The Wild Robot is an adaptation of Peter Brown’s children’s book.DreamWorks/Supplied
- The Wild Robot
- Directed by Chris Sanders
- Written by Chris Sanders, based on the book by Peter Brown
- Featuring the voices of Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal and Bill Nighy
- Classification G; 102 minutes
- Opens in theatres Sept. 27
Critic’s Pick
Continuing the proud tradition of finding deeply human stories inside the cold metallic hearts of machines, the new animated film The Wild Robot joins WALL-E and last year’s Robot Dreams in delivering top-tier children’s entertainment that could also double as beautiful silent films.
Adapting Peter Brown’s children’s book, The Wild Robot traces the journey of a utility droid named ROZZUM 7134 (“Roz” for short, and voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) whose cargo ship runs aground on an uninhabited island some time in the distant future. (There are eventual quick, and rather dark, glimpses of just how bad things have gone for Earth, including a haunting shot of the Golden Gate Bridge buried deep under water.) A mechanical servant without a human master, Roz wanders the island trying to find tasks to accomplish, only to encounter various animals who either consider the machine a monster or want to rip its body to pieces.
Lupita Nyong’o voices the character of Roz, a utility droid, in the film.Universal Pictures / DreamWorks Animation/Supplied
After learning to translate the various animals dialects – Roz is a quick study – the robot begins to form a friendly relationship with some of the island’s outcasts, including a sly red fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and the cynical opossum Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara). But after accidentally orphaning a newborn baby goose named Brightbill (Kit Conner), Roz must learn to expand her prime directive to include becoming a surrogate mother, while also learning the ways of the constantly warring animal kingdom.
While the story is slight – some restless children, and their parents, might wonder when exactly the dialogue-light plot is going to kick into motion, at which point the script then unintentionally recalls so very much of last year’s kids flick Migration – writer-director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) elevates the sometimes thin material with the most beautiful animation in recent memory.
Eschewing the generically smooth aesthetics of current animation titan Illumination (Despicable Me, Super Mario) and the classical but frequently unsurprising work of Disney, Sanders and his Dreamworks team employ a visual language that the director accurately labels “a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest.” The world of The Wild Robot is lush, immersive and engaging – as impressive as the eye-popping work in, say, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but gentle enough to not rearrange the brains of its target audience.
And once the narrative does move along, including the introduction of a sinister robotics company that makes the Alien franchise’s Weyland-Yutani corporation look downright cuddly, the whole package comes together with a distinctly human-touch kind of precision.
Like almost every other kids film these days, The Wild Robot cannot quite figure out which of its many endings to close out things. Yet even a little creative indecision will not stop children from cheering out loud when Roz defiantly confronts her makers, or prevent parents from weeping like babies once Brightbill comes to realize the sacrifices his “mother” made for him. Leave it to a robot to break our puny human hearts.