The Wild Robot Review – The Best Version of a Familiar Thing
© DreamWorks
How much innovation can you take in one dose? There’s a thin line between a welcome breath of fresh air and a pretentious mess. Innovative elements need to be microdosed into big studio films, too much ‘new’ leaves you at risk of a sub-90 Rotten Tomatoes score and a handicapped box office. DreamWorks live with the burden of being innovators over 20 years ago, leading the CG revolution and cementing a new style of storytelling which audiences have found comfort in and expect every time they see the iconic logo.
Their latest film, The Wild Robot, also carries some of Disney’s burden, coming from former House of Mouse alum Chris Sanders, who co-directed his (and Disney’s) best movie, Lilo & Stitch, not by looking into the future of animation, but into its past, to execute a traditional art style as the company begun its transition to CG storytelling. The Wild Robot itself is caught between looking forward and backwards, executing on animation that’s as fresh and awe-inspiring as the landscapes it depicts but settling into a story structure and emotional framework that have been parsed by American animated movies for decades.
The Wild Robot moves through three different gears. In its earliest minutes, it’s a largely silent film as Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), our robot protagonist, struggles to establish her purpose on a human-less island. A sliding doors moment for the film is when Roz learns how to communicate with the island’s animal population and the voices of Pedro Pascal, Matt Berry and Catherine O’Hara begin to blurt from their mouths. Roz ends up forming a connection to a gosling, discovering love, connection and mothership. Finally, the film’s climax sees The Wild Robot evolve into an action thriller.
© DreamWorks
The film’s versatility won’t be a boon for everyone. In those opening minutes, The Wild Robot begins to furrow into new ground. No words are spoken other than Roz’s standard factory setting utterances, the editing flows between softness and sharpness, the camera angles and movements are dynamic, and the film’s thesis and heavy ideas are brought to the forefront without needing to over explain them. Just seeing Roz mimic the movements of a crab to scale a cliff, or stare in silence at a kaleidoscope of butterflies, or be met with grunts and growls when trying to make connections evoke existential questions. Can a manmade object truly integrate into nature? Can a machine know beauty? What is the nature of adaptation?
It takes bravery to commit to that mode for an entire film, and The Wild Robot opts against it. The film is still funny, emotional, powerful, full of meaning, bombastic and it operates on a huge scale. It delivers on a film that American animation has been delivering on for a long time, but through flirting with something outside of that, it gives the impression of missed potential. Sanders has cited Miyazaki as a visual inspiration but it’s clear that his influence seeped into the first 10 minutes of The Wild Robot. Subtext is everywhere, but as soon as the animals begin to speak, it rockets to the surface.
However, if The Wild Robot’s very traditional story structure enables its art style, it’s a worthy trade off. This film is endlessly beautiful, and by far the best looking film of 2024 so far. The CG models are imbued with vibrant, watercolour-like textures that seem to swirl as the characters move. There are no blank surfaces in The Wild Robot, every surface has information, every item tells a story. Roz herself ages with bumps, grazes and moss as the film develops, and the varied fauna of the forest shows for how long this area had been untouched by man.
© DreamWorks
DreamWorks had played with a more painterly art style in 2023’s Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, but The Wild Robot pushes it further. While in Puss In Boots, the foreground and characters are designed in a more straightforwardly CG way and the backgrounds grew more painterly, The Wild Robot manages to make every character, object and background look like a painting. It’s DreamWorks’ most beautiful movie, bittersweet seeing as this is the last movie to come out of this iteration of the studio. Their decision to shift away from in-house production means that the artists who brought them their artistic peak will be replaced by outsourced labour.
It feels about time for the animation industry to move on from the way it treats its people and from the way it sees its stories. The Wild Robot is an incredible rendition of a story we’re used to, elevated through awe-inspiring animation. The movies made within this safety net work well, there’s a formula to making people leave the cinema an emotional, blubbering mess, but even perfection can get boring. The Wild Robot sees DreamWorks’ animators pushed to the peak of their powers, what could they achieve if they asked the same of their writers?