Dreamworks Animation has build itself a pretty solid empire. The house that Shrek built has become quite the powerful force in animation over the last thirty years, releasing mostly profitable films that feature all-star casts and are meant to appeal to the whole family. Films like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon have spawned franchises that are comparable, and almost as beloved/emotionally devastating, as what audiences have come to expect from Pixar. The latest from director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), adapted from a book series by author Peter Brown, is a beautiful film about found family, heavy topics that will baffle and frighten your children, and what it means to truly love someone.
The Wild Robot opens with, well, a robot. Awakening on an island, the ROZZAM Unit 7134 quickly begins looking for a task to accomplish. She finds one after a significant amount of hijinks involving bears, racoons that are more like little chaos gremlins, and a accident that leads to a dead mother goose. Hatching the final egg from the nest she crashed into, “Roz” is tasked by a local opossum mother to raise the gosling by feeding it, teaching it to swim, and teaching it to fly in time for migration.
A simple setup, but Sanders’ film offers nothing simple in its delivery. The world this gosling is born into may be bright, forested, and teeming with life but the rest of the world that Roz comes from is a depressingly bleak nightmare of climate disaster, corporate greed, and humans clinging to leisure in their last gasp before extinction. Haunting images like San Diego’s Golden Gate Bridge underwater, a robot programmed to murder anything it sees, another robot programmed to be the worst middle manager you’ve ever seen, are all insanely upsetting to witness.
Luckily the film is gloriously animated. This beautiful “sort of sketched like a book but really CGI” style carries over from previous films like Puss-in-Boots: The Last Wish and The Bad Guys, continuing to develop further into something that feels like a storybook fable. Bright colors, frenetic antics, and endless romps through stunning landscapes bring this world to life. Those moments contrast quite wonderfully with the grayer, drearier scenes that are content to sit in their quiet and contemplate. It’s a move that’s more feels more like Ghibli than most American animation and one that I appreciated.
The vocal performances only boost this film, taking it to heights I was not prepared for. I’m always down for Lupita Nyong’o but adding an almost unrecognizable Pedro Pascal as a wily fox and Stephanie Hsu as “corporate inhuman robot” is truly a feat. Nyong’o’s Roz is bright, excited, and chipper to the point of obnoxious but it makes those softer moments, ones where we watch someone programmed to work till they break learn to love someone, that devastate me.
My fiancée lost her stepfather this year. It’s been a rough ride, particularly in a year that’s been full of so many other hurdles life (and shitty middle managers) have thrown our way. Watching this adoptive parent step in to take care of this young gosling was so moving. Art is very specific when it comes to taste and The Wild Robot was very much to mine. Beyond its charm and appeal, it’s a film that arrived at a time when I honestly just needed it.
The Wild Robot is currently in theatres.
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