What The Wild Robot Teaches Us About Surviving a Planet Full of Danger

This is why you can't take a theologian to the movies

Photo credit: DreamWorks Animation

I promise: there are no spoilers in this post.

This has been a depressing week. The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams, despite the prosecuting attorney and victim’s family pleading for clemency amid legitimate questions about the handling of evidence and jury selection. New details about Sean Combs’ depravity continue to emerge (including a new lawsuit alleging that he recorded himself and his bodyguard viciously raping the girlfriend of an employee). Janet Jackson added herself to the list of problematic faves when she parroted a MAGA rumor that Kamala Harris has a White father (and no, Janet’s ignorance does not get a pass because of her brother Tito’s death, especially since her interview with The Guardian preceded it). Israel escalated its wars with Hamas and Hezbollah, further jeopardizing the possibility of a ceasefire. Climate change fueled Hurricane Helene’s destructive path through the southeast, killing over 50 people across Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia.

This weekend, I was supposed to be on a camping trip along with a few hundred Black people. I was looking forward to the opportunity to retreat from the madness of the past week. A combination of fatigue and Helene nixed those plans. As solace for missing out on the fun with my camp cousins, I went to the movies to see the new release, The Wild Robot.

The Wild Robot is an animated film about Roz, a robot who is programmed to assist humans with household tasks, but who, after a series of accidents, ends up on a island populated only by animals, raising a gosling named Brightbill with the help of a fox named Fink. The movie is about Roz learning to be a mother as a mechanical being governed by logic among wild animals who are ruled by instinct. It is a movie about survival.

I’ve been thinking a lot about survival lately. More specifically, I’ve been grappling with just how much life on earth is about survival. It can be easy to forget that in a post-industrialized world, especially when you live in an urban environment where the dangers of the natural world are often displaced by housing developments, roads, noise, and lights. In urban settings, humans are the apex predators, the biggest threat to ourselves and to other creatures. That can give us a false sense of security. Progressives seem to especially be lulled into this. We think that if we can just convince everyone to strive for the common good and pursue peace together, we can end violence. We like to think that human evolution inevitably leads to a more peaceful world.

I would venture that most of us, regardless of our political ideology, believe that we are more civilized than our ancestors. Christians espouse this belief all the time when we distinguish between the religion of the Old Testament – with its emphasis upon rules and punishment – and the religion of the New Testament – with its emphasis on love and forgiveness. I won’t get into the details of why that view is both wrong and potentially antisemitic. Suffice it to say that many of us seem to think that humanity is on a path of forward progress where the world inevitably becomes less violent and oppressive.

In The Wild Robot, Roz seems to think that the world of human and machines that she comes from is more peaceful than the world of predator and prey that she finds herself on. At one point, Fink asks her, “Where are you from that things don’t eat each other?” The thing is, we do eat each other. We are more driven by the need for survival than we think. Our guns, our home and car security systems, our choices about where to live and shop, our decisions about who to befriend and love are driven by our deep knowing that the world is dangerous, that we are dangerous to one another.

Watching The Wild Robot made me remember a stanza from the theme song for Strange Planet, an animated series on Apple TV+ about the absurdity and complexity of human life:

Joy and sadness, courage and fear

Curiosity and anger

On a planet full of danger

And it’s only getting stranger from here.

I was a few episodes into the show when that phrase, “a planet full of danger,” hit me. Suddenly, I realized that earth really is dangerous. It’s especially dangerous to humans. It is only our technology that makes us apex predators. Without it, we are among the most vulnerable creatures on this planet.

What we have, though, is a remarkable capacity to care for one another and to work together for our mutual good. We have learned the lesson that is at the core of Wild Robot: “Sometimes to survive, we must become more than we were programmed to be.” We see this at work in the aftermath of natural disasters like Hurricane Helene: when strangers help each other in the streets, when people in unaffected areas send money to assist those in need, when churches open their doors to provide shelter for the displaced, when organizations provide care for pets and wild animals that also suffer the effects of the storm.

It is often in the aftermath of disaster that humans best embody the directive given to the first humans in Genesis: “God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28, NRSV). As biblical scholar Terence E. Fretheim writes in volume I of The New Interpreter’s Bible, the phrase have dominion “must be understood in terms of care-giving, even nurturing, not exploitation. As the image of God, human beings should relate to the nonhuman as God relates to them” (p. 346). And we should certainly relate to other humans as God relates to us: with care, with love, with mercy, and with respect for autonomy.

I’m putting “Why did you make the world - and us - so dangerous?” on my list of questions to ask God. I suspect that God might in turn ask, “Why did you not care for one another the way that I created you to?”

This whole life is a wilderness. It is full of danger and madness, and for many of us, it entails lurching from one crisis to another. Try as we might, we will never conquer the wilderness. But maybe we can learn to care for one another in the midst of it. And hopefully, enjoy some of its beauty and wonder along the way.