In The Wild Robot, the future's about what we save, not what we build

The Wild Robot, the latest release from DreamWorks Animation (in one of the studio’s last in-house films), arrived at Fantastic Fest just days after no less a cinematic luminary and animation champion than Guillermo del Toro summed up the AI art vs. human art battle. Speaking as part of BFI in Conversation, del Toro said, “The value of art is not in how much it costs and how little effort it requires. It’s how much would you risk to be in its presence?”

Art, del Toro emphasizes, takes courage, the same way growing up takes courage and the same way raising a child—knowing that every moment risks failure—takes courage. The same way simply existing in a world that feels increasingly swallowed by inhumanity takes courage. The Wild Robot is a film about courage in its many forms, pondering the loss of everything we hold dear and asking what’s worth saving when faced with that prospect. It’s also, amidst all those heavy ideas about what we can engineer in a new world and what’s worth saving in the old one, a charming animated adventure about a robot and some woodland critters. Its ability to succeed on both levels makes it one of the best animated films of the year.

Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) was designed to be a kind of family butler a la Rosey on The Jetsons, but instead finds herself washed ashore on an idyllic island, where she activates and starts exploring. Roz begins by looking for a customer she can serve, printing out QR code stickers as she encounters raccoons, rabbits, bears, foxes, and more. All of these critters think she’s a monster and want nothing to do with her. Then, quite by accident, Roz holds a baby gosling as it hatches.

The gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor), imprints on Roz, and because his real parents are dead, Roz sees an opportunity to serve her prime directive, which is “complete a task.” Her task, she later learns, is three-pronged: She has to keep Brightbill alive, she has to teach him to swim, and she has to teach him to fly in time for the next migration. But Brightbill is a runt and his life with Roz has made him an outcast. Roz, meanwhile, has no one but possum mama Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara) and loner fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) to help her navigate a forest so dense with strange new encounters that it might as well be an alien landscape.

Over the course of this journey, writer-director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How To Train Your Dragon) delivers the kind of family movie experience worth the price of admission for everyone. Sanders has a proven track record with these kinds of films, and he hasn’t lost a step. His DreamWorks team conjures up a dynamic, beautifully realized world that’s part Disney and part Ghibli, with a hint of Impressionism around the edges and a wonderful retro-futuristic design for Roz. The images are airy and light, whether we’re talking about dreamy forestscapes or a brief peek into the futuristic manufacturing world that created Roz in the first place. Sweeping seaside storms are rendered with gorgeous drama, while a brood of possum children pop like Saturday morning cartoon characters; both are given equal weight in this story. You can see Across The Spider-Verse in these images, but you can also see Princess Mononoke.

That blend of hyper-kinetic and comic with sweeping and epic also extends to the work of the cast. Nyong’o plays a cold and distant character, a product of design, who has to become warmer and more informed by the world around her with each passing scene—sometimes with each passing second. There are moments when she has to feel a deep, crushing emotion while simultaneously playing a character who doesn’t know where the emotion is from or what it’s for. Nyong’o makes Roz not just believable, but relatable. As Fink, Pascal adds a naturalistic, warm sense of brutal honesty to the picturesque forest, while O’Hara delivers a dose of maternal realism, and Mark Hamill, as the local alpha predator bear, gets in some wonderfully gruff vulnerability. Then there’s Matt Berry, who just about steals the movie as an egotistical, over-the-top beaver who deserves his own spinoff.

But, aside from being a pure dose of family entertainment, there’s something else happening in The Wild Robot which lingers long after the credits roll. It’s a movie about a robot who learns to be more and more like a living thing, arriving at a time when people constantly claim that robots are becoming more and more like living things. 

Not a week goes by without someone blasting out a film reel made by a machine, and touting how lifelike and beautiful it is, claiming that, in the future, we’ll be able to queue up art on demand. There is obvious cultural tension between what machines can do and what people can do; at first glance, The Wild Robot may seem like an example of how far you can push an artificial being to generate true emotional resonance. But The Wild Robot is actually about that which can’t be engineered or anticipated, a treatise on what it really means to feel things. The more Roz searches for the roots of what drives her to complete her task, the more she understands that what she’s thinking and, yes, feeling exists beyond her, beyond the people who made her, beyond what anyone can achieve with a line of code or a piece of circuitry. 

Parents certainly can understand loving someone so much that it motivates their every step, even if they don’t understand where the love comes from exactly. Beyond this, we all understand that our humanity is unpredictable and messy and greater than the responses that can be generated by any system. Like WALL-E and Toy Story before it, The Wild Robot understands that sometimes these emotional truths are best expressed through inorganic objects that give us a new perspective on our own biological lives. And like those films, it navigates emotional complexities with grace and precision, never sacrificing depth or pulling its punches. And right now, observing those complexities through the camera lens-eyes of a machine-parent is a perfect reminder that some things are beyond what we can manufacture.

In The Wild Robot, the future is not about what we can build, but what we can save, and what we’ll risk to save it. At a time when cold calculation seems to permeate so much of our cultural lives, from financial strife to cultural discourse, it offers a balm for tech-dominated souls and a reminder that it takes courage to simply exist as a thinking, feeling human in a world this noisy. With its unexpectedly moving sights, remarkable voice ensemble, and pure clarity of humanist vision, The Wild Robot emerges as a stunning achievement.

Director: Chris Sanders
Writer: Chris Sanders
Stars: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Catherine O’Hara
Release Date: September 27, 2024