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