Director/Screenplay – Chris Sanders, Based on the Book The Wild Robot (2016) by Peter Brown, Producer – Jeff Hermann, Music – Kris Bowers, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jeff Budsberg, Animation Supervisors – Drew Adams, Michael Amos, Willy Harber, Fabio Lignini, Dan Wagner & Onur Yeldan, Production Design – Raymond Zibach. Production Company – DreamWorks Animation.
Voices
Lupita Nyong’o (Rozzum Unit 7134 ‘Roz’), Pedro Pascal (Fink), Kit Connor (Brightbill), Boone Storm (Baby Brightbill), Catherine O’Hara (Pinktail), Bill Nighy (Longneck), Matt Berry (Paddler), Stephanie Hsu (Vantra), Ving Rhames (Thunderbolt), Mark Hamill (Thorn)
Plot
A robot Rozzum Unit 7134 activates on an island. The robot tries to set about offering its services to the animals and wildlife but they all flee in fear or try to steal its parts. The robot powers down to absorb and learn the animal languages. While being pursued by a bear, the robot accidentally crushes and kills the nest of a family of geese. The single remaining egg is snatched by the fox Fink but the robot retrieves the egg and then watches it hatch into a gosling. Fink tells Unit 7134 how the gosling has imprinted itself on it and that 7134’s mission is now to teach the gosling to swim and fly before the migration season. To raise the gosling, which they name Brightbill, 7134 or Roz has to trust Fink and bring together the other animals of the island.
Like most other animation studios, DreamWorks’ output in the late 2010s/2020s has become depressingly formulaic – assorted Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon and Trolls sequels, and other follow-ups such as The Croods: New Age (2020), The Boss Baby: Family Business (2021), Spirit Untamed (2021) and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) – and original works that I just couldn’t drum up the inspiration to write up such as Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017) and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023). It had become such that I had written DreamWorks off as part of my waning interest in most modern theatrical animation, which has become sequel focused and driven by conveyor belt formula. On the other hand, The Wild Robot proves a considerable surprise.
Chris Sanders was a director who started work at Disney – he was production designer on The Lion King (1994) – and then made his directorial debut in partnership with Dean DeBlois on Lilo & Stitch (2002). Sanders and DeBlois moved to DreamWorks for How to Train Your Dragon and Sanders then co-directed The Croods. He made his live-action and solo directorial debut with The Call of the Wild (2020).
Roz holding Brightbill the goslingRoz and Fink the fox
Here Sanders adapts a 2016 children’s book by US writer/illustrator Peter Brown. The book was a best-seller and Brown has written two sequels The Wild Robot Escapes (2017) and The Wild Robot Protects (2023). I immediately warmed to Brown in his creating a nod to SF history and naming his robot series Rozzum, a direct reference to Rossum’s Universal Robots in Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1921), the play that introduced the word ‘robot’ to the world.
The Wild Robot begins winning you over from the moment it opens in the scenes with Roz stumbling across the island trying to offer its services to animals with they fleeing, pursuing the robot or even trying to steal its parts. The quality of the animation and backgrounds is unobtrusively superlative. The film has a trio of winning characterisations at the centre of it – the blank robot trying to do its duty; the wily and untrustworthy fox that you know has a redeemable heart of gold; and the tiny orphan gosling with an adorably squeaky voice that tugs all the heartstrings it can. The contrast of small anthropomorphic creatures with a robotic creature whose arc is the well-defined one of being a blank innocent in all ways as we see it slowly gaining a sense of family and defining its own purpose is an exceedingly strong one.
Chris Sanders goes through the film with hardly a step wrong. This is the sort of film that Pixar used to do superbly in their heyday from 1995 to 2010 – the period that produced everything from Toy Story (1995), Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Finding Nemo (2003) through to Wall-E (2008) and Up (2009) – before the 2010s and 2020s fell into sequelitis and less memorable works. One thought that this sort of animated film that paid all the care and attention to its characters, emotions and artistry had largely vanished in favour of tedious sequel-making involving the same characters going through minimal changes – look no further that DreamWorks’ own Kung Fu Panda films – but Chris Sanders proves me wrong.
The only part that didn’t quite settle with me is the portrayal of the animals. We start off with the film showing us their natural environment where they are predators and prey. By contrast, the latter half of the film shows the entire island coming together and setting their traditional predatory natures aside. All of which is fine and makes for a great emotional upsurge at seeing the group come together as one big family. On the other hand, the script also has Roz disrupt the animals’ natural hibernation season and shelter them all together in the big hut. This does lead to the logical question – if the animals are awake instead of asleep, then they are going to be getting hungry and wanting to be fed. Their natural source of food is each other – it is hard to believe that Roz, who has powered down, can just let them all stay in close proximity and quietly starve as opposed to do the natural thing and attack one another.
