Film Review - The Wild Robot
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.
The Wild Robot follows ROZZUM unit 7134 - or ‘Roz’ for short (Lupita Nyong’o) - a helper robot who has shipwrecked on a remote island with no humans, only a diverse array of animals. Seeking to fulfil her programming function as a robot mass-produced to assist people with specific tasks, Roz comes into contact with a clumsy yet adorable baby goose whom she names Brightbill (Kit Connor), as well as a loner with a heart of gold fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal). Roz has no pre-programmed emotions, and attempts to fulfil her newfound task - raising Brightbill to maturity so he can migrate with the other geese - the only way she knows how: mechanically. As Roz and Fink essentially co-parent Brightbill, they all learn a thing or two from each other about how to emotionally navigate the untamed wilderness of the world around them, and reckon with the consequences of Roz’s mistaken shipwreck when her creators come looking for her.
The Wild Robot is the latest entry from DreamWorks Animation, which like most contemporary animation studios, has been very hit-or-miss for most of their lifetime. I felt a lot of promise from The Wild Robot however - I love robot stories, especially ones that situate them among a natural environment, and director Chris Sanders has a great track record (Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), thus it brings me great pleasure to say that I was quite moved by the film. At the heart of Wild Robot is this attention to the mechanisms that govern relationships, this ostensible idea of ‘feeling it in your heart’ as being able to bridge differing ways of perception. Roz's naive and endearingly inhumane manner of raising Brightbill is played for laughs at first, but gradually becomes held up as ultimately beneficial for the gosling in conjunction with Fink’s ‘street smarts’ and very human (or fox in this case!) understanding of the world. Nyong’o lends an adorable voice to the character that grounds Roz in the pre-programmed politeness of the probably-evil tech company from which she hails. This narratively constructs a seemingly naive mindset that is reckoned with throughout the film, and it’s by far the strongest part of it. Roz’s emotional trajectory throughout the film reminded me a lot of The Iron Giant (Brad Bird, 1999), which is high praise coming from me. Like Iron Giant, beyond ‘wow, I love big robots!’ I saw a lot of myself in Roz, and later Brightbill as a result of Roz’s upbringing, and the film’s surprisingly nuanced portrayal of the ramifications of upbringing on both parties. Brightbill ends up more robot than goose, but this is painted as a good thing when Roz’s emotionally mechanically naive manner of thinking is pitted against the chaotic world around them.
The imagery of the film is quite something to behold. Described elsewhere as ‘Ghibli-esque’, the film utilises detailing and textual techniques as seen in prior DreamWorks features The Bad Guys (Pierre Perifel, 2022) and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Joel Crawford, 2022), with an ostensible pixelated painting-like quality to its artistic expression. Such a visual design signals to me that the film nearly registers its own status as animated, with an expression that plays with the very shapes of lighting textures and polygon interaction. This visual design, in conjunction with the setting and use of animal characters, immediately caused me to draw comparisons to recent festival favourite Flow (Gints Zilbalodis, 2024). Flow’s own animation and look was favourably compared to certain contemporary indie video games upon release, a look it wears distinctly well in my opinion, embodying a real-time generation feeling about it, and I see fleeting components of it in The Wild Robot. Flow formally embodies this style quite a bit better than The Wild Robot does, but the latter is certainly competent and confident in this decorum.
Flow, about a group of domestic animals surviving a biblical-esque flood in a post-human world, also bears a strong resemblance to The Wild Robot’s setting. Wild Robot is set in the distant future, humanity has seemingly fled to advanced cities that tower above the dramatically-risen oceans that have claimed the old world, shown in a thrilling migration scene in the film’s second act. The brief and fleeting glimpse of this world, and the hints that the government outside is quite authoritative and deterministic, are effective in letting the film’s central relationship breathe. The film spends a significant portion of its runtime on merely developing the relationship between the main trio, which for the most part is conveyed in a very moving manner, but this has unfortunately pitfalls. For all its visual splendour, the film is extremely reliant on its dialogue to carry out emotional beats and the bulk of its storytelling, and whilst this is not an inherent negative, the manner in which it is written signals a mistrust or insecurity in the pleasing simplicity of its visuals to tell this story. Characters will often exclusively blurt out motivational one-liners, reducing potentially interesting dynamic interactions into ‘this guy gives inspiring advice’, counter-intuitively rendering the advice shallow. This is unfortunately the downside of the earnestly interesting emotional conflict at the centre of the film - the film is so extremely aware of what it’s doing and overcorrects itself in the process of communicating this notion to the audience. My aforementioned comparisons to Ghibli films, The Iron Giant, and Flow, signal to me this underlying nagging at my brain that the film is perhaps a little too content to swim in its own pond of influences and not venture out further. A shame, given that this only just falls short of being spiritually inducted as a modern animated classic.
Despite this, the film still very much works wonders. Surface-level overly-inspirational dialogue holds it back from the great heights it so clearly wants to achieve, but with everything else this has going for it it’s incredibly hard to be mad, it’s just too adorable and sweet! I took to its earnest portrayal of the mechanised beauty behind how even relationships can be ‘programmed’ and the importance of striking a balance between this and natural intuition - which is really a form of programming in and of itself. If you’re going to see one animated robot film this spring, check out The Wild Robot.
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The Wild Robot is screening in cinemas now. For tickets and more info, click here.