I decided to see The Wild Robot for a couple of reasons. For one, I was left on my own this weekend, and I was able to finish off my essay grading earlier than planned. Why not go see two movies? I used to do two-movie-weekends all the time. The trailers for this one looked interesting, even if the first one falsely suggested this was some sort of silent movie. There are talking characters in this movie. The reviews sounded good. But honestly, mostly it was because Megalopolis was just so very terrible that I felt I needed to see something better than it to make the weekend feel better.
Granted, it wasn’t a high bar to clear to get something better than Megalopolis…
At the start of a movie, set at some unspecified point in the future, a commercial robot comes online on the shoreline of an island. The robot, ROZZUM unit 7134 but eventually shortened to “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o), is programmed to help the first person who asks for it, but in the middle of a forest surrounded by wild animals, she doesn’t really get any responses so much as fear and avoidance. Roz eventually goes into a hibernation mode where she learns the language of the animals–apparently they all speak the same one–and then tries to help some more, but after a tumble off a cliff while running from a bear, Roz finds herself a parent when she discovers she accidentally killed a mother goose and crushed most of her eggs, leaving behind only one egg that she takes to caring for. Once given a task, Roz cannot stop until that task is completed, so she can wait until she calls the factory to pick her up.
The thing is, Roz doesn’t really know anything about parenting. She gets some pointers from a possum mother (Catherine O’Hara) and then more from Fink (Pedro Pascal), a lying fox looking to get some food and the easy life helping Roz raise the goose, the runt of his bunch, so young Brightbill (Kit Connor) can eventually fly south in the fall to avoid dying when the winter comes. What does Roz know about teaching a gosling to do anything? Not much, but she’s a quick study, and over time, she may bring something to the island that none of the animal residents have ever experienced before: compassion as a way to survive instead of the nonstop violence that is generally nature’s way. Can she raise Brightbill to be a good goose?
I went into this movie thinking it would be a story about a robot learning to adapt to nature and appreciating the beauty around her. And to be clear, there’s a lot of that. This movie has some beautifully animated moments, and Roz’s adaptable body make for some interesting and creative sights. Yes, this is a movie that occasionally has a pretty dark joke, many coming from the baby possums, but it can also be funny, especially in the early going before it takes a turn for the heartwarming. The thing is, the movie pulls this off very well, and with a stellar voice cast. Beyond Nyong’o, Pascal, Connor, and O’Hara, there’s also Mark Hamill as the bear, Matt Berry as a somewhat snobby beaver, Ving Rhames as a falcon, Bill Nighy as a more experienced adult goose, and finally Stephanie Hsu as a retrieval robot. Everyone here does a very good job with their respective roles, and the way the story goes along, I didn’t even necessarily mind that the movie’s big villain pops up more or less out of nowhere in the last act without any hint of an introduction before then. Roz finds a home and a family in the forest, and it feels earned.
Now, as much as I liked and appreciated this movie, there is a part of me that wonders if I found myself enjoying it so much after such a disappointing time with Megalopolis. I’ll admit that seems very possible, but I don’t think it made that much of a difference. The Wild Robot is very much the sort of movie that I would probably have liked anyway, and writer/director Chris Sanders has a pretty solid track record for me. The real test will be if the movie stays with me for a while, and that’s something I’ll be able to tell at the end of the year when I get to my Top Ten list of 2024. For now though, I think The Wild Robot did everything I want an animated kids movie to do, up to and including putting something together where I don’t regret going to a kids animated movie without bringing a kid of my own. And that much is definitely true.
Grade: A-
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