VERDICT: Animator Chris Sanders concocts a sweet fable about love, parenting, and finding your path.
Like any good fable, there’s more to The Wild Robot than its plot. A tale of a domestic robot set adrift in the wilderness and becoming guardian to a fledgling, the film touches on grander notions, including adoptive parenthood, a fractured community uniting against a common threat, and the use of technology to preserve rather than destroy the environment.
These ideas are all wrapped up inside a tale of talking animals, sylvan beauty, and a well-meaning robot that finds its soul by pushing back against its programming to nurture a baby bird until it can take off on its own. If the story sounds like it contains the DNA of earlier films like The Iron Giant, Fly Away Home, and How to Train Your Dragon, it does, but writer-director Chris Sanders (adapting the novel by Peter Brown) finds enough grace notes to let this story stand on its own. (Sanders, incidentally, co-directed Dragon with Dean DeBlois, his executive producer here.)
It’s a delicate piece of storytelling, one where the poignancy never feels forced and where the comedy springs from its characters rather than pop-culture references or lazy scatology. Animation has offered any number of robot protagonists of late — from Big Hero 6 to Ron’s Gone Wrong, all of them arguably paying tribute to Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky — but Sanders makes his hero a unique creation.
We open on a beach where a family of otters finds the wrecked packaging of a brand-new robot, the Rozzum Unit 734 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o). After making its way around the island in a desperate search for someone to give it instructions — and terrifying most of the local fauna in the process — the unit goes into shut-down mode long enough to learn to communicate with the local animal population. After a fall down a cliff, the robot discovers it has flattened a goose and its eggs and decides to nurture the one remaining egg, particularly after its hatching inhabitant imprints on “Roz” as its mother.
Wily fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) had tried to eat that egg, but now Roz presses him into service as a co-parent of sorts, and Fink helps out, mainly to get Roz to provide him with some free meals. Possum mom Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara) tells Roz and Fink that they have to feed the young gosling (Kit Connor, Heartbreakers), teach it to swim, and ready him to fly away with the other geese in the autumn when his species migrates south.
For a wisecracking-animal movie, The Wild Robot nonetheless gracefully addresses issues like discrimination, family separation, and death. (Pinktail and the other possums are experts at playing dead, so they’re pretty cavalier in making jokes about mortality.) It’s a story about misfits becoming heroes: the gosling (whom Roz eventually names “Brightbeak”) transforms from runt to alpha while Roz becomes the savior to a forest population who had previously thought of her as a monster.
Sanders and his team pepper the film with visual delights, whether it’s Roz being surrounded by a swarm of butterflies or Fink (and his beautifully fluffed tale) settling into the impressionist tufts of grass in the bed that Roz has prepared for him. The witty score by Kris Bowers (Bridgerton) gently accompanies the character moments while driving the scenes of physical comedy or peril.
Some of that peril arrives in the form of final-act plot beats that feel like a concession to big-studio animation. (There has to be a Big Chase and a Big Fight, even if they don’t fit the beautifully humane tone of the rest of the film.) The plot of The Wild Robot shows that machines can learn from nature; the mechanics of that plot’s execution indicate that the corporate machine still has a lot to learn from the artists it employs.
