Based on Peter Brown’s 2016 middle-grade novel of the same name, Universal Pictures’ The Wild Robot centers around ROZZUM-7134, or “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot created by company Universal Dynamics to serve a variety of tasks in their cities. After her delivery ship is shipwrecked on an island, she forms a family of sorts with fox Fink (Pedro Pascal), and goose Brightbill (Kit Connor).
Lupita Nyong’o is fabulous here. Her voice-acting is pristine, and gradually gains emotional range and variation as Roz does, breaking from her pre-programmed expressions and knowledge in order to adapt to an environment which requires – and permits – it. The rest of the cast shines too: the names are generally big, but they don’t feel as if they’ve been cast just because they’re famous. They feel suited to the characters, and deliver engaging performances that feel real, enlivening the generally very good screenplay of Chris Sanders (who is also the film’s director).
Like its cast, the majority of The Wild Robot is excellent. The animation is a gorgeous watercolor-esque style, and almost every still feels like a work of art. The audience is generally trusted to understand information without it being spoon-fed to them. There is humor accessible to kids, humor for any adults watching, and not much toilet humor. Kids can enjoy the goofy possum kids who play dead and their squabbling; adults can enjoy the specificity of one of them explaining that their play-death was so slow because they were dying of meningitis.
The film weakens in its final conflict. Roz has been steadily breaking down – she’s not made for life on a human-free island, and she’s been sacrificing herself in order to raise Brightbill. Her worsening physical condition is shown throughout the film. This is not what the climax of the film is about. Instead, the movie opts for an evil robot attack, led by Vontra (Stephanie Hsu), who is sent to bring Roz back to the humans so that they can study her. The animals fight back, and defeat them, but Roz ultimately chooses to go back to the humans, so that the island isn’t attacked again. Presumably, she manages to get fixed there, as she seems fine the next time we see her. The humans’ motivations for their actions seem vague, and the whole thing just feels a bit as if it comes out of nowhere. It feels like it happened in large part because animals fighting evil robots seems cool. And it is cool. But the rest of the film manages to do cool and interesting things with a really strong focus on character, and this didn’t feel like that to me. It did manage to provide a pseudo-death for Brightbill to bring Roz back from through the power of familial love, but Roz was already falling apart, and he could have just brought her back from that pseudo-death instead – that could even have had more emotional weight, as her dying would have been linked more directly to him.
Final robot battle aside (and even that is quite good given that it happens), The Wild Robot is a witty and warm story with a largely strong script that’s got something for audiences of many ages to enjoy.
