‘The Wild Robot’
My 41/2-year-old son Ben has a complicated relationship with movie theaters.
Movies? Oh, he loves movies. Ben got hooked on Cars early. (I was a writer on that film and took great pleasure when it became his go-to … then took it hard when he started making me fast-forward through “the talky parts.”)
Finding Nemo was another hit in our house.
But movie theaters … not so much. It’s a complicated dance getting him through a movie in a theater. We have to navigate the moment when the theater first goes dark. The boring trailers that he doesn’t understand. We don’t like it when the movie gets too loud. Nor when the movie gets too scary.
So, a few months ago, when I took him to see The Wild Robot — a film I knew nothing about — I didn’t have high hopes.
I certainly didn’t expect I was about to watch my favorite film of the year and have my favorite experience ever in a movie theater.
The premise of the film is a simple one: A robot named Roz, built to help humans accomplish “tasks,” shipwrecks on an uninhabited island. Surrounded by wild animals and nature, Roz tries to orient herself by finding a “task.” She comes across an egg, which hatches a gosling, and she makes a decision: Her “task” will be to raise this gosling, whom she names Brightbill.
A beautiful mother-son relationship develops between Roz and Brightbill, but it also comes with a realization. If our robot is going to raise this gosling properly, one day she will have to teach him to fly away from her.
If she does her job as his mother, her child will eventually leave.
It is a stunning movie: simple, beautifully rendered, one of those films that allows you to sit back and just sink into it because it’s so well crafted. I even stopped worrying about my son. There was nothing too scary or loud, and he just sat there mesmerized, engaged with the film and his box of Red Vines.
For an hour, I honestly forgot he was there.
And then the movie hit an emotional high point. It became time for the (now-teenage) goose Brightbill to fly away. The score swelled. Roz began to run with the goose Brightbill on her shoulders … their long-developed routine of giving him a head start to launch into the air. Something started welling in me, a feeling I hadn’t felt in quite some time at the movies. And then …
Ben started to scream. He started to scream as loud as I’ve ever heard him in a public place:
“I WANT MOMMY! I MISS MOMMY!”
Over and over he screamed. He sobbed. I tried to calm him to no avail. I assumed the score had gotten too loud for him.
He couldn’t possibly be that emotionally engaged with a film at just 4 years old.
I had to carry him out of the theater.
It took me five minutes in the lobby to calm him down. Finally, the sobs slowed, then stopped. I was on my knee, eye to eye with him, and I asked, “Ben, what happened? Was it too loud?”
And my son looked at me and quietly asked: “Do you think the goose is ever going to fly back home to the mommy robot?”
I sat there, stunned. And of course, I started to cry. And there we sat, hugging each other, in the lobby of the Universal CityWalk theater. Just two dudes hugging and crying over a scene in an animated film.
We didn’t reenter the theater that day. I assured Ben that mother and son reunited in the end. I finished the gorgeous film on my own at home a few weeks later.
As a country, we don’t go to the movies as much as we used to. With the advent of streaming, and the constant distraction of our iPhones, individual films (and television shows) feel a lot more disposable these days. Many in our industry feel untethered and lost. A refrain I hear over and over these days is “What’s the point? Nothing matters.”
So, to all those who made The Wild Robot: This film mattered to me. What started as a regular Sunday at the movies with my kid gave me not just my favorite film of the year, but one of my favorite moments as a parent.
How wild, indeed.
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