The Wild Robot (2024)

The last third stumbles, I think, in reaching for even larger themes while settling for a standard Hollywood heroes-vs.-villains action finale—but, thankfully, none of this detracts from what the film has already achieved. If the movie creaks a bit as it transitions from a winsome tale of an awkward mother of an awkward child learning to give everything she has to see her child succeed and find acceptance to some kind of cautionary parable about solidarity in the face of, like, predatory Big Tech capitalism or whatever, at least what Sanders does in the first two-thirds doesn’t need anything else.

Though the broad outlines of the plot appear to come from the source material (the first of a series of children’s books by Peter Brown, unread by me), The Wild Robot’s plot resonates strikingly with Lilo & Stitch. An artificial being crash-lands on an island where it is unable to carry out its programming: programming it ultimately transcends, finding its own purpose by learning to love. In the end, the outside world of the creature’s origins comes to collect it, leading to the climactic conflict.

Stitch was a diminutive monster marooned on a Hawaiian island with no large cities on which he might vent his destructive impulses. The Wild Robot stars Lupita Nyong’o as ROZZUM Unit 7134, one of a line of mass-produced personal-service robots programmed to complete tasks for customers. When a delivery flight crash-lands on an uninhabited island, 7134—or Roz, as she’ll come to be called—flails about among the island’s wildlife trying to identify a customer and acquire a task.

In a daring but successful echo of (I want to say homage to) the prologue of Finding Nemo, Roz falls on a nest of goose eggs, accidentally killing the mother and smashing most of the eggs—but the bot’s infrared scanners can see the embryonic life in the one intact egg. Roz comes to find her task in ensuring that the surviving gosling is fed and learns to swim and to fly by fall.

In the book, Roz (who learns animal language!) is advised by a sympathetic goose, but the movie pairs her with a snarky fox called Fink (voiced by Pedro Pascal). At first this looks like an Ice Age set-up, with Fink in the predatory Diego the saber-tooth role waiting for his chance to snatch the vulnerable youngster—called Brightbill, voiced by Kit Connor—from its powerful protector’s grasp. But Fink’s motives and character are ultimately more interesting than that, and this oddball family becomes surprisingly endearing.

Visually, The Wild Robot is an absolute revelation; I can’t recall the last non-Spider-Verse Hollywood animated movie I found so mesmerizing just to look at. American computer animation has been in a rut for a long time, with the plastic 3D look pioneered by Disney/Pixar dominating everything. Only animation wizards Phil Lord and Chris Miller, producers of the Spider-Verse movies as well as The Mitchells vs. the Machines, have seemed interested in doing anything new. Recent DreamWorks Animation projects like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Bad Guys did make efforts at a more illustrative 2D style, but The Wild Robot takes this impulse to unprecedented artistic heights. At times the painterly style, with the natural-world setting, recalls the likes of Bambi (never more so than in the impressionistic lighting of a forest-fire sequence) and Miyazaki.

The voice cast is outstanding. Nyong’o, who made an outsize impact in a smaller maternal role as Mowgli’s wolf mother in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, beautifully modulates the many stages of Roz’s journey from customer service to wild robot mom. Connor’s ingenousness as Brightbill is essential, obviously, but Pascal plays Fink with an unexpected sincerity that shifts the tone of the whole movie. Among solid smaller performances including Catherine O’Hara (a stoically ironic mother opossum), Ving Rhames (a dignified falcon), and Mark Hamill (a choleric grizzly bear), Bill Nighy is especially invaluable as a wise and sympathetic patriarchal goose who provides a much-needed counterweight to the rejection that Brightbill faces from his peers.

Following the source material, The Wild Robot eventually becomes the story of how the corporation that manufactures ROZZUM robots comes to collect her, and here the movie makes, for me, a disappointing choice. Almost uniquely among Hollywood animation filmmakers today, Sanders and frequent collaborator Dean DeBlois (who executive produced) prefer to avoid hero-villain conflict. Both Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon involve imagining new social situations transcending conflict. (The same is true of Sanders’ The Croods, which I detest, but still.) Here, though, Roz’s manufacturers, a tech corporation called Universal Dynamics, are effectively militarized bad guys, and the climax is basically Return of the Jedi’s Battle of Endor with wild animals as Ewoks. Not that I’m against the idea of corporations as ruthless bad guys! Still, the tone and scale of the conflict in the last act struck me as unnecessary overkill in what had until then been a charmingly lowkey story.

None of this, though, touches the joys of the film’s first hour or so. Most centrally, The Wild Robot is about what parents sacrifice, emotionally and even physically, in the course of raising and launching children into an uncertain, sometimes (but not always) unforgiving world. (This theme is given early expression by O’Hara’s mother possum and her cheerfully morbid litter. The early appearance of a possum family was the first time I thought of Bambi.)

Unlike so many cartoons about conventional parents who want their quirky children to conform to accepted norms (e.g., Sanders’ own How to Train Your Dragon), The Wild Robot is about the anxiety of being a weird parent whose child’s social issues are inseparable from your own. It’s also about the joy of connecting with sympathetic mentors who can take your child, so to speak, under their wing and teach them things you can’t. It’s about the power of kindness to change the world. I’m still processing the fact that it’s real, that this movie exists.