At first glance, The Wild Robot, a new movie from DreamWorks Animation (and one of the studio’s last in-house productions), seems to target the voguish cultural anxiety over sentient, talking computers – technology designed, to borrow the dubious promises of companies like OpenAI, to seem more and more like a human. The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat affect of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her.
For The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) performs a sly, absorbing and extremely effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot – the more its programming trains on new input, to use the parlance of generative AI – the more it underscores the deep, inarticulable and sacred wells of human feelings, the exact things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. That this film, based on the book series by Peter Brown, does so while also being a highly enjoyable and lusciously detailed story about a misfit, amid a community of charismatic woodland creatures, makes it one of the best animated films of the year, rightfully considered the frontrunner for an Oscar.
Rozzum Unit 7134 – Roz, as she eventually becomes known – is greeted with understandable suspicion by the furry inhabitants of the island. Transformer-like, with spindly metal arms, veins of neon lighting and large, easily anthropomorphized screen eyes, Roz neither looks nor thinks like a living thing. Her logic is pure binary – execute task, then return to manufacturer, no failure allowed – successfully played for laughs and sympathy in the cutthroat forest food chain. Devoid of a clear purpose and thwarted in her return by the natural world’s chaos, she stumbles into the possession and care of something she does not understand: a lone goose egg, the rest of the family crushed beneath her.
As a household assistant device, Roz has no conception of caretaking (or of geese), but she is very good at the task at hand, even if that task is rescuing the egg from wily fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) – an early action highlight in a film with several impressive, invigorating wordless sequences. When the gosling hatches and, by the laws of nature, identifies the first face it sees as its mother, a world-weary possum (standout Catherine O’Hara) drily points out that Roz has a new mission now: parenting. Or more specifically, in this hard-edged yet never harsh natural world (the possum remarks that she’s a mother of seven, until a chomping sound amends that to six), Roz must teach the gosling, a runt named Brightbill (Kit Connor), to swim and fly by the fall, in order for him to endure the flight south and survive the winter.
The path forward is clear, the stakes high yet never too overwhelming for young viewers, but the way The Wild Robot gets there is a surprising emotional journey that launches it into the pantheon of elite animated films. All elements are working here, from the performances – a collection of woodland creatures voiced by Bill Nighy, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames – to clearly defined characters to increasingly grand stakes, as Roz’s manufacturer, suspicious of her emotive adaptations, sends another robot (Stephanie Hsu) to retrieve her. The animation style, as Roz begins to not only recognize and understand yet treasure feelings, is appropriately prismatic and sweeping – part photorealism (brushtroke precision for pine needles or otters’ fur) and part impressionism, a world that sublimely toggles between the naturalistic and the surreal. (Roz’s gait, as she takes on the different movements of the forest creatures, is particularly striking.)
Though Pascal, as the sardonic straight man to Roz’s 1s and 0s and corporate cheeriness, is the easy charmer, Nyong’o delivers the film’s essential voice acting, her performance shifting as Roz begins to understand emotions, experiencing a relatable bafflement at one’s own strange attachments. It’s a deft and tricky performance that pays off in the film’s slightly rushed final section, which ups the ante to near existential levels as (off-screen) humans send more robots to retrieve Roz, with devastating, if quickly passing, results for the ecosystem we have come to love.
Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one’s throat. And it delivers on the promise of a truly great animated feature: to express universal truths – love that defies logic, feelings that come from places we don’t understand, the bittersweet bargain of letting someone go so they can flourish – through the inorganic. If only all robot stories had this grand of a humanist vision.
The Wild Robot is out in Australian cinemas on 12 September, US on 27 September and in the UK on 18 October
