I was not looking forward to this one.
A year ago — almost to the day — news came down that Dreamworks Animation would be hollowed out, and the bulk of its work would be outsourced to other studios. While the brand name would continue — complete with a doomed attempt at resuscitating the Shrek franchise — the paradigm that brought us such all-time classic trilogies as Kung Fu Panda and How To Train Your Dragon is no more. In fact, the underwhelming and unnecessary Kung Fu Panda 4 earlier this year strongly implied that the new era of watered-down soulless cash grabs had already begun.
The Wild Robot was made and marketed as the last film in the pre-restructuring pipeline, the last hurrah of the old guard. Appropriately, the trailers were underwhelming, long on cliches and thin on anything of substance. In hindsight, it makes sense that the Comcast overlords wouldn’t waste too much money or effort promoting the last movie of a dying studio. Especially since their precious Illumination crap tends to bring in far more money with much less effort.
But then… justice. Sweet justice from beyond the grave. Because those same laid-off workers from a murdered studio created a movie that brought in a solid box office take, and stellar critical ravings.
Believe the hype, folks. This movie is a freaking miracle of miracles.
The premise begins in the distant future, with the Rozzum line of helper robots from Universal Dynamics. For the uninitiated, this is a clear reference to “Rossum’s Universal Robots” by Karel Capek, the Russian play that literally invented the word “robot”. And the play recently entered the public domain, so get familiar with it if you’re not already.
Anyway, our story begins shortly after a shipment of Rozzum units was lost at sea. And only one of those units — Rozzum-7134, aka “Rozz”, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o — washed up intact on what has to be the last island of untamed wilderness left on the planet. Rozz gets activated and we’re off to the races.
Such a basic premise, but there’s so much here to unpack. I barely know where to start.
From the outset, Rozz is clearly established to be a corporate drone. She’s designed to be an unfeeling and disposable appliance, built to perform and complete an assigned task to the satisfaction of the paying customer and the corporate overlords. And she’s activated in a strange place where neither the customer nor the corporation are accounted for.
Rozz only wants to be helpful. She is obsessively compelled to help people, because that’s what she was specifically and solely built to do. And she’s surrounded by wild animals who are only out for themselves, to the point where “help” is a foreign concept. They want nothing to do with this weird metallic monster who’s only fumbling around and causing inadvertent trouble because she’s in unfamiliar surroundings.
The filmmakers are abundantly clear in portraying Rozz as a soulless corporate drone. Yet they also made her overflowing with personality and deeply sympathetic. Literally from start to finish, through the entirety of her development arc, this disposable mass-produced machine is innately sympathetic. That should not be possible, and it sure as hell shouldn’t look this easy.
Things kick into a higher gear after Rozz uses her translation software and learning algorithms to translate the animals’ speech. As a conceit for a film with talking animals, that’s goddamn brilliant on its own. But then we get the introduction of Brightbill (Kit Connor), a goose hatchling who imprints onto Rozz. So the good news is that Rozz finally has someone in need of assistance and she has a task to complete. The bad news is that her task — i.e. serving as mother to this goose who needs to learn how to forage and swim and fly — is impossible within the harsh limits of Rozz’s programming.
Thus we have a goose who’s brought up as a misfit because he was raised by a monstrous robot. At the same time, Rozz has to improvise and alter her own programming (all for the purpose of completing her task, remember) to the point where she probably wouldn’t be welcome among her fellow robots either.
And while all of this is going on, we’ve got Fink (Pedro Pascal), a mischievous fox who agrees to help Rozz and Brightbill. At first, he does this in the interest of his own immediate needs for food and shelter. But as the film progresses, we watch him become more altruistic in his own sardonic way. Such a basic development arc, but damned if the filmmakers don’t sell it in a funny and sincere way.
There are so many fascinating conflicts going on here. Nature versus nurture. Society versus wilderness. Compassion and cooperation versus fear and self-preservation. Rozz was made for an environment where everything is smooth and safe and plotted to the last detail, and she learns to survive in a place where nothing is safe or predictable. Put simply, she and the animals have a lot to learn from each other.
Hell, that’s not even getting started on the film’s nuanced and compelling examination of kindness as a survival mechanism. To say nothing of how the film depicts “survival of the fittest” mentality with a brutally honest yet tasteful examination of death.
There is so much thematically going on here, and the plotting dovetails them all beautifully. Sure, this is all threadbare tried-and-true stuff for kids’ cinema, but this is at least three hours’ worth of thematic material crammed into 100 minutes. And it’s all done with such keen efficiency and profound depth that it totally succeeds beyond all comprehension.
Literally everything about this movie is firing on all cylinders. The development arcs are elegant and deeply satisfying. The characters are accessible archetypes, but they still grow in new and compelling ways. The cast is comprised of such talent as Nyong’o, Pascal, Bill Nighy, Catherine O’Hara, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, and Mark Fucking Hamill, a pitch-perfect blend of star power and superlative voice acting talent.
The editing brings us some fantastic montages. The design has this beautiful oil painting aesthetic. The score is powerful. The tie-in single is stellar. The lighting is dynamic. The animation is smooth and expressive. Gentle readers, I’m trying as hard as I can to find anything wrong with this movie, anything that might’ve been improved on, and I’m coming up entirely empty.
The only minor flaws are with a couple of potential deus ex machinas in the climax. And even then, the lapses in internal logic are cleverly backed up with just enough deniability to suspend disbelief. Moreover, the film had earned so much goodwill by that point, I would feel terrible with myself for knocking it.
Seriously, this movie is good enough that I could let it get away with a death fake-out. I can’t remember the last time a movie did a death fake-out so well that I would let the filmmakers get away with it scot-free.
The Wild Robot is a masterpiece. Dead to rights, full stop. I’m honestly grateful that we’re probably never getting a sequel because this is absolutely perfect as it is, and that’s not a word I use lightly on this blog. This movie is beyond my ability to critique, it’s that damn good. This is literally “off-the-scale” good.
It’s funny, it’s heartwarming, it’s tearjerking, it’s exciting, it’s thought-provoking… the film accomplishes everything it sets out to do and then some. I could probably watch this movie another two or three times and still find some new message or idea to unpack. It’s astounding how much the filmmakers were able to pack into such a short runtime. It’s nothing short miraculous that these filmmakers could do so much with so little.
This is can’t-miss material, folks. See it immediately.