With two published sequels ready and waiting, DreamWorks Animation has a franchise in the works with The Wild Robot, a big success in its first weekend. It’s good, too.
Based on the first of three books by writer-illustrator Peter Brown, the feature runs on the same spirit of well-paced adventure and strategic shifts in mood found in the first How to Train Your Dragon, or in a more openly comic vein, the first Kung Fu Panda.
At the story’s centre, there’s a sweetly determined helper robot designated Rozzum Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o), washed ashore on what appears to be an island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The time is the near future but things on the island remain as they ever were: predators vs. prey, some living, some dying, cyclical weather extremes and migrations overhead. Roz has been programmed to complete tasks determined by its owner, only there is no owner here, only survival and wisecracking cliques among the various species.
Meanwhile Roz, whose features include instant physical mimicry, gives machine learning and generative AI a good name, though later developments in The Wild Robot suggest an inevitable rise of the machines, potentially soul-killing and humanity-optional.
A tragic accident, glancingly and deftly depicted, sets the narrative course. With its living relatives gone, a newly hatched gosling, later named Brightbill (Kit Connor), becomes the charge of Roz. The coolly perplexed but resourceful robot gets some help from Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal), described at one point as a local goose expert, though it’s primarily in a gustatory way. Roz’s hard-wired need to succeed focuses on feeding and caring for this orphaned bird, teaching Brightbill to swim and, when the weather turns chilly, to join the great migration.
"I do not have the programming to be a mother," she says at one point. This is The Wild Robot’s sweet spot. Every current, former or potential parent in the audience can recognise what this fledgling parental unit is going through.
Many aspects of director and co-writer Chris Sanders’ adaptation hold different keys to the relative success of the whole. There’s enough motivated story, helped by that story’s shift from island to utopian urban setting, to sustain 100 minutes easily, even through the final third.
The voice work’s unassumingly choice, led by Lupita Nyong’o as Roz. She finds carefully delineated gradations between factory-fresh, insistently upbeat impersonality and the wiser being we see learning to feel before our eyes. Pedro Pascal (as the fox) make a fine, artful dodger of a tough guy who’s hurting inside.
And the supporting ranks include Catherine O’Hara (Pinktail, overworked motherhood incarnate, in possum form) and Bill Nighy, in retrospect the optimal choice to voice a long-necked goose named, of course, Longneck.
Recently making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Wild Robot already has been pumped up into the contradictory instant classic stratosphere. I understand the enthusiasm, or most of it, I guess, especially given the mellow, less photorealistic, more painterly visual landscapes, and Sanders’ assured tear-duct massage technique.
If it’s unfortunate the animation doesn’t retaining more than a trace of the woodcut simplicity and charm of Peter Brown’s book drawings, well, that was unlikely to get by at this particular studio. The Roz robot design itself, simple and effective enough, lacks a special element of surprise, instead recalling elements of Wall-E (more in the character situation than the visualisation) to Big Hero 6 to the swift-moving BB-8 introduced in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Also, the first 20 or 30 minutes of The Wild Robot threatens to settle for a lesser DreamWorks sprint through calamities. But just in time, it calms down and finds the rhythmic change-ups crucial to this tale.
Kindness, as Fink notes early on, is not a survival skill. He’s basing his worldview on the only, lonely life he has known. Roz learns and teaches otherwise, and that sounds pretty good right about now. – Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service
Summary:
An instant classic
