‘The Wild Robot' earned a surprising and important honor this award season

CNN

20-02-2025

In 'The Wild Robot,' Lupita Nyong'o voices Roz, an intelligent droid who must navigate the challenging natural world of the future.
The DreamWorks film, based on the classic children's book by Peter Brown, has nabbed three Oscar nominations this year – including best original score, best sound and best animated feature – but it has also earned a lesser-known distinction.
Good Energy – a nonprofit that helps TV and film creators tell stories that 'honestly reflect,' even in part, climate-related issues – last year launched a Bechdel-Wallace-like test that explores how climate awareness shows up in the content we watch. After this year's Oscar-nominated movies were put to the Climate Reality Check test, 'The Wild Robot' stands as the only one to pass muster.
The criteria for the test are relatively simple. The film or TV show must take place on Earth, be set in the present, recent past, or future, and the following two statements must be true: climate change exists in the world of the story, and a character knows it. While it sounds easy enough, this year's crop of Oscar picks failed to clear those conditions, save for 'Robot,' 'with its stunning portrayal of our watery future,' according to Good Energy's Climate Reality Check Report released on Thursday.
The question is, how can movies and TV shows that depict climate change spur viewers into action, or even to just become more climate aware, without scaring them?
It's become irrefutable that climate-related emergencies have grown more common and urgent in today's world – just look at the recent wildfires that ravaged Hollywood's hometown of Los Angeles, or hurricanes Helene and Milton last fall, which left the southeastern United States grappling with the loss of more than 200 lives and billions of dollars in damages.
With that comes a renewed focus on how climate awareness and normalization is represented in popular culture, which is where Good Energy's new tool comes in.
'Humans are wired for stories,' Anna Jane Joyner, founder and CEO of Good Energy, told CNN in an interview.
'TV and film have a profound impact on shaping public opinion and behavior,' she added, going on to cite how TV shows introducing the concept of a designated driver in the 1980s led to a stark decline in alcohol-related driving fatalities or how a 2020 GLAAD report found that a clear majority of Americans felt TV shows and movies influenced their acceptance of LGBTQ+ people.
Joyner and others are eager to see the same happen when it comes to climate awareness, with stories featuring characters that model conscientious behavior with regard to the planet and our collective footprint – not just people running and screaming from some natural disaster.
'We must meet the moment, which means we must create stories that shift our relationship to our earth,' said adrienne marie brown, a writer, podcast host and climate justice activist who styles their name lowercase. She added that it is 'non-negotiable' to include themes of climate change and activism in popular film, television and beyond.
'Climate catastrophe impacts and threatens everything that lives,' brown, who recently published the book 'Loving Corrections,' also said. 'We need stories that show what's coming, how to prepare and build community.'
But both brown and Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson – a marine biologist and policy expert – are adamant that modeling climate activism in popular culture need not be all about just ringing warning bells.
In fact, Johnson told CNN there's even space for joy in this area.
'What I personally would like to see, what I have pitched,' said Johnson, who recently published 'What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures,' 'is more climate rom-coms. Where the meet-cute is, like, at a composting facility. They bump into each other with their food scraps!'
Her ideas don't stop there. 'Like, you're trying to go on a romantic ski trip, and there's no f***ing snow! Right?'
This is just life now, Johnson added. So having climate themes integrated into movies organically – say, two people 'falling in love in the context of an electric car charging station,' she brainstormed – could be a way to reach more audiences.
brown also talked about the need for 'stories that show us a compelling future' as opposed to a bleak one, as seen in movies like the Jake Gyllenhaal-starring 'Day After Tomorrow' from 2004, or the more recent 'Twisters.' These films are often grouped under the term 'cli-fi.'
'There is a part of what's coming to us that is inevitable,' brown acknowledged. But she also stressed the 'need to normalize people being prepared for cataclysmic change as communities' and 'weave it in and make it joyful, sexy, admirable and powerful to love the earth.'
'I actually don't think we need more apocalyptic stories,' Johnson shared. 'We're all very clear on what the bad version of the future is. But what kind of future do we get if we actually deploy all the solutions we have?'
Those solutions include things like renewable energy, more public transit, regenerative agriculture and more, she said.
'I really do feel like we can take climate change seriously without taking ourselves seriously,' she added. 'The sort of sanctimonious earnestness, or intensity and terror, doesn't really work for everybody.'
There's a place for humor in storytelling around climate awareness and activism, too, Johnson said. She mentioned AppleTV+'s winsome comedy 'Ted Lasso,' in which the teammates decide as a group to no longer allow an oil company to sponsor their team because the business wreaked havoc in the African country from which one of their players hails.
'I thought that was just such a smart way to do it,' she said.
Johnson was also quick to point out how the climate activism implicit in the storyline was properly contextualized.
'At no point did it feel like, 'Wait, how did this get to be about climate?'' she said. 'It was just like, 'Of course, a creepy oil company would be trying to take advantage.''
For Joyner, there is a pressing and personal stake in getting more climate-normalizing stories out there for mass consumption.
She lives on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, and her family has roots there for five generations. During Hurricane Sally in 2020, they had to evacuate in the middle of the night as the region was blindsided.
'Every year, I see my home disappearing before my eyes. I've struggled with climate anxiety, anger, fear, and grief – as do millions of people,' she said. 'I need to see my world on-screen. I need help making meaning of all this – and finding joy, courage, and possibility in the midst of it.'
Acknowledging climate change in our stories is as simple as 'authentically writing about what it feels like to be alive today,' Joyner added.
'Showing the climate crisis in our stories helps audiences process their own difficult emotions, and find the courage to face it,' she said. 'We need to talk about it in our stories so that we can talk about it in real life. We need to explore what it means to be human in this new age of climate change.'