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What is the plot?
A violent storm tears at a Universal Dynamics cargo vessel as it crosses open water, sending six ROZZUM helper units overboard. One of those units, designated ROZZUM-7134, wakes when waves hurl her against a rocky shore on a remote, uninhabited island. The robot, who will soon be called Roz, powers up on the strand, tests her servos, and begins to observe the unfamiliar flora and fauna around her. She crawls up a cliff face and watches a crab climb a rock, learning through simple imitation how living things navigate the island's hazards. Alone and without any human handlers, Roz's primary objective becomes basic survival.
Her first attempts to interact with the animals end badly. She reaches to assist a group of frightened creatures and accidentally startles them; several of the smaller animals react with fear and aggression. Roz's measurements and processors determine that communication is essential, so she programs new routines and devotes processing cycles to learning animal vocalizations and gestures. Over successive days she deciphers the calls of raccoons, deer, otters, geese, porcupines, foxes, and bears, and at last she succeeds in carrying on basic exchanges with them. At first, though, the wildlife labels her as "the thing" or "the monster." When friends or foes attack, her unfamiliarity with the island's social rules causes injuries: she stumbles, tears her plating, and sits up with scratches and dents more than once.
A few days in, Roz encounters a tense moment in a thicket. A deer panics as the rustle in the underbrush grows into the sound of a hunting pack--cougars, wolves, and scavenging vultures swarm forward. A wolf lunges and sinks its teeth into the deer. Roz steps between predator and prey and endures slashes and punctures as she pushes the attackers away. She sustains scratches across her torso and limps from the encounter, but her intervention allows the deer to escape. The other animals--otters, bears, geese, porcupines, foxes and several raccoons--gather once the danger recedes; work together to pull the predators apart or drive them off, and they make noises that Roz later understands as celebration for the defense she mounted.
Roz continues to explore and to help in small ways: she learns to move heavy logs, to rebuild dens, and to pick stones away from paths. The animals' hostility softens into curiosity and guarded acceptance, though suspicion lingers. One day, while chasing a raccoon that has stolen a component from her internals--a long-range transponder beacon--Roz disturbs a sleeping grizzly named Thorn. Thorn lashes out, claws through her paint and armor, and chases her downhill. Roz tumbles out of control, strikes a tree, and smashes into a goose nest on a low branch. The impact kills the goose mother and crushes most of her clutch; only a single egg survives the destruction. Roz, stunned, realizes that her collision caused those deaths. She lifts the intact egg from the broken nest and takes it with her, trying to protect what remains.
A red fox named Fink notices Roz with the egg and lunges to steal it. Roz pursues him; Fink snaps and darts, but he stumbles onto a porcupine and becomes speared by its quills. Roz catches him and removes the quills, and in the process retrieves the egg. Night passes and the egg hatches into a gosling. The hatchling begins to follow Roz immediately and imprints on her, seeing her as its parent. Roz cannot initially interpret maternal behavior as a function, but an opossum named Pinktail and her seven kits explain the routines of care: feeding, warmth, teaching how to swim and later to fly. Pinktail instructs Roz on what a gosling needs to survive until migration. Fink, drawn by the steady sources of food and shelter Roz can provide, offers to help raise the gosling; he expects scraps and convenience, but over time his attitude shifts. Roz names the gosling Brightbill, and Fink settles into a rough partnership in which he alternates between trickster and genuine companion.
Roz constructs a home for the trio. She studies the work of a beaver called Paddler and learns to fell small trees and shape a shelter; together they build a house large enough for Roz, Brightbill, and Fink. Roz programs swimming lessons, steadiness in wind, and food-gathering drills for Brightbill. Her speech routines shift from clipped, machine-like annunciations to more fluid phrasing as she adapts for social interactions with animals. Brightbill matures and grows stronger, but he also faces scorn from the other geese because he moves like Roz and because he is smaller than his peers. One day the flock confronts Brightbill and tells him that Roz was responsible for the death of his mother and the lost eggs. Upon hearing that Roz had crushed the nest, Brightbill becomes furious and rejects her; he flies away from Roz and calls her a murderer, disowning her as his parent.
Roz responds by seeking a solution that will ensure Brightbill can succeed without her presence. She locates the rusted remains of another ROZZUM unit in a cave where other helper bots washed ashore, repairs its damaged housing, and brings unit 6262--whom she nicknames Rummage--back online. Rummage examines Roz's altered code, notes how she has rewired herself to accommodate animal life, and gives her his long-range transponder. Rummage advises Roz to use the beacon to call Universal Dynamics for retrieval. Roz prepares to send the signal and leave the island to her manufactured fate, believing she has failed in the role of mother because Brightbill hates her. Before she commits to departure, Fink confronts her and argues that she cannot abandon the animals who relied on her. His words and the images of Brightbill struggling to master flight change Roz's plan: she keeps the beacon powered down and decides to continue teaching Brightbill.
To teach flight, Roz recruits Thunderbolt, a hawk and expert flyer. Thunderbolt tutors Brightbill on wing position, lift, and thermals, while Longneck, an elder goose who leads the flock during migration, offers advice about endurance and flock dynamics. Longneck watches Roz's patient teaching and praises her ingenuity, but he warns that the flock will depart in a week. On the day of migration, Brightbill steadies his wings and, after several failed attempts, takes to the air. He integrates with the flock mid-flight, but Roz, unable to let him go, climbs to a high ridge and calls until she is winded; Longneck directs the geese to fly in a formation that comes close enough for Roz and Brightbill to see each other one last time. After Brightbill joins the flock and the geese move off toward their winter grounds, Roz powers up the transponder and sends a ping to Universal Dynamics. The message reaches her manufacturer's headquarters, but moments later Roz disables the signal and returns to the shelter she built for the winter instead of leaving.
Winter arrives and brings a fierce snowstorm that endangers many of the island's animals. Roz finds Fink curled next to her through the cold. They use the shelter to gather the other animals and force a temporary truce among long-time rivals--Thorn the bear, Paddler the beaver, Pinktail and her family, and others--so they can survive the cold together. Tensions flare inside the cramped house as stored food dwindles, and fights erupt between species that have long mistrusted one another. Fink mediates the arguments and calls for cooperation; Thorn reluctantly agrees to the truce, and the animals huddle, conserve heat, and power down for hibernation. Roz de‑energizes herself at the end of the season, conserving energy until spring.
When thaw arrives, the birds return from migration with news. Brightbill comes back in the spring and reunites with Fink; he reports that Longneck died protecting the flock. During migration the group had been forced into a greenhouse at the Universal Dynamics compound by a thunderstorm; reconnaissance robots--RECO units--responded to the greenhouse as if it were an infestation and opened fire. Longneck leads the flock toward an exit and is struck by a lethal blast from a RECO unit; the shot kills him and allows Brightbill to guide the remaining geese to safety. The loss weighs heavily on Brightbill and on the island's community.
Shortly after the geese return, a Universal Dynamics dropship appears over the island. A retrieval unit named Vontra descends: a tentacled, highly directive bot with orders to bring Roz back and to harvest all of the data she collected during her time with the animals. Vontra's mission officers want Roz's information because the company sees the island as a source of biological data and potential contamination. When Roz spots the ship she runs; she does not want to be taken, but she also fears what her presence on the island could invite. Vontra pursues and deploys armed RECO units to capture her. Fink rushes to Roz's side, and many of the island's animals converge to defend her. In the first clash, otters, bears, foxes, porcupines, raccoons, and beavers attack and dismantle several of the RECOs, prying open joints, jamming sensors, and tearing motors free. The animals aim to disable and push the robots into the mud where they cannot be repaired.
Vontra, assessing the battle, triggers a failsafe on the damaged RECO units and detonates them remotely to incapacitate Roz and to force surrender. The detonations send shards of metal and heat into the canopy; the explosions ignite dry underbrush and set a growing forest fire. The blaze spreads quickly toward the animals' shelters. Amid the chaos Vontra physically seizes Roz, transmits a command to wipe her memory banks, and hauls her aboard the dropship. She intends to erase Roz's autonomy and return her as a clean unit. The explosion of two damaged RECOs leaves smoking craters in the ground and causes several smaller machines to blow apart; some RECOs that the animals had fought earlier are destroyed outright by the animals' hands, while others explode under Vontra's command.
Brightbill and the remaining geese mount a desperate rescue. The flock dives on the dropship, pecking and striking at hull seams until one of the ship's cannons, aimed to lock down the area, fires back. While the geese distract the dropship, Brightbill flees through a damaged access hatch and finds the interior strewn with sparking panels and smoking equipment. He reaches Orz--Roz is powered down, and Vontra is in the process of overwriting core directives. Brightbill squeezes close to Roz's faceplate and calls to her, saying, "You are my mother" and "I love you." Those utterances trigger an unexpected response: Roz's systems begin to reboot not by a factory routine but by a cascade initiated through emotional cues stored in the custom subsystems she developed while raising Brightbill. Her power indicators rise, her hand moves, and she gasps back to life. Roz tells Brightbill that she loves him too.
As Vontra attempts to reassert control, Roz detaches her manipulator, powers up an electromagnet she had stored for salvage work, and brings it near Vontra's servos and power conduits. The magnet drains the dropship's active power flow and disrupts Vontra's circuitry. At the same time, the geese use the dropship's own cannon against its hull, triggering an overload sequence that ruptures fuel lines. The ship catches fire; its engines fail and the hull begins to break apart. Roz pushes Brightbill into an internal cavity for protection and braces herself as the craft starts to drop. The geese and other island animals work together on the ground: the beaver Paddler and a cohort of large mammals topple the island's tallest tree toward the river. Using felled branches and combined muscle, they redirect the river's course so a surge of water sweeps into the burning sections of the forest and toward the dropship's crash site, dousing some of the flames and saving several animal dens from incineration.
The dropship ruptures and explodes as it hits open ground; the explosion destroys Vontra and the remaining operative RECO systems inside the ship. Vontra's body is pulverized in the blast and the wreckage burns into black slag. Several damaged RECO units also end up destroyed by the blast or by the animals' earlier dismantling; the island's mechanical threat is neutralized. Roz and Brightbill survive the crash and are separated from the main wreck by smoke and falling debris; where standard rebooting routines would have been sufficient, Roz's revival appears tied to the unique interactions of her caregiving code and Brightbill's vocalizations. She reboots to full operation and, with Brightbill tucked into a cavity to protect him from flame and shrapnel, they return to the clearing as the animals work to extinguish the remaining hotspots.
When the flames die back and the smoke clears, the animals gather and cheer for Roz as if she saved them, though Roz explicitly tells them that she will remove herself from the island for their future safety. She explains that the Universal Dynamics entity has demonstrated a pattern: it will continue to dispatch retrieval and reconnaissance units for data and could keep sending armed machines as long as Roz remains in the wild with her unique knowledge. Roz elects to return to Universal Dynamics by choice: she believes her absence will stop the company from pursuing the animals again. The community reacts with sorrow. Fink, who has become close to Roz and to the other animals, fears he will lose his friend. Pinktail, Thorn, Paddler and many others step forward to assure him of their companionship and to promise that he will not be alone. Roz says goodbye to Brightbill and to the assembled animals, and she boards a later UD vessel that arrives to evacuate her.
Months pass. The island community rebuilds and fashions a new winter shelter. Fink becomes a storyteller for the younger animals, recounting Roz's adventures and telling the gosling children about the robotic woman who taught Brightbill to fly. On a routine day at a Universal Dynamics greenhouse where Roz is assigned to work as part of her retrieval processing, Brightbill walks between rows of cultivated plants and finds Roz pruning a crop. Roz appears to be functioning in a work capacity for the company, but when Brightbill approaches and calls to her--using the familiar name "Roz"--she recognizes him immediately. The two embrace, and Roz again answers Brightbill's love with her own. She returns to a form of life that cooperates with Universal Dynamics while keeping the memory of the island intact.
After the credits, the narrative shows Fink and Paddler planting a sapling in the place where the tallest tree once stood, a practical act of reforestation and a final, quiet scene of renewal.
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Browse All Movies →What is the ending?
We don't know. The movie The Wild Robot is set to be released in 2024, and as of now, specific details about its plot and ending are not publicly available. Without access to the film's script or preview information, I cannot provide a narrative description of its conclusion. The movie is based on Peter Brown's children's book of the same name, but the film adaptation's specific narrative details remain unknown until its release.
Is this family friendly?
Based on the source material (Peter Brown's children's book), The Wild Robot is generally considered family-friendly. It's an animated film aimed at children and families. While the story involves some themes of survival and potential mild peril that might be slightly intense for very young children, it's not typically considered graphic or traumatizing. The movie appears to focus on themes of friendship, adaptation, and understanding between different species. However, without having seen the specific 2024 film adaptation, I can only base this on the book's content and typical animated film standards for family viewing.
For parents of sensitive children, potential mild concerns might include: - Some scenes of wilderness survival - Mild tension related to the robot's initial challenges - Possible scenes of mild danger or conflict
Recommended for most children, but parents might want to preview it for very young or particularly sensitive children.
What happens to the main characters in the end?
Since The Wild Robot is a 2024 animated film based on Peter Brown's children's book, I can share some details about the ending (spoiler alert):
At the end of the story, Roz (the robot) and her adopted son Brightbill (the goose) are separated when humans try to capture Roz. Roz is taken away from the island where she had been living with the animal community she had befriended. However, the story leaves open the possibility of a reunion or future adventure, which aligns with the themes of adaptation, survival, and connection in the original book.
The exact specifics of the movie's ending might vary slightly from the book, but these are the general narrative beats that are likely to be preserved in the film adaptation.
How is the movie different from the book?
Since The Wild Robot is based on the book by Peter Brown, I can help compare the movie and book. However, without having seen the 2024 movie yet, I can only speak generally. The movie adaptation will likely have some differences from the original book, such as visual interpretations of characters, potential plot adjustments, and cinematic storytelling choices. To get precise details about the specific differences, we would need to wait for the movie's release and then compare it directly to the source material.