The Wild Robot (2024 | USA | 101 minutes | Chris Sanders)
A movie about a lost robot and a cynical loner fox raising an orphaned goose, plus the power of unlikely animal friendships? It’s as if this gorgeously animated marvel was built in a lab specifically to make me weep. Task accomplished, satisfaction rating 10/10.
The movie opens with the title robot, ROZZUM unit 7134 (“Roz”, voiced beautifully by Lupita Nyong’o, so I’m going with she/her pronouns) far from “wild”. Bulbous and adaptable, it’s a machine built for the sole purpose of making people’s lives easier through its dedication to cheerfully accomplishing whatever task is put in front of it. The only problem: it’s woken up by some adorably curious critters on basalt cliffs of an island inhabited entirely by animals. As cute as the fauna are, she doesn’t speak their language and they all regard her as a hostile invading monster who threatens their existence.
But this robot is nothing if not determined, so she sets herself to hibernating until she can learn to communicate. Time passes, she wakes up, they still have no use for her even when they can chat. But just as she’s about to activate her emergency retrieval beacon, a rollicking chase culminates in an accident that leaves her as the caretaker of one surviving egg. Keeping the little gosling who imprints upon her upon hatching (pluckily voiced by Kit Connor) the task that gives her a long-awaited raison d’être.
Her companion in parenting is Fink, a manipulative red fox and self-serving outcast voiced charmingly by Pedro Pascal. Together, they team up to make sure the little fellow can survive to eat, swim, and fly. This makeshift family of misfits is largely shunned by the rest of the island’s animals, but a beleaguered possum mother (Catherine O’Hara, hilarious as always) and her brood of death-obsessed joeys provide plenty of comedic relief. As does the eventual awkward adolescence of the growing goose, who Roz eventually names Brightbill instead of an unintelligible series of alphanumerics.
While there are a few jokes here and there for adults, writer/director Chris Sanders aims squarely for the “middle reader” demographic of Peter Brown’s source material. Paired with innovations from Dreamworks animation to allow artists to apply a hand-painted style in three dimensions, every gorgeous frame feels fully alive. There’s a (yes) wildness to the environments and creatures, nothing’s cartoonishly oversmoothed, nor is there an uncanny valley of realism. The effect is astonishing: all of the creatures seem to have bounded, fully formed, from a cherished illustrated storybook.
With that said, by aiming for an audience of kids, there’s necessarily a degree to which the plot itself isn’t the most sophisticated. The first act culminating in drama of whether Brightbill will be ready to migrate with the other geese is by far the most successful and richly realized. The rest of the movie features a feel-good episode of how the island’s menagerie of predators, prey, and bickering creatures weather a long cold winter. The final episode, concerning Roz’s place in the larger world feels pulled from an entirely different franchise as it brings the most danger and action to what had been a very tranquil setting.
But even with these limitations in storytelling, the movie brings tremendous heart to its themes of motherhood, found families, cooperation, and discovering one’s purpose. Accompanied by an evocative score by Kris Bowers, it pushes all the right emotional buttons without being cloying. The voice performances — which also include Bill Nighy as an elder goose, Mark Hamill as a grumpy bear, Matt Berry as a hilarious beaver, and Ving Rhames as an inspirational falcon — were so engaging, the art so evocative, and the story so pure, resistance to the tears welling in my eyes for most of its life-affirming runtime was futile.
The Wild Robot had its World premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It arrives in theaters on September 20th, where you should see it at Pacific Science Center IMAX if you can.
Image courtesy DreamWorks & TIFF.