2024 | PG | Animated | starring voices of Lupita Nyong’o, Kit Connor, Pedro Pascal, Bill Nighy, Matt Berry, Stephanie Hsu, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara | directed by Chris Sanders | 1h 42m | 4 1/2 out of 5 stars |
[Thematic Spoilers]
Like Roger Ebert said, a great movie isn’t about what it’s about but how it’s about. You can have the most original idea in the world, but if you don’t know how to explore it or flesh it out into a story, then it isn’t worth much. The opposite is also true, in the case of The Wild Robot. Your base premise can be nothing you’d look twice at, but with the right amount of craftsmanship, passion, imagination and, dare I say, even love, you can turn that nugget of an idea into a work of beauty. That’s what Chris Sanders has done with The Wild Robot.
After being shipwrecked on an island, a helper robot is switched on and must learn to adapt in a wild forest inhabited only by animals. Rozzum Unit-7134 or Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) inadvertently becomes the foster mother of a baby goose (Kit Connor) and realizes that the best way to complete her mission is to teach him to fly with the rest of the heard when migration season comes.
If you sprung a movie on me and said it was about a robot that becomes a mother to a goose, you couldn’t be in a more uphill climb to get me interested. But if Wild Robot didn’t start with this challenge and then completely win me over before it was over. The movie does everything it can to distance itself from Pixar’s neo-classic Wall-E, another science fiction film about a robot who becomes less robotic in a world devoid of humans. A translation ability gives Roz the ability to hear the animals around her speak so the movie can become a Talking Animals movie in which baby goose Brightbill is picked on by the other geese for being raised by a robot and not geese. Roz develops a sidekick in Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal) and a mentor in Nightwing (Bill Nighy). Much like Wall-E, Wild Robot appears to be about one thing at first and then about halfway through turns the page into something more interesting, and ultimately, thrilling as it opens up its world and explores the more sci-fi aspects of its story. Where did Roz come from? What is her mission? Each answer builds the universe of the movie into something richer and more satisfying as it goes.
Trust in Chris Sanders, co-director of the Dreamworks 2010 animated masterwork, How to Train Your Dragon. In the same way that Sanders turned a dragon-training montage into a moving piece of cinema, he does the same with a sequence about a goose learning how to fly – and the robot who can’t but still needs to teach him. The beautifully animated nature setting, the souring flying sequences and the more oppressive science fiction elements are all eventually brought together flawlessly by Sanders as if conducting a perfectly tuned orchestra. And speaking of, the movie’s original score, composed by Kris Bowers, is an absolute showstopper that reaches into your gut and tugs at the heartstrings.
In an era where everything is ironic and nobody has the guts to express an actual emotion on screen anymore for fear of not being cool, The Wild Robot boldly and proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. This movie leans hard into its heart. Pushing on us first with the cute animals, then with an unlikely mother/son maternal story and then finally with the reality of the situation, that a robot and a goose are simply too different and there are things that he needs that she simply cannot give him. The social order in both the animal kingdom and the robot domain wants to force them apart. You can pull any number of metaphors out of it from the crushingly specific to heartbreakingly universal.
So yes, it takes a minute for The Wild Robot to get on its feet. The first act is slow and somewhat trite, but it’s all going somewhere. Sanders, and Bowers, load this thing up and fire it on all cylinders in the thrilling third act. It is great storytelling, built brick by brick and then woven together into a visual and sonic stunner of a payoff. They make this movie work by sheer filmmaking fortitude, by lifting it up with every tool in their visual and musical toolkit. I was moved by the overwhelming beauty of it all and the obvious passion for this project by those behind it – and it takes a lot for that to happen. It takes everything falling in just the right place. We will be hard-pressed to find a movie this year that is this emotionally satisfying.