Ani-May-Tion: The Wild Robot (Dir Chris Sanders, 1h47m, 2024)
To May, and our annual look at the world of animation, in which we will consider two Oscar winners, and two nominees, and discuss films that range between the work of a single filmmaker and a tiny team in Latvia in the form of Flow (2024) and the world-famous Studio Ghibli, as Hayao Miyazaki returns for another anime spectacular with the deeply personal The Boy and the Heron (2024). We begin though, with another animation titan, Chris Sanders, director of Lilo and Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, and Dreamwork's latest feature, The Wild Robot, a sumpteously animated ecofable based on the childrens' book by Peter Brown (2016), in which a robot (Lupita Nyong'o) crashlands on an island inhabited only by animals and must adapt to her surrounding whilst raising an orphaned gosling.
It's fair to say that the last few years hae seen something of a renaissance for Dreamworks, in much the same way that their long-time rivals Disney enjoyed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whilst much of this undeniably comes as a reaction to the seismic shock across animation caused by Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse (2018), Dreamworks have undeniably changed thet style, with work now matching the studio's artistic stylisation with emotionally driven storylines evidenced in 2022's The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish's. Both of these enjoyed financial as well as critical success. The Last Wish illustrates this, with a painterly attention that evokes storybook illustrations as it is by its ultramodern-feeling use of dropped frames - a trick lifted straight from Spider-Verse - when the film's action intensifies.
At least visually, The Wild Robot raises the bar again; added to the already impressively painterly style of modern Dreamworks is something that feels at once an extension of Sanders' own work on 2001's Lilo and Stitch, a film rendering watercolour into cel and CGI animation and something brand new, where a digital paintbrush replaces the rendering of pixel and geometric shapes and vertices into something that was painted rather than generated. This style extends to every shot in this film, every character, and as a result, the film has an hand-crafted sense, despite being fully computer generated, that would be impressive on its own.
Sanders goes further - this is a perfect match of a studio of animators and a director known for visually impressive work in both Lilo and Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon (2010); but the film's sweeping visuals evoke Disney in their 1950s technicolour pomp and Miyazaki at his best in its depictions of nature and the world the Wild Robot, Rozzum 7134, eventually dubbing itself Roz (Nyong'o), finds itself in. Certainly, homage or other, as Roz goes 'wild', her appearance eventually comes to resemble the robots from Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky, (1986), festooned with moss, battledamaged and with a leg replaced by wood.
This ambition is matched in a number of spectacular shots by some smartly done visual storytelling that uses its medium to the full. There are too many shots to mention, but having attempted to befriend, and thus complete tasks for, the island's animal inhabitants, and been rebuffed, Roz goes into "Observation Mode" and we are treated to a charmingly done timelapse in which the animals' language slowly become familiar to Roz, as we pass through the seasons. Even just shots of her, and her eventual charge, Brightbill (Kit Connors) making their way across the island, from lush forests to cliffsides to desolate rocky beaches, have an sense of place and lead to some truly spectacular shots. As a spectacle, at least, Sanders has lost none of his ability to tell a story.
As to Sanders' screenplay, however, The Wild Robot is not quite as ambitious. Perhaps the film's slightly trite anthromorphisation or 'cute' of ita principal cast is to blame - this is, after all, where the majority of the voice cast arrives, and it is every bit as typical a celebrity cast with mixed voice acting skills, with the exception of a scene-stealing opossum mother from the late Catherine O'Hara, who offers Roz advice. This ranges from the rather good - the semi-omniprescent, but charming Pedro Pascal, who, voicing a fox, and introduced trying to steal the last egg from a destroyed nest- an egg that eventually hatches to be Brightbill - acts as a smart-alec foil to Roz - to the perfunctory, in which Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, Bill Nighy, and, somewhat inevitably, Matt Berry, here voicing an OCD beaver - all of whom are crammed in, somwhat needlessly, around the sides of the film's main narrative.
This is the problem with The Wild Robot; its central narrative is, in a word, safe; a coming of age story/motherhood tale that, from beginning to end, is easy predictable, Here and there there are elements of other takes on the concept of mismatched rearings, from Fly Away Home and Tarka the Otter to 2019's offbeat cyberpunk horror piece I am Mother. Whilst there's nothing really to dislike about the odd trio of robot, gosling and fox, it's a dynamic that never really goes anywhere - there's a perfunctory disagreement between surrogate mother and child, and a couple of moments that skip over both an arbitrary ticking countdown to the geese's migration and Roz losing her surrogate son that are quickly dispensed with. It is a plot so safe, so formless, that it barely feels like it's the same film.
When the film is allowed time to develop, so it can concentrate on the small moments, using its animation style and its voice talent and its narrative to the full, it is undeniably beautiful but these moments are so rare as to feel lost, like its heroine, in what surrounds them. As a result, one is left, between the impressive visuals and beautifully framed shots, looking for something fundamentally missing from the film - a narrative to match the visual grandeur of its tale.
Rating: Recommended
The Wild Robot is available via DVD and BluRay from
Spirit Entertainment and on streaming on AppleTV
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