The wild robot responsibly humanizes the AI

This article is part of IGN's Fantastic Fest coverage and offers a spoiler-free look at The Wild Robot, directed by Chris Sanders and featuring the voices of Lupita Nyong'o and Pedro Pascal.

I had some concerns while watching The Wild Robot. Although I love children's films with heart, I've been feeling anxious lately about anything involving robots and AI. With everything that's going on with regulation the AI ​​or rather the complete absence of itas well as our inability to compete with it Carbon footprint of technologyI lost patience with even the most practical applications of the tool. That, coupled with the fact that Big Tech has become far too involved in art over the last five to ten years, made me worried about The Wild Robot. Sure, the film, written and directed by Chris Sanders (the man who brought us Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon), should have allayed those concerns from the start, but the last two years in which the creatives fought tooth and nail to protect it. The film and television industry made me cynical.

Mea culpa, Chris. My cynicism was unfounded.

The Wild Robot makes you fall in love with Roz (Lupita Nyong'o), who, yes, is an AI-powered robot helper created by an evil tech giant. After a storm throws her shipment off course, Roz becomes stranded on an island populated only by animals. She learns to speak their language by studying it for a while and basically does nothing but cause severe harm to those around her in the first act of the film. Roz is eventually forced to care for a baby gosling, and the story unfolds from there.

In the third act, it becomes clear that Sanders and the team behind the film were aware of the tightrope they had to walk to create something heartfelt without inadvertently celebrating a technology that created one existential threat to their preferred medium And continues to exacerbate serious climate risks We stand before us around the globe. Roz may be an AI-powered technician, but she eventually learns that she is a “dysfunctional” technician. Her emotions – which she discovers over the course of the film – are not a feature, they are a bug, and they completely separate her from the rest of the robot fleet that created her.

The filmmakers take this consideration seriously, not just for Roz but also for the world around her. As we see the rest of the planet outside the island where the robot is stranded, it becomes clear that climate change has taken a major toll worldwide. The consequences of this are not explicitly related to the AI ​​- which is logical since it is a children's film and there is a lot of important information to decipher – but he makes the decision to portray a climate catastrophe as a clear part of the future world Roz and the animals inhabit. It even offers some glimmers of hope for life after this catastrophe – but if we dig too deep, we end up in spoiler territory.

All of this undoubtedly makes it sound like The Wild Robot is an extremely serious film that deals with big themes, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The film, like all the best children's films, has complicated concepts in its DNA to introduce the Munchkins to its ideas, but otherwise it's just a fun, emotional (and quite pretty) journey that encourages us all to ignore our programming and to choose kindness.

“The Wild Robot” hits theaters on September 27th. I cried like a baby. Bring tissues.