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Former Disney animator Chris Sanders’s family robot adventure puts his former employer to shame.
The Wild Robot
Director: Chris Sanders • Writer: Chris Sanders, based on the book by Peter Brown
Starring [English]: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Matt Berry, Catherine O’Hara, Stephanie Hsu
USA • 1hr 42mins
Opens Hong Kong Oct 1 • I
Grade: A
That’s two for two now. After last year’s Robot Dreams knocked it out of the damn park in nailing art, storytelling and theme in one animated film, along comes The Wild Robot to reaffirm my faith in robots as the basis for witty, nuanced, genuine all-ages entertainment. Quite notably DreamWorks’ 30th anniversary release, it’s safe to say The Wild Robot finally lives up to the vindictive potential of the upstart studio’s animation division. Yes, yes, everyone loves Shrek, a groundbreaker in its way (even if the thrill is gone), and the How to Train Your Dragon franchise earned decent kudos (enough to justify a dreaded “live action” remake). But The Croods, The Boss Baby and Trolls don’t really rival the best of Pixar – or even classic Disney – for true greatness. Director Chris Sanders cut his teeth, ironically, with Disney, creating the legendary Stitch from 2002’s Lilo & Stitch, and is the brains behind HtTYD, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise he’s in charge here, exerting a retro philosophy on TWR that flies in the face of the seemingly entrenched trend to animation that looks nothing like animation (the forthcoming Mufasa could be another hot mess of soulless tech). Also unsurprising, Sanders has claimed his (and his artists) inspiration for TWR’s visuals is old school 2D Disney and Studio Ghibli’s hand drawn work. Good call, because the end result here is a gorgeously rendered, ideal blend of 2D and 3D images that are ultra-vivid, painterly and wildly (see what I did there?) creative. It’s about a futuristic robot that literally talks to the animals. This doesn’t need to be photorealistic, and it’s all the better for it. In fact it’s one of the year’s best.
Canada geese are still gross
At its core, TWR is a story about parenthood, belonging and community (and ever so delicately climate change and technology’s relationship to nature), and it begins when consumer tech manufacturer Universal Dynamics’ ROZZUM7134 crashes on an island somewhere far, far away from its intended delivery destination. The ROZZUM7134 wakes up and proceeds to carry out its programming and complete assigned tasks to make life better. Easier said than done, when the wildlife on the island is initially hostile, making it impossible for the ROZZUM7134 to work. The lost robot is finally compelled to re-programme itself when an accident destroys a nest, leaving one unhatched egg on its own. When it emerges, the ROZZUM7134 renames itself Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), and decides its task is to teach the runt Canada goose Roz names Brightbill (Kit Connor), to swim, fly and migrate south for the winter with the rest of the flock.
Also in the forest are Roz’s first ally, a loner fox called Fink (Pedro Pascal) who Roz prevents from eating Brightbill as an egg, and the opossum Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), who winds up giving advice on the ups, downs, joys and stresses (“Crushing obligation!”) of motherhood. The final piece of the puzzle is Longneck (Bill Nighy), an older, wiser, more authoritative goose who accepts Brightbill when no one else will – and who plants the seeds of connection that bring the forest dwellers together, first when the coldest, snowiest winter anyone has ever known settles in, and later when Universal Dynamics comes looking for its property and Bambi-fies the island.
Roz, Brightbill and Fink form the central family of The Wild Robot, a found family that never stops searching for its place in the world despite irrational fear from neighbours. Roz is a “monster”, Brightbill is a runt told by the other geese he’ll never be “one of us,” and Fink is a loner who’s caught in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. No one likes him, so he doesn’t like them. They’re not alone as outsiders: Paddler is a cranky beaver (Matt Berry, TV series What We Do in the Shadows) who’s recycled the laughter directed at him for his ambition to fell the forest’s largest tree into a sarcastic shield, and Thorn the grizzly (an unrecognisable Mark Hamill) is widely treated like the apex predator he might be and given a wide berth.
This is based on a kids’ book, so it’s guaranteed to end happily and roll in all the expected emotional beats. And it does, but Sanders never condescends or makes the easy choice en route to that inevitability, and so for a movie with zero human characters it’s incredibly, authentically human in every gorgeous brushstroke and imaginative composition. The humour woven into the story is rooted in the characters and their personalities, motivations and insecurities – not lazy pop culture references – relayed in stellar voice performances. Nyong’o delivers a masterclass in balancing formal iciness with evolving sentiment, and three seasons of The Mandalorian have added considerable emotional power to Pascal’s vocals. They’re almost upstaged by Berry’s effortless wounded snark, and Stephanie Hsu as the riotously passive-aggressive, maddeningly chipper retrieval bot VONTRA.
Brown wrote a trilogy (there’s also The Wild Robot Escapes and The Wild Robot Protects) so given The Wild Robot’s relatively modest budget (US$75 million) and massive critical buzz we can pretty much be assured the other two books will be turned out to build a fully functioning franchise – assuming the box office returns are there (fingers crossed). If all goes well, let’s just hope DreamWorks’ braintrust keeps the purse strings tight lest it inspire a case of sequelitis.