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At a Turning Point in Life, I Related to the Wild Robot’s Autistic-Coded Gosling, Brightbill

This is my migration

Sarah TC
Cinemania
5 min readDec 9, 2024

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Two geese are on the water, one spreading its wings and ready to fly off.
Photo by Ella Christenson on Unsplash

Being a kids’ movie meant the lights went up the second the credits started rolling. I pretended to yawn to hide the tears. I was coming to the end of a difficult patch in my life, and I couldn’t help but draw parallels between my experience and that of a fictional gosling in an animated movie, The Wild Robot.

Autistic coded characters are commonplace in animated films, whether intentional or not. Robot and alien characters are discussed extensively in the autistic community and online forums. Existing in a neurotypical world can often feel like you’re from another planet or running on another operating system to everyone else. The robot in this movie was somewhat autistic-coded, but that’s not who I found myself relating to.

Roz, a robot designed to complete tasks, finds herself stuck on an island uninhabited by human life. Without a task to complete, she wanders the island without a purpose. That is until she finds an egg and acquires the task of caring for it.

Brightbill, the gosling protagonist in The Wild Robot, is the runt of the litter. He only survives after an accident led to Roz (his reluctant robot matriarch) killing his family. Like Brightbill, I was small. I was born…

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Cinemania
Cinemania

Published in Cinemania

A home for conversations about all things cinema.

Sarah TC
Sarah TC

Written by Sarah TC

I am a queer, neurodivergent mental health nurse, academic and PhD student. I write about the things that matter to me and my community.

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