Dreamworks needs to quit playing games with my heart. When they’re on, they make the best of the best films. Yet, some of their movies specifically targeted towards younger audiences, land with a thud. I’ll never be able to say enough about the perfect How To Train Your Dragon trilogy and the surprisingly deep Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. So, everything I saw leading up to the release of The Wild Robot showed that kind of storytelling and animation potential. It’s long been one of my most anticipated movies of the year, but does it hold up to the hype I created for myself?
After a shipwreck, an intelligent robot called Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is stranded on an uninhabited island. She quickly wants to return back to her factory, but literally stumbles into being a pivotal figure for a baby goose. While Roz is built to serve all life, she is not programmed to care for or raise a child. She gets some helpful hints from a wily fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) in an attempt to keep this young goose alive.
Chris Sanders directs. He has previously directed How to Train Your Dragon, and Lilo & Stitch. With The Wild Robot, he has managed to make yet another movie that appeals to both children and adults. In this 1 hour 41 minute movie, he balances a stacked cast of voice actors with Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, and Matt Berry. Even with several characters, I still cared for and remembered each one after the movie ended.
The instantly notable element within The Wild Robot is the near impeccable animation and the different mediums the film uses to show its world. Roz and the forest look crisp and often photo-realistic, the animals are animated in an exaggerated cartoony way, but it gives them personality and life. The landscapes composed of the mountains, skies, and moss are given a paintbrush effect as seen in The Last Wish. My eyes were never tired of soaking in poster-worthy images throughout the movie. However, the humans shown in the movie seem to have a simple style. Their look seems to be pulled from CG movies made over 15 years ago.
The second element that swept me away was the gorgeous score. Composer Kris Bowers has done something wonderful here. There’s so much of this experience that is dialogue-free, and the sound design is able to fill in the blanks. There are big sweeping orchestrations that punctuate the intense moments, but also more subtle music cues that sneaked up on me, knowing just how to pull the right heart strings. This is a score that I’ll be listening to for fun.
The story of The Wild Robot is adapted from a book by Peter Brown, and is simple on its face. The way the script flows could almost feel formulaic. Yet, it’s rife with themes, emotion, and most of all – heart. Even thinking about it now, I can recall resonant themes of parenthood, letting go, finding your place, unity under duress, personal goals and sacrifice. These themes weave themselves seamlessly throughout the script and bring magic to the experience.
I brought my daughter to this movie and I’m quite sure we enjoyed the movie differently. While she enjoyed the story of the young goose achieving his potential, I was choking up thinking of what it’s like to be a parent and lose touch with children more and more as they grow. I knew I’d get emotional somewhere near the end of the movie, but was caught off guard as a beautiful moment took place halfway through.
The Wild Robot is overall delightful. Be warned, it may inspire a few happy tears, but also a few earned laughs as well. It seems ridiculous that a movie about a AWOL robot living among forest creatures would feel relevant to me, but here we are. This is easily my favorite animated film of the year and has the potential to be one of the year’s best films. B+
Comments are closed.