The Wild Robot
Score 3/4
Let’s be honest. Kid flicks are a real crapshoot these days. For the most part, the most we can hope for as parents is for the movie to not aggressively insult our intelligence while our child experiences the wonder that a new visual experience brings. Despicable Me 4 BARELY cleared that bar this summer, whereas Inside Out 2 dodged the bullet we were all worried it would end up taking and brought a whole new level of emotional self-awareness with beauty and grace. While the trailers for The Wild Robot made me hope it would fit in with the latter film, I had to keep my bar of expectations low for my own sanity. Thankfully, it has more in common with The Iron Giant (1999) than a Minions movie.
The film centers on ROZZUM unit 7134 as the lone survivor in a crate of robots that crashed into an island during a storm. As she comes online and is prevented from phoning home to be picked up, she explores the island in an effort to find a task to complete. As it learns to communicate with the local wildlife, Roz gets embroiled in all manner of dynamics between predator and prey. Eventually culminating in a reckoning with its previous life, Roz has to choose between the home made and the home left behind.
It’s fairly commonplace for an animated film only to feature name actors, and it shows. While it’s fun to be able to pick out the famous voice, it tends to take you out of the film. The Wild Robot somehow pulls off having famous people in it without drawing attention to them. While it’s easy to hear Lupita Nyongo’o in the titular role, she blends into the role and has a great supporting cast consisting of Pedro Pascal, Bill Nighy, Ving Rhames, and even Mark Hamill disappearing completely into their characters. When you can forget Catherine O’Hara is playing a put upon mother of 7 (or so), this movie is doing something right.
Thematically speaking is where this film approaches the heights of The Iron Giant. It tackles topics like the nature of a predator/prey relationship in the wild and doesn’t pull punches without being gratuitous. Honestly, it’s got a pretty dark sense of humor about this that left my family slack-jawed at what just happened while laughing. Other themes like abandonment and family are broached tactfully without talking down to its younger target demographic. While there are scenes meant to elicit a tearful response, The Wild Robot earns every single one of them with character building with real stakes.
The art style is something that struck me from the first teaser and it carries beautifully through the entire movie. Displaying something approximating oil painting like the Netflix series Arcane (arguably the best video game adaptation of all time), there’s a lived-in quality to the animation style. This is one of the few cases where computer animation outshines traditional animation simply because to try and accomplish this style by hand would take decades.
Writer/director Chris Sanders created something truly special with The Wild Robot. The beauty of tackling a property that hasn’t been transposed to another medium before is that you can take chances and really try something new. Sanders and his team did precisely that and came up with something altogether wonderful that has me anticipating new installments following the books it’s based upon.
