The Wild Robot's Beautiful, Complex Post-Apocalyptic World
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown was the first chapter book we got into as a family. I discovered it when Finch was four and we had a long road trip coming up and I desperately searched for an audiobook for kids that wouldn’t drive the adults mad. And y’all, The Wild Robot hit all of the marks being not only interesting and entertaining to a kid, but also a great listen for the grown-ups. Better yet, it’s a book that contains layers.
The Wild Robot is about a robot named Roz getting washed up on a deserted island, being accidentally activated and then learning how to live on the island and eventually becoming wild and interconnected with all the animals (even adopting a young gosling she names Brightbill) and the ecosystem therein. It’s simple enough for a young kid, but complex enough for adults to feel all of the feelings and to not get bored or annoyed at the inanity. I cried at the end and was as excited as Finch to discover there was a sequel, The Wild Robot Escapes.
This first reading/listening of the books was well before the idea for this project came to life and well before I had become a climate fiction consumer, so I didn’t see that as the focus at all. I saw it for a story the whole family could enjoy. But as The Wild Robot and Roz’s world have been with us for most of my son’s life and my brain has been dramatically consumed by thoughts of climate change, I realized that it was our very first foray into climate and apocalypse fiction. The world Roz comes from, we begin to see in the sequels, is one that has experienced the catastrophic impacts of climate change. These changes are treated subtly in the books and would need a close read to get any climate change themes out of the first two, but in Peter Brown’s latest in the series that came out last year, The Wild Robot Protects, the environmental themes are not subtle, in fact they are the focus.
In this installment, Roz’s beloved island is being destroyed by what the animals are calling “the poison tide.” There’s a mysterious poison that has drifted to the island poisoning the waters, hurting the animals, and destroying the ecosystem. And Roz is the only one who can do anything about it. So she embarks on a journey to find the source of the poison and stop it.
On that journey, you learn about the ocean ecosystem that you don’t get to see in the earlier books. But also you start to see the effects of climate change. In one chapter, Roz comes upon what she thinks is an undersea lava flow that has hardened. But then noticing that there were painted yellow lines, she realized it was a completely submerged road.
The road made for easier walking, so Roz followed it through the undersea landscape. It curved around rugged reefs and rolled over sandy slopes. One slope climbed so high that she rose up from the ocean surface and continued on, wading through knee-deep water. Surrounding her were small islands, scattered with abandoned buildings. Those islands had been hills until the nearby lowlands flooded. The robot tried to imagine what this place was like before the floodwaters. Had there been a park where she was now walking? Athletic fields? Farms?
As she ventured on, Roz saw old mailboxes, abandoned cars, metal fencing and the road she walked along led to a town that was completely submerged. This allowed for a kind of retrospective of what happened to the inhabitants of this town:
The ocean had risen only slightly when it flooded into the low-lying town. Humans built barriers to keep the water out, but it kept finding new ways to get in. Eventually, the humans packed up their things and left. As the ocean continued rising, the town gradually disappeared beneath the waves. Streets were buried under sand. Flower gardens were replaced with gardens of corals and sea sponges. Wooden structures were swept away, and now all that remained were structures made of steel or stone.
While this vision is subtly more optimistic than a complete lack of ocean life thanks to warming waters, it’s still a small, grim, but realistic vision of what could be the fate of island communities. It’s scenes like this one that gives opportunities to have conversations with Finch about the future in the face of climate change. And laying the groundwork for complex conversations is something perfect about all of The Wild Robot stories.
As such, having read these books multiple times with Finch over the years, we were thrilled that it was being made into a movie. And it did not disappoint–watching this world on screen carried out in such a beautiful way was nothing short of exhilarating. It was funny, joyful, gorgeously depicted and, of course, sad. I cried multiple times and Finch laughed way-too-loud about 20 times. It was perfect.
What the movie also did was help fill in some of the climate change backdrop that one wouldn’t be able to get from reading the first book. In the scene following Roz’s adopted goose son, Brightbill, on his first migration, you see a nod to the post-apocalyptic future when his flock flies over a submerged Golden Gate Bridge and then later they rest on a floating futuristic city where food is grown in large greenhouses managed by robots like Roz.
It’s that imagery that comes up a bit more in The Wild Robot Protects when the environmental/climate change themes are much more apparent. But because the story is so compelling and so strongly relatable, there’s a palatability to the post-apocalyptic themes and a great jumping off point for conversations.
After seeing the movie, we’re eager to get back to the books again. And we’re eager for the movie to come out to streaming services so that we can watch it over and over and over again. And hopefully there will be more movies. Because I do believe they are the perfect stories for us to reflect on our collective aliveness with all the beings on this earth and to help foster important conversations with our kids.