Watched: 03/15/2025
Format: Peacock
Viewing: First
Director: Chris Sanders
Well, this is kind of funny. I wondered what had become of the writer/ director of Disney's Lilo & Stitch after watching the movie the other night, and here is as writer/ director of The Wild Robot (2024).
The biggest problem The Wild Robot has is that it came up against Flow in the same year in the Oscar race, and the two, curiously, share similar themes using animals as their analogy. But, luckily, I am not an award-granting body, and have place in my brain for both movies. And I liked this movie quite a lot.
Yes, The Wild Robot is worth seeing, if for no other reason than that the design of film is a wonder. It's some of the finest work I've seen from a US animation studio outside of Pixar or Disney, mixing realism with painterly flourishes, with classical film-making featuring inventive use of camera movement in a way that I just rarely feel anyone outside of Pixar, in particular, really lands (I'm still not over some of the imagery in Soul).
The unnatural colors of the designed/ human world never exactly clash with the palette of the wild world, but they do stand out, and as our robot has no face with which to indicate expression, she illuminates in a variety of colors. And, in the climactic confrontation, even the blaze is an unnatural hue. And Roz's (Lupita Nyong'o) slow transformation to fit in with the wild world is handled not with near-invisible nuance, maybe, but it sure feels right. It's fantastic stuff.
The character animation is top-notch, and in an era with nigh-unwatchable films like Garfield and Despicable Me 4 cluttering theaters, is a reminder that character animation is not just jerking characters around the screen at top speed or barely animating skeletons. Yes, that was supposed to be an attack on a lot of modern animation. But we get far more from the face-less Roz through lights, sounds and gesture than you get out of an army of hyperactive minions.
We're in a future wherein autonomous, humanoid robots are now part of every day society for humans, and priced where every family can own one. A real Jetsons future. However, a shipment of these robots has been lost at sea, crashing up on what appears to be an island along the Pacific Northwest coastline, likely along the Washington or Canadian shore. The island is uninhabited by humans, but is full of wildlife, like geese, raccoons, squirrels, deer, moose, beavers and a bear.
A surviving robot comes online and, never intended to live in the woods, must figure out why none of these organisms will give her orders. After learning to speak "animal", she is accidentally given the directive to raise an orphaned gosling to adulthood so it will be able to fly south for the winter. Pairing with a fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), she builds a home and raises Brightbill (Kit Connor).
Along the way, our robot overwrites her programming to meet the challenges of motherhood, the animals find that they're better together than apart, etc... from a bullet point perspective, boilerplate kid movie stuff. But, it's really the tone with which this is delivered that sets it apart. If Flow is trying to embrace the natural world and animal behavior representing specific traits we recognize in ourselves, albeit wordlessly, The Wild Robot taps into the same idea a bit more on the nose while recognizing that all of these behaviors are *survival* behaviors. And that a portion of the animals on this island are only going to survive by killing the other animals. In the land of tooth and claw, shit is hard, man.
I don't know how Disney's story department would have handled some of the gags here about, yeah, life is short and hard and you're likely to get eaten. Some of that is super dark (but funny!). And, of course, the possum voiced by Catherine O'Hara's blunt descriptions of motherhood that are clearly intended for the parents in the audience who dragged their kids to a theater.
This is a kids movie, so its under no obligation to explain how the predators manage to not eat the other animals, but it is a lovely idea.
Anyway, I dug the film. As much as I like Flow, I wouldn't watch it with my nephew and niece, 9 and 7, without knowing we'd be stopping every ten minutes to discuss. Wild Robot is made for them - which I know because the nephew had opinions on this movie - very positive, but as a proud member of our family, was not shy about discussing the difference from the book to film.
Like Flow, I look forward to rewatching the movie. And, it sure feels set up for more Wild Robot as there are three books (to date) in the series and ends with the promise of more for Roz and Brightbill.
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