Protecting Your Children From Modernity

A Review of “The Wild Robot” Film

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I’ve been around long enough that I can usually spot “hypothetical advice”. You know the kind—it’s advice based on a theory rather than experience. It always sounds right, but then doesn’t work, because no one has actually tried it. When I was starting out with my religious praxis, I often heard that you were supposed to dispose of old libations in the ground, or somewhere natural at least. “If you live in an apartment,” I was told, “you can just pour them into a potted plant”. This advice was great for creating a millipede nursery, but not much else.

You get this a lot when it comes to parenting too. Well-meaning folks will tell you that you should never let your kids watch TV, should avoid all movies, etc. While TV and movies are certainly more subversive today than ever, parents have been shielding their kids from all that since I was a kid. And I remember those kids. They were the first to become junkies and trannies, because they were babes in the woods. Like it or not, we live in modernity, and we need to learn to navigate it.

Better to curate what media your kids consume. But there will come a time when they are going to consume some filth filled with lies. Or much worse, half-lies, which are harder to spot. It were better for your kids if they learned to spot them early.

I took my kids to watch the film The Wild Robot last week, and after it we had an in-depth discussion about what they saw. Afterward, they understood that what they had seen contained some good lessons and some bad ones. In the end, they were not contaminated by modernity but were benefitted by the whole experience. The time will come when Dad isn’t around to offer a folkish analysis of what they see, but they won’t need him for that.

The Wild Robot is not a terrible film, I’ve seen much worse. I wouldn’t even recommend that you avoid it. In this Substack we give you the tools to carve modernity at the joints with a folkish conceptual framework. In this article we’ll apply that framework to a children’s film, and show you how you can purge your kids of regime narratives.

Let’s start with a quick plot summary.

The Wild Robot is the story of a helper robot (“Roz”) who gets marooned on an island and takes on the task of raising a gosling (“Brightbill”) with the help of a fox (“Fink”). The odd family makes it work, and Brightbill successfully makes his winter migration with the other geese. Flash forward to the dead of winter and all the animals are freezing to death, so Roz takes it upon herself to save them, after which her manufacturer arrives to collect her. There ensues an epic battle to keep her (now self-identifying as a “wild robot”) on the island, but she decides to leave anyway to spare them the trouble.

There are a number of regime-approved narratives in The Wild Robot. Each of them can be discussed with children in terms they can understand. Let’s go through a few of them.

Slave Morality:

Most of the characters in this film are consciously “misfits”. There is of course Roz, the helper robot who doesn’t belong in the wild. There is Brightbill, the runt of the litter who gets teased by the other geese for being slower, clumsier, weaker, and for not having a real goose family. There is Fink, who doesn’t seem to have any family of his own. There is the beaver who, like every “cool nerd” ca. 2010, is autistically obsessed with some trivial task. The overall effect that the film tries to give is that everyone is a little weird, everyone is a special snowflake.

Each of these misfit traits turns out to be the character’s secret virtue in the end. Roz “does not have the programming to be a mother,” and the mother opossum feeds her that little chestnut of boomer cope, “none of us does.” And yet, Roz’s robotic obsession with her “assignment” makes her a great Mom in the end. Brightbill’s broken family situation turns him into the hero when the wintering flock are spooked by a group of helper robots just like his mother. He alone understands that the robots have a protocol not to harm living creatures, so only he can keep a cool head and lead the flock to safety. The nerdy beaver’s obsession is the object of ridicule, but as in every nerd fantasy, his otherwise useless compulsion turns out to be crucial to turning the tide later in the film.

The overall effect is to break down categories, to tell us that anyone can be anything if they really want to. But children like putting things in boxes. What would happen if Daddy was the kid and you had to be the grown-up? Dad would sure love to get in bed by 8 o’clock. Would you like to go to work and get yelled at by Dad’s boss? No? Well then, maybe there’s a good reason why Dads are Dads, Moms are Moms, and kids are kids. Maybe nature knows better than any of us. Maybe things have always been a certain way for very good reason.

This brings us to the next regime-approved narrative, which is far worse than the last.