The Incomplete Guide to The Wild Robot
In which a robot soars in our hearts
THE WILD ROBOT
I know I’m bandying about the phrase ‘straight into the top five of the year’ with a bit of abandon sometimes on this substack, but Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot should easily enter anyone’s best of the year in cinema list.
The Wild Robot concerns a robot accidentally being shipped to an island in the middle of the ocean, inhabited by all manner of animals from the fairytale world. Roz, the robot that accidentally gets activated, is capable of all sorts, with arms and legs that stretch and flexibly move in all manor of directions, and is obsessed with completing tasks. Roz, who I could refer to as it, or she, but will be using she to match Lupita N’Yongo’s marvellous voice performance, is desperate for tasks. After learning to translate the animals’ noises into words, she learns that they think she’s a monster, a fact only made worse by her accidental destruction of a bird’s nest. She takes it upon herself to raise the resulting orphan goose.
Based on Peter Brown's 2016 novel, and helmed by Chris Sanders, whose previous credits boast co-writing Lilo and Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, The Wild Robot’s themes of an unusual family and an embrace of nature are inevitable upon reflection of the creative forces behind it. Lilo and Stitch is about a family unit coming into existence against odds and conventional (nuclear) family tropes, and How To Train Your Dragon is about a family reconnecting when they learn to communicate about their shared issues better. This is about both of those things and about an unconventional family forming when they become isolated from the rest of the world.
It is utterly charming and full of fantastic performances all around, and I think better for it because the actors are actually performing and don’t just sound like themselves. Pedro Pascal is Think, a fox lacking status in the world, Bill Nighy is Longneck, a wonderful Obi-Wan-esque mentor goose,, and Catherine O’Hara is Pinktail, the struggling skunk mother. Also in the film are delightful appearances from Matt Berry and Mark Hamill. It’s a solid cast, and no one sounds phoned in or like they’re just doing themselves, these are well-rounded and fun characters to spend time with.
The heart of the film is Roz’s relationship with her orphaned gosling, Brightbill, performed with a believable earnest Connor Kit (Heartstopper, His Dark Materials). Roz has three tasks; feed him, help him swim, and help him fly. These learning curves don’t form the whole film, but merely act as a direction for the first two acts, putting one of the most emotional and tear-jerking scenes right in the middle of the film. Just when it punches you in the gut with an emotional climax, you realise you’re barely halfway through this journey. The story evolves and progresses with a surprising and epic scale from here.
The whole thing is a wonderful dream to look at. Rather than trying to ape the Comic-Book-in-3D appearance that so many films have aimed for to ride Into the Spider-Verse’s coattails, this computer animation has a unique watercolour effect, and the result is somewhere between Studio Ghibli and the incredible realism achieved in some of Disney and Pixar’s recent output like Toy Story 4 and The Lion King. It’s the most beautiful and innovative animation of the year, it’s almost insulting to compare it to those, but notably, it’s not trying to be like any one particular other film, it just absorbs influences and remixes them into a thing of beauty. The island has every environment you need from lush jungles and swamps to snowy hellscapes that when it comes under threat in the third act, the island is as much a character that you want to defend as any of the animals.
The Wild Robot is an absolute masterpiece. No other animation this year deserves to win Best Animated Picture, and its early box office victory (at time of writing, $233m worldwide) suggests that Dreamworks has a popular hit on its hands. When I left the cinema and finished crying with every emotion on offer, I just exhaled, in awe.
The Wild Robot is in cinemas now.