Let me start with the plaudits: The Wild Robot is the most effectively emotional film since Inside Out. The Wild Robot will likely win the Oscar for Best Animated Picture. The Wild Robot is the Best DreamWorks film since How to Train Your Dragon.
All of those plaudits are true, and you’ll likely hear them a lot.
But here’s the bottom line: if you have kids, you will love watching this movie.
The Wild Robot is set on a future earth where humanoid robots called Rozzums produced by Universal Dynamics help serve the human population. A delivery of Rozzum robots crashes onto a remote island. One survives the crash and tries to serve the local wildlife the way it would have served a human master, but they’re frightened.
Our protagonist, Rozzum 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o), who soon goes by Roz, accidentally kills a goose and its eggs and decides that caring for the surviving egg is her task. Fink (Pedro Pascal), an opportunistic fox, decides it can get Roz to provide him food and shelter if he pretends to know how to raise a gosling. The Wild Robot follows these two as they try and raise the baby they name 0186, then Bright Bill after some goading from Fink.
The world of the film is starker than you might expect in a children’s movie. These are animals that eat each other, and death is a constant specter. But somehow, the film never feels dark. Yes, this world is hard, but the struggles are always worth it.
The movie is a regular concert of emotions. A seven-year-old I watched it with said in a single breath, “I laughed so much, it was so sad, I cried all along, it was happy.”
Computer animation has finally settled into a place where directors no longer feel the need to show off the peak of their technical capacity but rather choose the best approach to telling the story at hand. There’s a handcrafted, rough-hewn sense to the animation here that enhances the entire production.
Meanwhile Lupita Nyong’o, who voices Roz, does such an affecting job she is sure to reignite calls to add a Best Vocal Performance Oscar.
There is much to chew on here for families. The movie doesn’t feel like sci-fi, but like all good sci-fi it gives us a metaphor to look at important questions. The movie teaches that there is a part of us that is independent of our bodies that is important to our parenting, and the existence of that makes the film’s conclusion possible. The main theme of the movie is overcoming our “programming” or “instincts,” which is an important message for children to learn. And ultimately the characters solve their problems by building community and working together, a lesson we could all use more of.
Perhaps its most poignant message is about the importance of parenting. Parenting is hard and the film doesn’t shy away from that, but all too often, our pop culture becomes fixated on the hard, which has discouraged too many. The Wild Robot can be read as an extended argument of why parenting is so worth it. This will especially hit home for adopted and step-parents. The ten-year-old I watched it with reported, “There’s so much to think about.” And we spent the twenty-minute drive home discussing the movie’s themes.
That doesn’t mean that The Wild Robot is free from problems. On the artistic side, the film’s third act can feel a bit disjointed, and I wouldn’t blame someone if they felt it was a bit saccharine, though I didn’t. And while the pacing is good for most kids, those five and under probably won’t have the attention span for it. This is a family movie, and yet the parents are the main audience.
There are also some problematic messages that could be taken from it. It continues the long trend of films that deconstruct the idea of families. Here, they idealize a situation where the mother and father character have no relationship. And in a broader environment where many are redefining natural family bonds, the “overcome programming” theme can take on a sinister undertone.
But those possible messages are mostly a footnote here to a film that is overwhelmingly good in both its execution and its heart.
Four and a half out of five stars. The Wild Robot opens in theaters nationwide on September 27, 2024.
