Sometimes when I watch a movie, it hits me with a dart of emotion, a crying dart, and I think, “Oh no, a crying dart,” and then my lip begins to quiver a bit, and I hope nobody sees me. Typically, I put my hand over my mouth when this happens (don’t ask me why).
If I had one complaint about The Wild Robot (2024), it is that it was constantly sticking these weepy little darts into my neck. I watched it with my wife, mom, and two daughters. They were getting hit, too. It was like some benevolent angel was cutting invisible onions in front of our faces.
Imagine a lovable forklift sitting on top of you, telling you about her adopted bull frog son, making you weep about all the confusions and miscommunications in their relationship. Well, that is exactly what The Wild Robot is like, except it’s not a forklift but a nimbler robot, and it’s not a bullfrog but a gosling.
The movie opens like Castaway. Except it is not Tom Hanks falling from the stormy sky onto a desert island but a Universal Dynamics ROZZUM Unit 7134 robot. Shortly thereafter, the robot (Roz) gets chased by a bear, falls down a hill, and lands on a bunch of goose eggs. She crushes all but one. She holds the egg up, scans it, and sees a glowing little bird inside.
As it turns out, the gosling (Brightbill) is a runt. He’ll die on the island if he doesn’t learn to eat, swim, and fly. So Roz, who “always accomplishes her task,” determines to help him learn these three things before the winter migration comes.
“It’s just a metaphor” means “This is literally the case.”
Remarkably, humans barely appear in the film, and it is all for the better. Yet all the robots and animals on this island tell a very human story. This rhetorical and poetic technique of using the non-human to reveal something human is as old as Aesop (and likely much older, of course). The genius of metaphor lies in the transfer of meaning. We see mother and child through bird and robot.
I think it may have been Kenneth Burke who said that whenever someone says that they’re speaking metaphorically what they mean is that they’re speaking literally. “It’s just a metaphor” means “This is literally the case.” Keep that in mind the next time someone resorts to a metaphor “simply” for illustrative purposes.
Let’s close with a task. Watch this movie before the winter migration. It’ll teach you to eat, swim, and fly. And, if you pay close enough attention, it’ll teach you something about what it means to be human.