Becoming Human: How The Wild Robot Preaches the Gospel of Self-Gift

I’m not going to lie, when I started working on this article, I felt a bit overwhelmed. The Wild Robot has so many great themes–like motherhood, solidarity, and the importance of kindness–I wasn’t sure what to write about. It’s like trying to pick just one dish from a menu of your favorite foods, but after some reflection, I finally settled on the idea that resonated with me the most. As you might be able to guess, it’s a concept that lies at the heart of our Catholic faith, so rather than try to explain it myself, I’ll let the Church spell it out in her own words:

“Jesus…reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (Gaudium et Spes 24)

At first glance, it may be tough to imagine how The Wild Robot could even begin to embody that teaching. As the name suggests, this film centers around a robot, not a person, so what could it possibly have to say about human nature? Perhaps surprisingly, quite a bit. At its core, The Wild Robot is a touching and heartwarming parable about what it means to be human, so let’s dive into this animated masterpiece and see just how it encapsulates a timeless truth about our nature.

The Basic Plot of The Wild Robot

Before we get started, I want to take a minute or two to briefly go over the plot of the movie. When The Wild Robot begins, a storm causes a Universal Dynamics ship to lose its store of advanced ROZZUM robots, and they end up on an uninhabited island. Some time afterwards, one of these units, ROZZUM 7134, is activated by animals, and she immediately begins searching for a task.

See, ROZZUM robots are designed to be helpers. They’re programmed to complete any task they’re given, so naturally, this particular unit is looking for something to do. Eventually, she ends up accidentally squashing a goose nest and killing all the birds in it, but luckily, one of the eggs manages to survive. The baby bird soon hatches and imprints on the robot, so with the help of a fox named Fink, the ROZZUM unit cares for the gosling and teaches him how to swim and fly.

In the course of raising this baby, the android names him Brightbill and takes on the name Roz, and soon enough, she completes her task. Brightbill is able to fly south with his fellow geese for their yearly migration, and when the time comes for the birds to return, Brightbill makes it back safely to the island.

However, before he can see Roz again, a fleet of Universal Dynamics retrieval robots attempts to snatch Roz away and bring her back to the factory for study, so all the animals on the island have to band together to fight them off. They want Roz to stay, but after they successfully fend off the invaders, Roz makes a startling decision. She realizes that Universal Dynamics won’t stop sending retrieval units until they finally have her, so she chooses to turn herself in so her friends can stay safe. She promises to return one day, but for now, she’s doing what she can to protect Brightbill and the other residents of her new home.

Following Her Programming

With that out of the way, let’s get to the real meat of this article. How exactly does The Wild Robot embody the Church’s teaching that we find ourselves by giving ourselves to others? To answer that question, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. See, Roz doesn’t start out particularly human. Instead, when we first meet her, she’s just a robot.

She doesn’t understand that she’s dealing with animals, not people, so she hands out stickers and keeps asking for a task even though it becomes very obvious very quickly that the island’s residents want nothing to do with her. She simply doesn’t understand anything beyond her programming, so to the surprise of no one, her speech and her interactions with these woodland creatures are stiff and awkward.

And in case that’s not clear enough, some of the dialogue in the opening act of The Wild Robot hammers the point home even further. For example, there’s a scene where Roz tells Fink, “I’m a robot. I do robot-y things. I seek tasks and ensure all essential needs have been met or exceeded,” and she sometimes even uses the word “programming” to refer to the animals’ natural instincts.

But above all else, Roz’s lack of humanity is made crystal clear when Fink tells Brightbill a story. It’s a fictionalized account of how Roz found the gosling, and Roz interrupts the fox a few times as he tells the tale. Unsurprisingly, her interjections are always technically true, but they’re not very comforting. For example, at one point in the scene, Roz exclaims, “I will not leave until I have completed this task, which has delayed me, damaged me, and violated my protocols, potentially voiding my warranty,” and Fink has to quickly add, “which is robot for, she loves you very much.”

Even the fox understands that love is about more than just completing tasks, but that truth goes completely over Roz’s head. All she understands is following her programming, so once again, it’s clear that she’s still very much just a robot.

Becoming Human

However, even at that early stage, we can already see a few hints of the humanity that will eventually flower within her. The fact that she’s allowed her care for Brightbill to “violate her protocols” already shows that she’s not completely beholden to her programming, and soon after Fink tells this story, Roz takes another small step towards transcending her artificial nature.

She asks the fox, “How do you tell a story about something you say you know nothing about?”, and when Fink asks for clarification, she responds with a single word: love. The Wild Robot doesn’t explicitly tell us why this exchange is significant, but if you ponder it for a moment, the importance of that one-word answer isn’t hard to discover.

Sure, Roz doesn’t really understand love, but she clearly wants to. Even if only implicitly, she wants to transcend her programming and perform the most human act of all, and as The Wild Robot goes on, she moves closer and closer to achieving that goal. For instance, consider the moment when Brightbill finds out that Roz killed his family (albeit accidentally). Upon learning that painful truth, he disowns the robot and says she’s not his mother, and even though Roz doesn’t have a real face, her pain is impossible to miss. The music, her eye movements, and the position of her head make it clear that Brightbill’s words have cut her to the core, so she’s obviously developed some semblance of humanity.

Soon after that, Roz heads out to the place where she was awakened, and when she finds another ROZZUM unit, she activates it and asks it for help. She explains, “My responses to problems increasingly rely on improvised solutions. The processing that used to happen here [pointing to her head] is now coming more from here [pointing to her chest],” and when the robot runs a diagnostic test on her, it finds that she’s been overriding her programming for months and tells her that she’s “become the wrong thing.”

The android doesn’t say exactly what that means, but it’s not hard to figure out. By overriding her programming, Roz has slowly been gaining free will, so she’s slowly gaining the ability to truly love Brightbill and make decisions from her heart, not just from her head. The robot truly is turning into something else, and that “something else” is human.

This process of slow humanization continues for the rest of the film, and it culminates in a third act in which Roz defies not just her programming but the very company that made her. She refuses to go back to the factory, so she fights the retrieval units that have come to take her away.

In fact, one of those robots even says she’s changed, clearly referring to her newfound humanity, and during this big fight, the action slows down for a few moments to highlight just how far Roz has come. When it appears that the invaders have finally managed to wipe the android’s mind, Brightbill tells her seemingly lifeless body that he loves her, and after a few seconds, she wakes up and says she loves him too.

It’s a touching scene, and it completes Roz’s transformation from mindless robot to genuine human. She now has free will and the ability to truly love, so despite her humble beginnings, her arc really is a parable about what it means to be human.

A Sincere Gift of Self

At this point, you might be scratching your head a bit. Sure, Roz displays some distinctive human qualities by the end of The Wild Robot, but what does any of this have to do with the Church's teaching about making a sincere gift of self? Quite a bit, actually. See, as the robot slowly becomes more human, she also begins to display an increasingly sacrificial heart.

For starters, when Roz and Fink teach Brightbill how to fly, there’s a brief moment when Roz injures herself a bit and leaks some sort of “robot blood.” We don’t know exactly what it is, but it doesn’t seem good. In fact, Fink even gets a concerned look on his face when he sees it, but Roz just shrugs it off and continues helping her gosling son.

Then, after the geese head south, Roz does something remarkable. The winter storm that year is particularly brutal, so the robot finds each one of the island’s inhabitants and brings them to her warm hut. The task is genuinely herculean, and by the end of it, Roz can barely move or speak. She’s so tired she has to shut down until spring, and Fink even remarks that she “risked everything” to save her neighbors.

That bold act alone qualifies as a heroic self-gift, but Roz isn’t done yet. As I said in my brief plot synopsis, The Wild Robot ends with Roz literally handing herself over to Universal Dynamics, the very people she fought so hard to escape. She clearly doesn’t want to go, but it’s the only way to keep her friends safe, and if that’s not a sincere gift of self, I don’t know what is.

It’s the high point of her humanity, and it's also the high point of the movie’s message. As Roz becomes increasingly human, she gives more and more of herself to her friends and neighbors, and the pinnacle of that transformation is an act of completely selfless love. For her, becoming human invariably entails learning to make a sincere gift of herself to the people around her (they're technically animals, but you get the point), and the correlation isn’t accidental. That’s simply what it means to be human, so despite being about an android, The Wild Robot truly embodies the Church's teaching on self-giving love.

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