The Wild Robot (2024)

Score: 5 / 5

One of the most beautiful animated movies yet made is also one of the most spiritually satisfying. The Wild Robot, released along with the news that DreamWorks is downsizing and beginning to outsource its artists, feels like the ending of an era on the highest note possible. Partial as this reviewer is to Disney animation, occasionally a film from another studio will capture my attention and my heart: Sony/Marvel's Across the Spider-verse, Toho's Your Name, or Laika's Kubo and the Two Strings come immediately to mind, though there are many more. I haven't cared much about releases from DreamWorks since they released 2D masterpieces like The Prince of Egypt, The Road To El Dorado, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas.

But The Wild Robot slows things down and allows you to soak in its transcendent spectacle. Every image sparkles with knowing color grading, endlessly detailed minutiae, and ever deeper... well, depth. Watching it on the largest screen possible is akin to staring at a nature documentary about a coral reef, bursting with authentic, earned life even as it dazzles you with its own splendor. Like a living painting, it breathes life in a strange, somewhat indescribable way. In fact, my only gripe about the film is that, after it's over and you've come back down to earth, you quickly remember how flat and silly most other animation is by comparison. You could pause it at any moment and frame the image on your wall. Hell, you could watch it without sound and still be moved to tears.

Not that I recommend that. Its sound design is exquisite, and its voice acting even more so. Lupita Nyong'o voices the title character, Roz, a robot who crash-lands onto an island wilderness, seemingly in the Pacific northwest. Programmed to assist any human in every conceivable way, she hunts for a master with determination and fervor: encountering only woodland animals, she scares and upsets all of them in increasingly hilarious ways until she finally sits down and simply absorbs the world around her. Eventually coming to, she surprises the animals by having learned their language. Now the only thing stopping her from fulfilling her mandate is her generally off-putting insistence on assistance. After all, not everyone wants to be helped.

Apart from her silly and heartwarming encounters with a local opossum (Catherine O'Hara) and her children, a surly grizzly bear (Mark Hamill), beaver (Matt Berry) and fox Fink (Pedro Pascal), who becomes her most unexpected ally, Roz befriends all the critters on the island while also learning that nature isn't always nice to even its hardiest denizens. In fact, one of the things I loved most about this film was how unafraid of facing death it is; death isn't always welcome in children's fiction, but the best works never shy from it. The Wild Robot knows its audience deserves unvarnished truths about life and death, growing up and losing innocence and family and friends, and about our cultural losses of innocence when it comes to the ways humans are negatively impacting the environment. 

Before you get up in arms about politics infecting kids' media, I'll derail your tirade by noting that there is very little explicit ecocriticism here, relegated as it is to much later plot developments involving a deadly winter storm, a difficult migration south, and the reason robots this advanced exist on Earth at all (spoiler alert: it feels like early steps that might lead to the horrific state of affairs in the likes of WALL-E). Thankfully, that's not the only progressive element to this nuanced, endlessly layered story. Apart from the subtle issues of immigration, differently-abled communities, and linguistic social barriers, the film leans heavily -- that is, as a primary thematic element -- on found families and the crucial, universal need for friendships of unusual, surprising dynamics. Demonstrated integrity, consistency, and kindness are the currency of the day, and this movie champions community-building in every scene.

To describe the plot proper is not to spoil this film, but I won't summarize anything else here. Roz's relationship with her surrogate child, a gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor), is born in the most horrific tragedy, cultivated in the joys and trials of childhood, forged in the treacherous crucible of adolescence, and reaches the kind of spiritual climax that can only be described as epic in the most classical sense. He's a runt, she's a freak, and they know instinctively that they need each other to survive; they learn to want each other to survive. And if you think I'm not tearing up as I write this....

Incandescently perfect as this film is for its entire runtime, nothing prepared me for the emotional wallops of its climax, which also includes apocalyptic disaster, invasion of highly advanced predators, and the threat of annihilation on multiple fronts, or how Roz as one of the most archetypal stock characters -- the protecting, providing mother, and a stoic robot at that -- goes on the most empowering and disturbing developmental arc I've seen from an animated character in my life. 

A film for kids about hot topics like climate change, immigration, disability, and broken families could so easily have been just that, flat and obvious, churned out of a major studio known for (let's be honest) a lot of grotesquely rendered, ideologically insipid movies for a reliable profit and then forgotten by the next year. But this movie, on literally every level of production, was clearly a labor of love. It's evidenced in every sense we as humans possess, and you can even feel it somewhere further inside, so deep it can only be proof we have a soul.

Overdramatic? I don't think so. Watch and see for yourself.