The Wild Robot as Transracial Adoption Story
On a forested island with the burnished sheen of an oil painting, a robot named Roz crash lands and offers her services to the woodland creatures she encounters. In a world of hungry predators and foraging scavengers, she is all circles and symmetry and customer service surveys.
“Did anyone order me?” she asks, a bit despondently, when none of the local animals can offer her a task or an explanation for her presence.
Although well meaning (“I’m ready to enhance your lives,” she announces to a field of perplexed deer and rabbits), her presence causes havoc. One night, while fleeing a bear, she stumbles onto a bird’s nest and crushes it with the metallic ball of her body.
Shortly thereafter, she finds a stray egg, which she wrenches from the jaws of a fox. When it hatches, the downy, big-eyed gosling can’t help but imprint on her.
She does not immediately recognize herself as the gosling’s mother: “That gosling stalks me, emits noise, and makes simple tasks more complicated or impossible…. I do not have the programming to be a mother.”
Pigtail, a possum with seven babies clinging to her, counters, “No one does. You just make it up.”
*
The Wild Robot, the new Dreamworks animated movie based on Peter Brown’s novel, offers multiple allegories. When a fierce winter storm hits the island, Roz and her reluctant co-parent, the fox, convince natural enemies to huddle around the same fire, setting aside their differences in the name of survival. It’s hard not to think of the alliances and compromises that both nations and individuals will need to make to save our planet. It is also a movie about the balance between sense (Roz) and sensibility (the Id-driven fox).
But personally, I watched it as a transracial adoption story.
I couldn’t help but see it as an allegory of a determined but clueless white woman adopting a Brown child. (Is there anything more on-brand for a white woman than seeing every movie as being about me?)
History is rife with stories of oppressors adopting the children of the people they oppressed. During Argentina’s “Dirty War” of the 1970s, a 28-year-old pregnant physician named Silvia Quintela was detained on a military base because of her leftist sympathies. When she and others gave birth, their babies were often given to soldiers’ families to raise.
Most cases aren’t so direct. But countries that are poor or struggling as the result of U.S. foreign policy, colonialism, and/or the forces of global capitalism (in addition to race and class hierarchies within their own borders) have often been the primary adoption suppliers: South Korea, Guatemala, China, Ethiopia. In recent years, foreign adoption has become more difficult, probably for good reason, although many potential adoptive parents have gotten unfairly caught in the shifting gears of policy change. Prior to the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act, 25%-35% of Native children were taken from their families, and 85% of those children were placed with non-Native families, turning adoption into a form of cultural genocide.
My partner and I adopted our children via domestic open adoption, in part because we thought it was the most equitable option. If a woman actively chose us to parent her child, we couldn’t be too oppressive, right? It’s true that I stand by both specific stories that landed our specific children in our family. I don’t believe either of their first mothers was coerced. But did we have material, familial, emotional, and/or racial privileges that they did not? We absolutely did.
Imagine being a goose who learns that the only mother you’ve known—who has loved you deeply if imperfectly—killed your parents. By accident. But still. Most of us participate in oppression by accident.
*
Roz is not the ideal mother for Brightbill, the gosling who quickly grows into a long-necked goose with sleek brown feathers. She knows he needs to learn to swim and fly so that he can migrate with a flock that largely rejects him as that weird kid who lives with “that thing.” Adoption abolitionists would say this is why adoption outside the bounds of kinship should be a last resort.
I can’t say I disagree, exactly. I relate to Roz’s weaknesses—her clunkiness, her lack of cultural competence—and her brokenness. Repeatedly battered by her adventures, she loses parts and stomps around with a tree trunk for a lower leg. (I had breast cancer before I adopted; my fake boobs make me a literal cyborg.)
At the same time, I relate to Roz’s strengths. She is 100% committed to accomplishing her task. She is programmed that way, and so am I. Choosing to raise Brightbill might be hubristic, but the act of actually raising him demands humility. Not only does she let herself be literally reshaped by the experience—learning to love while getting dented and covered in moss—but she knows she is not enough for her child. This fact is not unique to transracial adoptive parents, but we may feel it extra starkly.
She knows he needs his flock.
She recruits a hawk to teach Brightbill to fly, attracting the respect of Longneck, a goose leader who convinces the other geese to accept Brightbill.
I sobbed when Roz let Brightbill go (also not a parenting experience unique to adoption). My nine-year-old threatened to turn off the movie if I didn’t stop crying. And while the statistics about higher rates of addiction and suicidality among adoptees terrify me, I cheered when Brightbill used his unique upbringing—his own involuntarily acquired cultural competence—to protect his flock from hostile robots. We can be honest about the heartbreak and injustice of adoption without seeing it as inherently or entirely negative.
I am wary of sounding like a kids’ movie in my assessment of anything that involves systemic oppression. Love wins! We can all get along! The white lady is a savior! Roz behaves heroically, but she also gets saved many times. It takes a village of geese, beavers, foxes, and opossums to raise a robot. I’m grateful for mine.
About the Author
Related Posts
Requiem for Target →
In Praise of Antibiotics and DEI Hires →
Hazy Shade of Winter: Fire, Destruction, and Survival in Los Angeles →
