Review: “Wild Robot”★★★★★
DreamWorks Animation's “The Wild Robot,” a gorgeous computer-generated cartoon with a human heart beating beneath its sleek, avant-garde surface, comes at a time when audiences seem more worried than ever about being overtaken by artificial intelligence. It's ironic that the film, a charming family fable adapted from the first book in Peter Brown's open-ended series, includes no human characters of note. Instead, “The Savage Robot” focuses on an overzealous automaton named ROZZUM 7134 (or simply “Roz”), whose personality stems in part from Lupita Nyong'o and the rest of the DWA performers. Together with “How to Train Your Dragon” co-director Chris Sanders, they imbue this robot - basically, two spheres, four limbs and more tools than a Swiss Army knife - with maternal instincts and something that could pass for a soul.
And that's because The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) performs a sly, absorbing and extremely effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot - the more its programming is trained with new inputs, to use the jargon of generative AI - the more it underscores the deep, inarticulable, sacred wells of human feelings, the exact things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. The fact that this film, based on Peter Brown's book series, does so while remaining a highly enjoyable and delightfully detailed story about a misfit, amidst a community of charismatic woodland creatures, makes it one of the best animated films of the year, rightly considered an Oscar favorite.
The journey leads her to cross paths with some of the most rambunctious animals in this remote place, including a fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal), an opossum named Pinktail (Catherine O'Hara), a grizzly bear named Thorn (Mark Hamill) and a beaver named Paddler (Matt Berry). He also quickly learns that nature is a scary place. One of the many wonderful things about Sanders' adaptation of Peter Brown's book is how little this film fears death, which used to be a subject that children's fiction helped little ones understand, but now seems forbidden in animation. Nature is lovely, but it can kill you.
Nyong'o's voice is impeccable and vital to Roz's journey. At the beginning of the film, Roz's voice is relentlessly cheerful, with a robotic edge that reflects how Roz excels in a natural setting. As The Savage Robot progresses, Nyong'o adds more emotion to Roz's voice, leaving her feeling angry, insecure and exasperated. The end result is a voice full of feeling, but with traces of roboticism; it's the culmination of a breath-taking high-wire vocal performance.
This is a film that is replete with unexpected humor - often in the form of jokes about how easy it is for animals to die in the wild - but also feels deeply felt in every frame, and only rarely in a way that seems at all manipulative. The visual artistry of the painterly compositions is reflected in other elements as well, from the stellar voiceover work (especially Nyong'o's, who finds nuance in what could have been a cold vocal turn) to Kris Bowers' propulsive score. You can tell when a project like this is done for profit and when it's done out of artistic passion, and everyone involved in “The Savage Robot” has poured their hearts into it. It shows. You hear it. You feel it. And that really matters, especially in an age when so much children's entertainment seems like nothing more than a cynical drive for profit. It's made from the heart in every way. And that's what allows it to connect with yours.
Funny, heartfelt and often breathtaking, The Wild Robot delivers the kind of all-ages animated entertainment that will delight children and leave a lump in the throat. And it delivers on the promise of a great animated feature: expressing universal truths-love that defies logic, feelings that come from places we don't understand, the bittersweet bargain of letting someone go so they can flourish-through the inorganic. If only all robot stories had this great humanist vision.
