Review: 'The Wild Robot'

Chris Sanders has only directed four animated features (plus a live action adaptation Call of the Wild), and the previous three (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train your Dragon and The Croods put him in four way tie for most nominations without a win in the Best Animated Feature category at the Oscars. It feels pretty certain that The Wild Robot will be the movie that finally wins him that Oscar, but we'll keep such speculation to a minimum.

Sanders's first feature, Lilo & Stitch, is probably the only truly great movie to come out of Walt Disney Animation Studios in the first decade of this century. (To be clear, you're allowed to like other movies from that decade, but most were flawed.) Anyway, the upshot of Lilo & Stitch becoming a beloved classic is that its directors, Sanders and his writing and directing partner, Dean Deblois, were driven out of Disney by John Lasseter a few years later (I don't like that guy).

Sanders and Deblois took their talents to DreamWorks Animation, where they delivered How to Train Your Dragon to the studio, often seen as one of the highlights of its output.

I've often seen Sanders cast as the "idea guy" in the Sanders/Deblois partnership, as well as being the guy who brings a lot of unique visual aspects to his projects, while Deblois is the more story-driven member of the partnership, bringing in the emotional aspects. I'm not so sure about that, especially after this movie, which features an emotional story just as potent as Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, sans Deblois. The Wild Robot also features a visual design that echoes the original illustrations of the book it's based on, by Peter Brown, showing Sanders is more than just a recognizable art style.

The Wild Robot presents Lupita Nyong'o as the voice of the titular wild robot, a ROZZUM Unit with the designation 7134, soon dubbed Roz for short. After an accident leaves her stranded on an uninhabited island, Roz, in her quest to complete some sort of task for anybody, becomes a caretaker for the animals of the island in general, and a gosling she names Brightbill specifically. It features Kit Connor as the adult Brightbill (Boone Storm voices the gosling as a hatchling) and Pedro Pascal as the voice of Fink the fox, Roz's first ally on the island.

The story is fairly simple; basically a science fiction update of the Robinson Crusoe story with a robot in Crusoe's role, except the movie is also a talking animal fantasy. Roz, early on - realizing she can't talk to the animals - takes a page out of Doctor Dolittle's playbook, and simply takes the time to learn their language. She (and Roz is always referred to with female pronouns, despite being a robot) soon finds herself taking on tasks she was not programmed for, most especially the role of surrogate mother to Brightbill. The story of an outsider from the human world becoming adopted mother of a young waterfowl reminded me strongly of the Korean animated movie, Leafy: A Hen into the Wild, though the parallels are probably unintentional.

At the start of the movie, Roz's voice is chipper and enthusiastic; this friendly programmed demeanor is explained as easing the process of helping robots to complete their tasks for people. During the course of the movie, if anything, Roz becomes less outwardly artificially emotional. It turns out she has a subdued personality, and even though it feels like this would make her more robotic, it feels truer than her original bubbliness, which has interesting consequences when we meet other robots later in the story.

At first, all the animals of the forested island are quite intimidated by this clanking mechanical creature that crashes into their midst. The only animals who don't flee or attack are Pinktail (voiced by Catherine O'Hara), a mother opossum whose children's bad acting at playing dead makes her realize Roz is actually harmless; Paddler (voiced by Matt Berry), a cranky beaver so obsessed with cutting down the island's largest tree that even the other animals think he's a bit odd; and Fink, a fox nobody likes, who realizes Roz will feed him if he agrees not to eat Brightbill and "helps" her raise the gosling. Fink soon becomes Roz's main ally, eventually realizing he's lonely, and becoming Brightbill's odd pseudo-uncle.

The movie deals frankly with the fact that these are wild animals who are not separate from the food chain. A small woodland creature is violently, if a bit bloodlessly, decapitated onscreen within minutes of the movie's runtime, and predation is often played for very dark laughs. There's no question that the animals eat each other, at least in the beginning. As the animals become more united due to Roz's actions, it becomes unclear, for example, what the obligate carnivore lynx background character is actually eating. But the sometimes-cruel reality of nature is stressed; one of the few animals who is not himself some sort of outcast who respects Roz early on is the elder goose Longneck (voiced by Bill Nighy). He points out that the accident that killed his mother was actually very lucky for Brightbill: as a runt, his own goose parent would have abandoned him.

One interesting aspect of the movie is that, as it is set in the future, it's one of the first I've seen that deals with climate change so matter-of-factly. During the geese migration scenes, they pass over the Golden Gate Bridge. Also passing over it, is a sort of reverse of San Francisco set, "save the whales with time travel" Star Trek: The Voyage Home; whereas in this future, humanity successfully saved the whales, but not San Francisco. But The Wild Robot doesn't really preach anything, or linger on it – Longneck doesn't take Brightbill aside and explain the city wasn't always underwater.

The Wild Robot follows Puss in Boots: The Last Wish in that it has an overtly painterly style. To be clear, by that, I mean the movie is designed to look like it was physically painted, with some apparent brushstrokes visible, especially in the backgrounds. Obviously, this is a very in vogue look, but I find it more appropriate here, as this is a first entry in a new series of movies; and it's set in the wilderness, which has been a frequent inspiration for real painters since time immemorial. Roz herself uses charcoal to make some crude drawings of her animal friends. She doesn't have access to a database of art to copy from, so her drawings are AI art I can get behind.