“More Than We Were Programmed to Be”: Restoring Indigenous Kinship in The Wild Robot

Near the end of DreamWorks Animation’s dazzling feature film The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders, 2024), a brutal winter overtakes the island where Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), the eponymous artificial intelligence of the film’s title, crash-landed two seasons before. In the intervening months, she weathers damage to various parts of her exoskeleton while navigating an unforgiving natural environment. She undergoes a programming revolution, adaptively over-writing her original source code to become an unexpected mother to a fledgling goose, a runt she names Brightbill (Kit Connor). And to her great bewilderment, she experiences newfound (and, for an AI, supposedly impossible) emotions like love, fear, joy, sadness, and hope, through developing bonds between herself and an ever-widening network of previously hostile animals. With her surrogate “child” now in migration, her friend Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal) ensconced in his seasonal den, and a frigid cloud cover overtaking the once verdant, sunlit landscape, Roz begins her own hibernation, preparing to shut down her power core to conserve energy while living with the uncertainty of her next purpose now that her gosling has flown the coop.

But just as Roz returns to her shelter to drift asleep for the season, Fink reappears in a state of shivering agitation: “It is bad out there. Worst storm I’ve ever seen. Cold got to me in my den, and I got a deep den.” Concerned by her friend’s uncharacteristic fear, she asks: “Are others in danger?” Ever self-interested and secretly wishing to spend the winter in the company of Roz, his one friend, the wily fox tries to fudge his answer before finally admitting, “Uhhhh, yeaaaaaahhhh?” In a flash, Roz grabs Fink by his furry nape and sets out into the storm. A heart-wrenching montage depicts Roz and Fink traversing the ferocious winter landscape, rescuing shivering skunks, possums, and racoons, freeing a squirrel nearly frozen alongside his winter store of nuts, lifting struggling otters out of the frigid ocean waves, reverently burying animals discovered dead in their dens, and valiantly corralling moose, deer, wild cats, even the island’s lone bear, Thorn (Mark Hamill), who, on any normal day, would be its fiercest predator.

Brought together in the safety of Roz’s wooden dome lodge, however, the animals devolve into vicious fighting: crab pincers, elk hooves, bird beaks, fox teeth, and feline claws hilariously grasp at one another over long held resentments and sheer hunger as the food chain reasserts itself. “Fink, what is happening?” Roz pleads. He replies, “You put a bunch of predators and their food supply in one room.” With her power reserves nearly at zero from the effort of saving the island’s inhabitants, Roz implores Fink to “do something” for the very animal community that has long shunned him. Fink makes a speech:

Stunned into silence by Fink’s words, the animals look toward Roz. “I know you all have instincts that keep you alive,” she haltingly tells them, “B-but sometimes, to survive, we must become more than we were programmed to be. Before I shut down, I need you to promise me one thing. A truce. Just while we are in here.” Moved by her plea, the animals agree, led by Thorn, who regally intones, “I will not harm anyone. Not while we’re in here.”

In this and other emotionally charged scenes that populate the exuberant visual field of The Wild Robot, the film delivers more than a heartwarming story of alternative family or chosen kinship. It offers a reconstituted, contemporary iteration of the Indigenous creation story Skywoman Falling, a foundational tale of interspecies reciprocity and care that functioned for millennia as a blueprint or orientation device for the proper relationship with Mother Earth of the Native peoples of the Great Lakes region. In the story, a lone woman falls from the heavens toward a water-covered planet, the first human to arrive as a cosmic immigrant to our natural world. Seeing Skywoman plummeting downward, a flock of geese gather to break her fall by holding her aloft on their wings. Indigenous plant biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer recounts the story this way:

Skywoman Falling is an Indigenous creation story that weds three foundational ideas.² First, it foregrounds the fundamental generosity of the natural world, populated by an abundance of animate creatures and materials (from collaborative geese to rich and productive soil) whose talents and resources are made to be ethically shared. Second, it models the cultivation of a spirit of reciprocity that includes humankind in the perpetual and freely engaged give and take between Earth’s creatures, as a matter of mutual survival and thriving. Third, it expresses reverence toward the natural cycle of life, which includes continual processes of birth, death, rebirth, adaptation, and evolution (like the nuts and seeds Skywoman brings with her to populate Turtle Island with fruits, vegetables, trees, and flowers). Kimmerer explains, “The Skywoman’s story, shared by the original peoples throughout the Great Lakes, is a constant star in the constellation of teachings we call the Original Instructions. These are not instructions like commandments, though, or rules; rather, they are like a compass: they provide an orientation but not a map. The work of living is creating that map for yourself.”³

The Wild Robot presents its viewers with a set of original instructions for this era—what is commonly called late capitalism, which, for many, entails a living nightmare of planetary alienation and destruction. Because the protagonist is a machine that learns empathy, the film does this work through storytelling. It suggests a truce could be possible between a less destructive form of hypermodernity, represented by Roz, and a complex and hybrid version of ecology or ecological thinking grounded in Indigenous wisdom; this involves finding novel, salubrious contexts for the use of advanced technology to support the flourishing of the natural world, which might include bringing artificial intelligence into direct contact with an older, Indigenous view of sustainability. The Wild Robot achieves this synthesis in part by re-narrating, multiplying, and recombining elements of Skywoman’s story. In so doing, the film produces a restoration, or a “re-story-ation,” of the Indigenous kinship worldview for a contemporary, multicultural global audience.⁴ By portraying an alliance of a machine with animals and the natural world, however, it also reframes the problem of environmental destruction as categorically human (rather than blaming technology itself, which, the film asserts, might be put to better use, although the film doesn’t address the environmental impact of AI as an industry).

Across the span of the movie, viewers are presented with no less than four distinct versions of the Skywoman Falling story. All involve Roz plunging, tumbling, or descending from the sky, but in different contexts, from different heights, and with different results. The Wild Robot opens with Roz literally crash landing off the coast of a pristine island untouched by human hands, where she is accidentally activated by a curious parcel of otters before being nearly smashed to bits by the incoming tide. Roz shares with Skywoman both a disorienting tumble from the heavens, and a staunch commitment to being of service to others. But where Skywoman holds deep gratitude for her reciprocal relations with the creatures of Mother Earth, Roz is pre-programmed to be an energetic, cheery, task-oriented consumer service robot focused on human needs, who seeks nothing in return for her accomplishments. She knows how to give but not how to love and receive love.

Despite her astounding store of human knowledge, Roz is utterly ignorant of the natural world and its inhabitants, having been made by and for humans. In her first tour of the island, she avidly harasses various animals whom she repeatedly anthropomorphizes: “Congratulations on your purchase of a Universal Dynamics robot. I am ROZZUM 7134. And ROZZUM always completes its task. Just ask. Here’s a free sticker. Scan the code and receive 10% off of your …” And unlike Skywoman, who is greeted with open arms by the “council of animals,” Roz is quickly labeled a murderous monster and aberration, hounded by raccoons who permanently damage her energy core, kicked by elk, and nearly mauled to pieces by Thorn the bear before tumbling down a hill and almost flying off a cliffside. Her fall is broken by a ledge upon which a mother goose has built her nest. In barely averting her own destruction, Roz accidentally kills the mother goose and most of her unhatched eggs. This latter fall represents the film’s second iteration of the Skywoman story, one in which a symbolically female artificial intelligence tumbles down a cliff face, where she ends up not buoyed by the soft feathers of geese, but rather fatally crushing them beneath her metal body. It is this second fall that initiates the plot of the film, for Roz is unwittingly conscripted into mothering the final living hatchling, the runt Brightbill, as a result of this accident.

In these revisions of the Indigenous creation story, the film admits that the original image of organic reciprocity between all the members of the animal kingdom can no longer be presumed in a world where humans and animals no longer inhabit the same natural spaces, where human conceptions of care and mutual exchange have been thoroughly annexed to the corporate logic of optimization and service, and where animals live in utter scarcity alongside an increasingly mechanized world whose apparent plenty disguises grotesque inequality and environmental devastation.

Thus, when Roz and Fink valiantly save the island’s inhabitants and convince them to forge a truce for their mutual survival, the scene represents a substantive rewriting of the original Skywoman tale, one that reverses the affective polarity of the original story. Where once Skywoman was transformed by the animal kingdom’s seemingly boundless generosity, now Roz’s own deep and growing capacity to care for her network of companions outside the logic of the service economy equally transforms them into more generous members of the “council of animals.” In a deeply hopeful turn, the film suggests that at the core of even the mind-numbing consumer-oriented capitalist value system that dominates human earthly life today, there lies a utopian wish to be of service to others, which, in theory, could be cultivated into a spirit of mutual exchange in the right context. (Whether or not it will seems doubtful, and human intervention is notably absent from the necessary conditions for utopianism portrayed in the film.)

The Wild Robot represents a restoration of the Skywoman creation story in which the nonhuman inhabitants of the world earn their capacity for mutual care and exchange. This ethos, in turn, is grounded in a worldview informed by sacred Indigenous philosophy, not by the capitalist rhetoric or the postmodern industrial practices associated with AI. As the island’s resident storyteller, Fink concludes the film with these words: “Once, there was an island with all sorts of animals. And they fought and they ran and they hid. But mostly, they were scared. But then, a robot fell right out of the sky. Roz. She had some strange ideas. Thought kindness was a survival skill. And you know what? She was right.” The Original Instructions are thus revised and updated, not only reminding us to return to those forms of reciprocity that have proven so durable, but also proposing an alternative potential in AI that is not antithetical to biological or earthly life, but instead might be better harnessed as an extension of the animal kingdom’s capacity to learn, grow, evolve, and exceed one’s programming in concert with others.

Thus, The Wild Robot rejects the dualism between “natural” communities (geese among geese, foxes among foxes) and seemingly unnatural or hybrid communities of affiliation (like the alternative kinship forged between Roz, Brightbill, and Fink), suggesting that both are necessary. In fact, these two categories co-constitute one another, and, if redirected productively along the lines of Indigenous philosophy, allow for the unpredictability and diversity that underwrites basic survival and multispecies flourishing. The film uses the animated children’s adventure genre to inculcate a generation of viewers into a novel outlook, one that synthesizes the Indigenous kinship worldview with contemporary evolutionary science by asking them how they will choose to adapt, rather than assuming that adaptation is a foregone conclusion taking place beyond conscious awareness (i.e. as an automatic expression of one’s genes). The former sees humans as one node in an intricate, multi-species network of mutual exchanges (in ecotheologian Thomas Berry’s words, “a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects”⁵). Simultaneously, the new evolutionary science refutes genetic essentialism, opting for a multi-dimensional view of the organism as a product of endless relationships between various units of living matter that far exceed the information encoded in presumably immutable genetic material.⁶

When Roz vocalizes the need for the island’s animals to “become more than their programming,” she acknowledges that her interactions with them have allowed her to become more than her source code intended, undergoing countless forms of evolutionary plasticity. This includes unprecedented, and presumably impossible, changes to her own coding brought about by her encounters with a chaotic natural environment. Roz learns to manipulate her body into new shapes, mimicking the movement of animals such as deer, porcupines, skunks and bears. Meanwhile, the damage to her power core forces her to maximize her capacity to synthesize sunlight as energy, thus literally becoming powered by the natural rays of our solar system’s single star. In addition, the accidental loss of her right leg unit, while trying to save Brightbill from being eaten by a ravenous eel, leads to her donning a prosthetic tree trunk that fuses her machinery with organic materials. The neon network of lights running along her exoskeleton, once functioning to put potential customers at ease, increasingly comes to represent the visual expression of Roz’s rapidly evolving emotional states. Despite the numerous risks these adaptations involve, including the potential permanent deformation of her foundational code and engineered architecture, they result in her reaching extraordinary new potentials in cognitive and mechanical innovation, a feat only made possible by her arrival to a wilderness she was never meant to inhabit.

Throughout the film, various characters repeatedly express their uncertainty over this question: Where does any creature best belong? Is it among one’s own (species, kind, type) or among unpredictable, exogenous companions? How can a goose learn to fly and survive properly if it never learns how to do so in the company of its own kind? At the same time, how can a gosling runt possibly survive alongside other geese if it doesn’t adapt by learning skills its species peers do not have? Is a fox a solitary predator because of his biological “programming” or because he lives in perpetual scarcity of both food and affection? Can a fox become a friend to other species if those friendships contribute to fulfilling his biological and emotional needs? The film firmly lands on an all-inclusive system of values, arguing that adaptation must happen through the powerful interplay between varied communities—all of which are, ultimately, natural precisely in their seeming unnaturalness. In other words, what defines nature is its continual shirking of assumed universal rules, genetic scripts, or “natural” precepts. Every creature belongs both to their presumed species, and to the communities of affinity they forge across all their relations. The agile movement between both is precisely the basis for all living beings’ capacity to evolve and introduce new traits, relationships, and techniques of survival to their communities of origin. In this way, the film implicitly makes a case for the lesser explored applications of AI technologies to rewilding, to geoengineering to ameliorate climate catastrophe, or to helping repopulate endangered species as a radical alternative to the dominant trends of military efficiency and resource extraction.

The graceful capacity to drift between organic communities and unexpected affiliations is best captured in the film’s recurrent visual depiction of the swarm, flock, or herd, repeatedly animating vast constellations of insects and animals: a kaleidoscope of butterflies that disperse into the air at Roz’s touch; a nursery of raccoons that gleefully tear apart her power core; and epic skeins of geese that Brightbill joins for their annual migration. In each instance, the cinematography showcases the majestic beauty of various species in formation, but also inhabits the subjectivity of Roz’s artificial intelligence as it singles out individual agents within the swarm to make sense of its unique characteristics (including a single butterfly that lands on her finger, or Brightbill’s uniquely colored beak and plumage among his thousands of fellow geese). These instances serve as reminders that every collective formation is made up of infinite singularities, each with the potential to introduce unpredictable traits into the evolutionary development of the group.

The dualism of natural belonging versus unnatural affiliation is initially played out in conventional terms of a distinction between an organic creature (a gosling, Brightbill) and a robot or machine (Roz). This seemingly unnatural pair is brought together by an accident of fate, Roz’s unintentional killing of Brightbill’s mother and unhatched siblings. The film then begins its good work of fracturing the idea of proper filiation for both beings. Roz experiences violent dislocation from her packaging (and later radical deviations from her source code), while Brightbill survives the loss of his biological parentage. Initially, these breaks in proper lineage cause seemingly no end of conflict for both creatures. For Roz, this entails going against her programming. “I have a task that has become impossible,” she says. “My responses to problems increasingly rely on improvised solutions. … I’m just making stuff up. I have been overriding my code for months. It was the only way to complete my task.” For Brightbill, this involves being raised by an AI that fundamentally does not understand the lifecycle of a goose. Roz: “The events that led to this situation were unintended.” Brightbill: “Tell that to my sisters, my brothers, my real mom. They were my chance to be normal. They were my chance to swim, to fly.” Despite these internal and relational conflicts, Roz and Brightbill rapidly imprint on one another, first through mimicking one another’s movements, personality traits, and habits, but then by influencing each other’s “base programming.”

Despite Brightbill’s “teenage” rebellion against Roz’s mothering when he discovers that she accidentally killed his biological family, he will later come to realize that his very survival was made possible by a radical alteration in the natural life cycle of a healthy goose: the introduction of an exogenous life form, Roz, as his guardian. When Brightbill is finally assimilated into the community of geese, by the elder Longneck (Bill Nighy) before their months-long migration, he is caught off guard by Longneck’s perspective on Brightbill’s “unnatural” heritage. “This flight is a gift Roz has given you,” Longneck states. “You see any other geese here your size? The accident that killed your family saved you. Funny how life works.”

The evolution of Roz and Brightbill’s bond, as well as their mutual friendship with Fink, describes the capacity of instincts or programming to radically adapt to new environments or take new form in unexpected contexts. The film underscores the necessity of encounter as a basis for evolution. It is telling, for instance, that no previous ROZZUM unit has evolved emotions or independent thought while in the company of humans, a species that is presented as completely cut off from a reciprocal, mutually adaptive relationship to other members of the animal kingdom. Humans barely appear at all in the film, visible in a small handful of shots as smiling nuclear families enjoying the leisure time afforded by a ROZZUM robot unit or lab technicians overseeing vast fields of sustainable farming. When the geese migrate south in the winter, the camera follows their journey, revealing to viewers that the planet’s oceans have significantly risen, covering over all of Earth’s major cities, which have been replaced by shining, futuristic, sustainable floating suburban communities (think The Jetsons). While these communities are clearly environmentally friendly, self-contained, and seemingly pristine, it is made visually clear that, in order to solve the crises of humanity’s ravenous destruction of planet Earth, the species has simply chosen to cut itself off from all other organic life, living in isolated nuclear family units alongside consumer-oriented service robots programmed to recognize most wild animals as “unauthorized lifeforms.” In this environment, neither humans nor robots have the potential for evolutionary growth and change.

This dynamic is reflected in Roz’s own lack of knowledge about animal life, as it was deemed unnecessary for her to be programmed to understand experiences with a more wild existence. She initially plots out Brightbill’s growth using the image of a swimming human as her only available analogy, projecting the long strokes of a human arm onto the bird’s small wings. Only later does she begin to study other geese, expanding her knowledge about the bodily movements of birds, while introducing Brightbill to Thunderbolt the falcon (Ving Rhames), whose short but powerful wings become the gosling’s model for efficient flight. Paradoxically then, in order to revitalize the Skywoman Falling story for a new era, the film must radically decenter humans, in order to remind viewers that humanity is, in Indigenous terms, “the younger Brother of creation,” rather than its central or most important member.⁷

Ever expanding encounters with “wildness,” then, are figured as the basis for becoming “indigenous to place.”⁸ Yet, as Kimmerer reminds her readers, immigrant, migrant, migratory, and alien experiences all weave together in order to create the overall atmosphere of the Skywoman Falling story:

In the original creation story, Skywoman seemed to immediately, even innately understand the language of animals, bringing seeds to create a world of abundance for her children’s future. By contrast, Roz, trained almost exclusively in the language of human consumer society, must use her in-built skillset to learn the language of animals. Initially befuddled by the lack of human beings on the island, and after a series of vexing and sometimes terrifying encounters with its animal life, Roz nestles into her exoskeleton and activates her “learning mode.” Listening intently to the animals, she carefully reconstructs their distinct languages, translating their barks, caws, hisses, growls, and yaps into an understandable combination of sounds. As she does so, Roz also learns all the ways in which animals themselves are often trapped in their own limiting logics, driven by scarcity, fear and paranoia, and species-specific habits and biases. Longneck explains to Roz that the geese are self-involved, xenophobic gossips (which is why they initially shun Brightbill as an “alien” outsider). Fink the fox has made enemies of everyone on the island by virtue of his sneaky stealing of food and unhatched eggs (his tendency to do “foxy” things). The possum Pinktail’s (Catherine O’Hara) litters are always competing for their mother’s attention, attempting to one-up each other’s ability to “play dead.”

The first half of the story depicts how Roz becomes indigenous to the land by virtue of forging an alternative kinship network that supports Brightbill’s precarious survival. The second half is about Roz’s capacity to expand the circle of her care, from Brightbill, Fink, and Pinktail, to the entire network of multi-species relations across the island, thus providing them with a model or blueprint that they can carry into the future, long after Roz is gone. As Roz rightly suspects, once her original creators discover the unprecedented data she has amassed living in the wild, they will be relentless in retrieving what they consider to be their property. Rather than further expose her animal companions to the potential violence and recklessness of her human creators, Roz willingly returns to her corporate headquarters at Universal Dynamics, but promises her newfound companions to find a way back to them, to her real home, one day. Rather than a single plot trajectory then, the film offers a series of unfolding crises: Roz’s crash landing on the island; Brightbill’s unusual development; the brutal winter; and finally, the infiltration of the island by militarized robots seeking to steal Roz’s data core. Each crisis requires the formation of new best practices that respond to the networked needs of beings across this ecosystem. Collectively, these novel and adaptive forms of original instructions push back against a sterile human-made world that seeks to remain in stasis, securing human needs by sealing the species off from other life on the planet.

I’ll end in the style of a manifesto with the three theses that I think The Wild Robot proposes for serious consideration, delivered in the form of a children’s film:

1. Every creature must learn to practice the capacity for mothering. The film presents a version of mothering based not on biological reproduction, but on the willful extension of care for vulnerable life, a practice that can be taken up by any creature of any gender, including a robot. Thus, The Wild Robot depicts mothering in an utterly unsentimental way as an ethical necessity born of mutual interdependence, one that can instill a sense of “crushing obligation” (as it initially does for Roz) but that can also inspire extraordinary innovation (the ability to “make stuff up” in response to unpredictable circumstances and countless reciprocal needs). It is about a fierce or passionate attachment and investment in the thriving of another being, but one that also involves learning to let them go, as when Roz finally sends Brightbill off on his migration knowing that her original task is complete.

2. Every creature must learn the language of animacy.¹⁰ The Wild Robot presents a picture of all creatures and even earthly materials as lively, agentic beings, capable of taking new and unexpected shapes in the service of their mutual thriving. A running joke throughout the film concerns the snooty beaver Paddler’s (Matt Berry) lifelong project to fell the largest tree on the island by chewing away at its trunk, which all his forest companions believe is a waste of his time. Near the end of the film, however, when the robot army sent to retrieve Roz causes a raging fire that threatens to annihilate the island’s wildlife, the film’s version of the council of animals realizes that the biggest organism on the entire rock—Paddler’s beloved pet project—is the key to their survival. Helping him complete his task, they collectively topple the tree into a river, creating a dam that diverts water across the landscape, dousing the fire. Thus, trees, rivers, and rocks are imbued with as much animacy as any animal. Similarly, Roz’s own scars—the numerous scratches, tears, and knicks to her exoskeleton as well as her “bleeding” green coolant fluid—figure her as an animate creature, both acted upon and reactive or sensitive to her wild surroundings.

3. Every creature must learn to adapt. Each one of the film’s central characters works with and against their so-called nature, developing their innate skills and expanding their repertoire through continual interactions with other species and beings. (In an early, ingenious scene, Roz rapidly learns to mimic the sideways pincer movement of a crab in order to crawl up a rock face and avoid being destroyed by a cresting ocean wave.) Like the new evolutionary science, adaptation is understood as modular and constructive. This is made literal in Roz’s own shapeshifting body, which can split parts of itself off, or redirect energy to various portions of her exoskeleton. Brightbill’s evolution is the film’s central example of adaptation. He learns how to be a successful goose through lessons from creatures outside his own species, including the survival instincts of a crafty fox, the ingenuity of an artificial intelligence, and the exceptional flight skills of a confident falcon. What appears, from a species-specific perspective, to be Brightbill’s fatal flaw—being a runt—becomes his greatest adaptive strength. Moreover, because he survives under Roz’s care, but outside of the goose society, he learns skills like being unafraid of robots, the creative use of his shorter wings for diving and swooping, and an exceptional level of endurance that outpaces his peers. Viewed as a contemporary recoding or novel reprogramming of the Skywoman story, while respectfully engaging with Indigenous sacral notions of the interconnected environment contained within it, the film becomes an adaptation about adaptation.

These three interlinked assertions are integrated into the lives of The Wild Robot’s cast of characters especially well in the film’s final scenes, which conclude with one last iteration of the Skywoman Falling story, a version meant to be taken forth into the future. While the council of animals struggles to quell the fire, Brightbill and his flock take to the sky, disrupting the Universal Dynamics dropship and freeing Roz from its hold. Somewhat like the original geese who held Skywoman aloft, Brightbill’s flock encircles the ship in a powerful embrace. Seeing that Brightbill has hurt his wing helping her escape, Roz places him inside the shell of her body before diverting “all energy to her exterior” and taking an epic leap to the earth. In this last act of mothering, she saves Brightbill’s life as an expression of gratitude for having saved hers. Landing battered but alive, she and Brightbill join the council of animals, where she embraces them all in her long arms, reminding them that no matter where she goes, she will always find her way to her true home, this wild place filled with all her relations. Recalling the central conceit of the Skywoman story, the scene reminds viewers that their home, Turtle Island, was formed from “the alchemy” of the animals’ gifts and Skywoman’s gratitude.”¹¹ According to the film, in order to regain our humanity, we must be willing to take countless other-than-human creatures into our own hearts, allowing their presence to return us to our wildest, most transformable potential.