I no longer feel an imperative to see and review every animated feature that comes along, but Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot is exceptional in every way. It embraces a wide range of emotions and somehow manages to keep cynicism at bay. My class of 20-somethings at USC adored it, and so did I.
Sanders is by now a veteran in the field, having attended Cal Arts and worked on such Disney films as Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Mulan, finally taking command on the distinctive-looking Lilo & Stitch. (He even performed the impish character’s voice). Moving to DreamWorks with his longtime partner Dean DeBlois he was instrumental in shaping How to Train Your Dragon and launching a mini-industry in the process. This is reportedly the last DreamWorks Animation film to be produced completely in-house.
Based on a book by Peter Crown, The Wild Robot enables us to watch the equivalent of a classic fairy tale unfolding, beat by beat. Its main characters are a futuristic robot (whose deliberately imperfect rendering makes her quite different from earlier animated droids like The Iron Giant and Wall*E.) Following a disastrous crash landing on a remote island, this malfunctioning machine—with a female voice and personality—becomes the unlikely mother figure to an orphaned hatchling who imprints on her from the moment he opens his little eyes. And amidst the polyglot population on the island a wiseguy fox becomes her sidekick.
With no sense of following an agenda, the movie embraces primal feelings of loneliness, attachment, friendship, loyalty, and kindness, while doling out smart, funny gags involving faceless Big Brother-ish corporations, global warming, and the need for all different species to find a way to get along.
Lupita Nyong’o delivers a beautifully nuanced performance as the robot Roz, perfectly matched by Pedro Pascal as the smart-alecky fox named Fink. As the gosling grows up he is played by Kit Connor, and if your ears are well-tuned they may recognize other actors like Bill Nighy, Ving Rhames and Catherine O’Hara along the way. But there is no sense of “stunt casting” or drawing on these actors’ perceived personalities; they are all working in service to the film.
The Wild Robot is a genuinely beautiful movie, in every sense of that adjective. Its physical production is impressive, to say the least, but there are no weak links in its chain, from character design to its exquisitely rendered environment. Sanders and DeBlois put together an A-list team of colleagues to help them realize their vision for this picture. One of them, the gifted composer Kris Bowers, also brings his A game to the project.
If you don’t have children don’t feel funny about going to a theater to experience The Wild Robot. As you brush away a tear, you’ll thank me for recommending it.