Directed by Chris Sanders | Written by Sanders and Peter Brown | 102 min | ▲▲▲▲△ | Amazon Prime
I’m a latecomer to this animated feature — it’s been in cinemas for over a month — but I’m glad to have caught it on the big screen where its painterly visuals really look good. It needs more than that to earn four triangles from me, and it does so by exploring multiple, parallel themes through storytelling that’s vital and vivid, plenty here to keep kids engaged while adults muse over the broader implications of this robot and talking-animal tale. I’ll admit, the trailers, which were giving The Iron Giant rip-off vibes didn’t impress, but the buzz since the film debuted at TIFF has been sterling all around.
It seems like a lot of the best animation this year could share Venn Diagrams of storytelling tropes. This one and Robot Dreams overlap in the tale of animals and an automaton, while the forthcoming Flow (soon to screen at Carbon Arc Cinema in Halifax) shares with The Wild Robot the idea that natural enemies, predator and prey, can find friendship and solidarity, that kindness is a survival strategy. Unlike those other two films, however, The Wild Robot is not silent — the animals and robot in this one are plenty chatty.
Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is a humanoid domestic service robot from corporate entity Universal Dynamics. She’s the only survivor, slightly damaged, of a shipment of robots that went down at sea — she’s washed up on an island populated by a whole ecosystem of wildlife. There’s the crafty, dishonest fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), who’s actually lonely, there’s the opossum with lots of kids, Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), and other critters voiced by Bill Nighy, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, and Mark Hamill. When Roz accidentally kills a goose and crushes eggs in her nest, she commits to raising of the surviving gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor). He needs to be able to eat, swim, and fly so he can migrate with the flock at the end of the season.
There’s a lot going on here. In the first act, the frenetic energy of the movie is exhausting — not a great start — but once Brightbill is on the scene things settle down and become more character-driven, less manic. Then the ideas manifest: finding redemption for mistakes and the role of parents to raise and send children out into the world, having to trust them to their own journey.
It also has room for the themes we’re familiar with from Frankenstein and Blade Runner — how to define a living, sentient being, and the question of whether our tools and technology will destroy us. It also considers our consumerist society and how it’s facilitated by devices, and how we may overcome prejudices and Darwinian notions of survival in order to help each other thrive as a community.
What’s most moving here, and the heart of the story, is the idea a chosen family can be as important as the one you’re born into. In that, The Wild Robot can lift its mossy head amongst the best entertainments of the year.
