The Wild Robot (2024) Movie Review

For his latest film, “The Wild Robot,” director Chris Sanders stated that he took inspiration from a range of sources, including classic Disney animated films and, more promisingly, the works of Japanese legend Hayao Miyazaki. The first trailer for the film shows flashes of this influence, opting towards a largely nonverbal advertisement of the film’s expansive visual scope and supposed interest in mature storytelling.

In hindsight, this promise of a mostly atmospheric, silent project akin to something like Studio Ghibli’s “The Red Turtle” was probably too much to hope for from a large-scale American family production, let alone one from one of the most uneven studios ever to challenge Disney for the throne. For what it’s worth, “The Wild Robot” finds Sanders exploring the widest possible range of visual ambition a DreamWorks project would allow in 2024. Still, to compensate for the potential risk of those graphic aspirations, the film undoubtedly, even necessarily, forces itself into a somewhat tepid cage.

Based on Peter Brown’s series of books, “The Wild Robot” drops us right into the situation promised by its title: ROZZUM 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o, appropriately static but never flat in her line delivery) is a standard issue unit designed to make people’s lives easier, a task complicated when a typhoon washes her up on an uninhabited island. Uninhabited, at least, by the human subjects that her programming has set her to understand, as her new neighbors are of the more animalistic variety. Roz just wants to fulfill her duty and help others accomplish whatever task is set before her, but these animals are more content to either run at the mere sight of her or try to scrap her for the parts they don’t even understand beyond their shininess.

To make matters worse, one of these unproductive encounters with a wild beast leads to Roz accidentally killing a family of geese, all but one unhatched egg. Eventually, the gosling is born, and with no real mother, it imprints itself upon its reluctant robot protector. With some iffy guidance from the lonely local fox (Pedro Pascal, sounding like Matthew Broderick if he could emote), Roz now finds herself tasked with a job outside the coding of her circuitry: motherhood.

With its prominent themes of the intuitive nature of maternity and the lingering reality of death, “The Wild Robot” certainly opens itself up to delivering on that maturity teased by its initial premise. More than its mere willingness to tackle these ideas, the film is commendable enough for its willingness to make jokes out of them, allowing itself to cut the tension every now and then and display a certain openness to the parents in the room that will no doubt appreciate this tonal throwback to the DreamWorks days of yore—and without any forced pop culture references, to boot!

Indeed, Sanders is more than willing to maintain a respect for the viewer’s intelligence that recalls his previous animation work on films like “Lilo & Stitch” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” to the point where even some of its more hackneyed plot elements—such as the hidden revelation that threatens to upend an entire relationship—are handled relatively early on in the narrative. With these new places to go, however, Sanders finds himself struggling to take “The Wild Robot” into any truly ambitious directions, favoring instead avenues less reminiscent of Miyazaki’s work and much closer to something like the long-forgotten “Open Season.”

These issues with the film mostly come down to its third act, as “The Wild Robot” fails to capitalize on its promise and instead doubles down on its themes of unification in ways that feel far too maudlin and forced for a story that ostensibly promotes more risk-taking. Without getting too specific, Sanders’s eventual “kumbaya” attitude almost seems to fly in the face of some of its more potentially nuanced understandings of nature and reality. The entire thesis of the film is that we must become, as Roz says, “more than what we were programmed to be,” but sometimes programming just can’t be overridden, and Sanders’s attempts to prove otherwise make for more than a few saccharine climactic beats.

If nothing else, the fact that “The Wild Robot” is absolutely stunning to behold visually goes without saying. Even if Sanders is unable to stand upon those visual strengths to deliver a story with layers that match those of its animation, the film maintains a dynamic flow to show where Roz’s fluid but stagnating mechanics clash with the wilderness and equally where they come in handy. The glow of her bodily lining alone does more than enough to communicate her emotional state, where the complete lack of facial details would generally be considered a challenge to overcome. Sanders is equally wise to give us ample closeups of Roz’s eyes, the deadened optic lenses given their own life from the hypnotic pulsating of her frigid, blue LEDs.

Inevitably, “The Wild Robot” will—and since its TIFF premiere, has already begun to—drum up audience support on a widespread scale. Given the film’s relatable themes and gorgeous mode of delivering them, Chris Sanders has provided the perfect formula for an impending classic of repeat family viewings. One can only hope, if the film continues down the path of the books with sequels (which its probable success makes more of an eventuality than a hypothetical), that further expansions on Roz’s wildlife get to be just a little bit less tame.