The Wild Robot review – heartfelt animated adventure is a huge success | Animation in the film

AAt first glance, “The Wild Robot,” a new film from Dreamworks Animation (and one of the studio’s last original productions), seems to take aim at the fashionable cultural fear of sentient, talking computers – a technology designed to fulfill the dubious promises to be taken over by companies like OpenAI, to seem more and more like a human. The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, presumably an invention of Silicon Valley if Silicon Valley was trying to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is thwarted by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote island in the northwest Pacific. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat appeal of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused longing to make you instantly hooked.

“The Wild Robot,” written and directed by Chris Sanders (“Lilo & Stitch,” “How to Train Your Dragon”), pulls off a clever, captivating and highly effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot, the more it trains its skills Programming input, to use the parlance of generative AI – all the more it highlights the deep, inarticulate and sacred sources of human emotion, the very things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. That this film, based on Peter Brown’s book series, does this while also being a hugely entertaining and lavishly detailed story about an outsider amidst a community of charismatic forest dwellers makes it one of the best animated films of the year and rightly considered a leading contender for one Oscar.

Rozzum Unit 7134 – Roz, as she eventually comes to be known – is greeted with understandable suspicion by the island’s furry residents. Resembling a transformer, Roz has spindly metal arms, veins of neon light, and large, easily anthropomorphized screen eyes, and neither looks nor thinks like a living creature. Their logic is purely binary – complete task, then return to manufacturer, no error allowed – successfully played to inspire laughter and compassion in the food chain of the murderous forest. With no clear purpose and her return thwarted by the chaos of nature, she stumbles into the possession and care of something she does not understand: a lone goose egg, while the rest of the family is crushed beneath her.

As a household assistant, Roz knows nothing about caregiving (or geese), but she’s very good at the task at hand, even if that task involves saving the egg from the wily fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) – an early plot highlight all in one Film with several impressive, invigorating wordless sequences. When the gosling hatches and, through the laws of nature, identifies the first face it sees as its mother, a suicidal possum (the outstanding Catherine O’Hara) dryly points out that Roz now has a new mission: raising children. Or more specifically, in this edgy but never harsh natural world (the Possum notes that she is the mother of seven children until a smacking noise changes the statement to six), Roz must teach the gosling, a dwarf named Brightbill (Kit Connor). , to swim and fly until fall so that it can survive the flight south and survive the winter.

The path forward is clear, the stakes high but never too overwhelming for young viewers, but the way “The Wild Robot” gets there is a surprising emotional journey that takes it into the pantheon of elite animated films . Every element works here, from the performances – a collection of woodland creatures with the voices of Bill Nighy, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames – to clearly defined characters to ever-increasing stakes as Roz’s producer becomes suspicious of her emotional adaptations faces, another robot (Stephanie Hsu) is sent to bring her back. The animation style in which Roz begins to not only recognize and understand but also appreciate feelings is appropriately prismatic and sweeping – part photorealism (brushstroke precision for pine needles or otter fur) and part impressionism, a world sublimely poised between the Naturalistic and the natural alternate between surreal. (Particularly striking is Roz’s gait, with which she absorbs the different movements of the forest dwellers.)

Although Pascal, as the sardonic straight man, is the easy-going charmer to Roz’s ones and zeros and entrepreneurial cheerfulness, Nyong’o provides the film’s essential voice acting, her performance shifting as Roz begins to understand emotions, and a relatable confusion about one’s own foreign experiences attachments. It’s a deft and tricky feat that pays off in the film’s slightly rushed final section, which raises the stakes to an almost existential level as (off-screen) humans send more robots to retrieve Roz, with devastating, if quick, results transient consequences for the ecosystem we have learned to love.

Smart, heartfelt and often breathtaking, The Wild Robot offers the kind of animated entertainment for all ages that will delight children and leave a lump in their throat. And it delivers on the promise of a truly great animated film: to express universal truths – love that defies logic, feelings that come from places we don’t understand, the bittersweet business of letting someone go so they can thrive – through this Inorganic. If only all robot stories had this grand humanistic vision.