I know that the best children’s movies have always been Trojan horses for grown-up content—that’s part of why the live-action Aladdin was so disappointing, and why the original was so good. But I still wasn’t ready to be accosted with the trailer for the upcoming movie adaptation of The Wild Robot while scrolling Tiktok at 3am like the highly responsible tax paying adult I am. Something about the “I feel fine!” “You shouldn’t feel anything at all!” really just caught me off guard, and I cried sleepy tears and then decided it was probably past my bedtime.

There are currently three installments in this series, all available with some notice at BookWoman:

• The Wild Robot

• The Wild Robot Escapes

• The Wild Robot Protects

Roz is a consumer-grade, “customer service” robot built to help people with whatever they may need. The manufacturers have equipped her (look at me personifying her already) with a self-preservation “instinct,” machine learning ability, and a purpose to help the customer with whatever they need. After a storm, Roz finds herself stranded on an island full of wildlife that’s uninhabited by humans or other robots and it is up to her to survive in this strange world.

She quickly learns that it benefits her chances of survival if she assimilates to the wildlife—she learns to speak the language of the animals, she mimics their behavior, and she builds community with them. At the same time, she begins to raise an orphaned gosling, taking responsibility for killing its family in a bad accident. As she raises the bird from runt to young adult ready for his first winter migration south, the reader can see that Roz is growing a personality—a kind, considerate, even loving personality. A robot, 100% obedient and 100% logical, with a goose for a son and more of a community than any human I’ve ever met.

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What is goodness?

An obnoxious question, even more so in a children’s book review. But play along with me here. What is goodness? And what is its relationship to community? What does that look like in the leftist context of building a just world?

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Thematically (to me) the second book essentially recapitulates to that of the first. The question of the genesis of love, whether all it really requires is a desire to help, reinforced over time. But to me, the more interesting question is one brushed on in the third book, and it’s that of community building, in my opinion the most important problem facing leftists right now.

In the first book, Roz begins building bonds and community with the animals around her due to her survival instincts. She learns their language, she alters her appearance to make the animals more comfortable, and she works for their collective benefit. This all comes back to her when she is in a bad situation as the animals help her in various ways, and before you know it, she’s become an integral part of the community of the island.

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Keeping in mind that this is still a children’s book—is this sort of community building only possible in an idealized setting where community members mean well, are open to reason, and are generally not shitty beings? When Roz goes out of her way to serve the collective interests of the animals and later on finds herself in trouble, she found that the animals were there for her. This often—usually? almost always?…actually always?—is not the case in real life, even when adjusted for homogeneity and familiarity within the group. And that’s once we get past the usual barriers of bigotry, inertia, idiopathic malice, and pathological selfishness.

Speaking of selfishness, is community building something that even can be achieved apart from a place of self-serving? This is, of course, its own philosophical sticky wicket.

Community, reciprocation, altruism—are these things all tied to the primordial love that manifests out of seeming nothingness and naked code for Roz? Y’all I really did crack back open my bell hook for this series literally written for elementary school readers.

And almost as an aside—what does it look like to accept responsibility as a part of the oppressor group as a prerequisite to the restoration of justice in that community? Is such a thing even possible in

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If you factor out all the overthinking, each book is a quiet weekend afternoon’s read and can be knocked out quickly enough to boost your self esteem as an excruciatingly slow reader if you’re easily distracted like me and end up in Wikipedia rabbit holes every 5 pages. I highly recommend the series as a lightning-fast read for yourself, a read-aloud bonding activity with the kids in your ~community~, or as a gift for your 3-5th grader. I for one can’t wait for this movie to come out in theaters. If you see me there in the back row sobbing into my popcorn in the dark, no you didn’t.