The world humanity leaves behind won’t be completely empty, despite our best attempts. There will be all the animals that manage to outlive a nuclear holocaust or an unrecognizable climate, and all the centuries of stuff — rusting cars, fallen satellites, mountains of plastic, and who knows what else — that will have accumulated during our brief, catastrophic reign as apex predators. In The Wild Robot, writer-director Chris Sanders showcases a pristine pocket of nature seemingly untouched by humanity — therefore, allowed to flourish.
When the robot ROZZUM 7314 (who eventually coins herself “Roz,” perhaps an homage to The Jetsons’ hardworking Rosie?) crash-lands on a lush island, she doesn’t behave all that differently from a human in her position. Like any lost and confused creature, she blunders around obliviously, scaring the wildlife while making high-pitched noises they can’t understand. Built like a snowman but upgraded with gangly retractable arms, Roz is like a walking, talking Swiss Army knife as powered by Alexa. She’s also a helper robot, manufactured to complete all tasks handed her way, and can’t return to her factory until she’s fulfilled this raison d’etre.
She doesn’t have to wait long: after accidentally destroying a nest, the one remaining egg hatches into a tiny gosling that imprints on her immediately. Thereafter, the giant robot and miniscule bird, whom she names Brightbill (Kit Connor), form a makeshift family with the gentle encouragement of a wily, lonely fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and a long-suffering opossum mama named Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara). While each actor brings their own distinct charm to their voice work, Lupita Nyong’o’s Roz is simply perfect. Faced with an onslaught of brand-new situations, she nails her robotic diction to an almost creepy degree while managing to bring wonder and nuance to Roz’s awakening. Nyong’o seemingly effortlessly conveys not just the overwhelming love associated with parenthood, but also the wonder, fear, awe, and countless other emotions that come with experiencing a new, beautiful, and terrifying world for the first time.
Sanders, who also helmed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, is no stranger to tear-jerking animated films about the unbreakable bonds of love, family, and community. Roz and Brightbill are both outsiders and freaks, stranded on an island where the phrase “nature is metal” isn’t so much a meme as a fact of life. Creatures are gobbled up on screen with hilarious frequency, and Pinktail’s many joeys love playing dead, a recurring gag that’s equally effective as a joke and a survival strategy. As Brightbill gets older, Roz leans on her small community to help meet her prime directives: teach her charge to eat, swim, and fly. As the runt, Brightbill is shunned by other geese and imprints on Roz even harder, taking on adorably robot-like qualities that don’t exactly endear him to his kin. But when the annual migration rolls around, Roz finds newfound urgency in her mission; even though he’s basically her child, she needs to let him go and be with his own kind. It’s the only way he’ll survive.
This heartwarming story, based on Peter Brown’s book of the same name, is amplified by the film’s truly stunning animation. Almost every scene is as painterly and impressionistic as the messy, unguarded emotions its characters (and the audience) will come to feel. When Roz has the chance to witness nature at its most majestic, such as the thousands-strong geese migration or a shimmering swarm of monarch butterflies in flight, it looks as if clips of Planet Earth were brought to life by Studio Ghibli. The island where Roz finds herself is a veritable Eden, a verdant paradise untouched by pollution or plastics, where the circle of life plays out as it has since prehistoric times. Yet it’s ultimately Roz who brings forth the island’s destruction, when a sinister minder from Universal Dynamics, her parent company, comes to whisk her back to headquarters. It turns out that the more time she spends with Brightbill and the other animals, the more she finds herself overwriting her programming. In short, she’s evolving. At one point, her “leg” gets jammed between rocks and is replaced with a small tree trunk, further symbolizing the space she comes to occupy between nature and technology.
It’s interesting that in The Wild Robot, nature seems destined to be destroyed, if not by humanity, then its creations. Just as we’ve outsourced so much of our daily lives to machines, trusting machines to perform everything from therapy to drone strikes, so too have the film’s humans seemingly abdicated all responsibility — and possibly even interest — in the natural world. In fact, humans are only seen in passing, in a shiny, soulless city of sweeping towers rising from what looks like lime-green AstroTurf. Roz’s self-proclaimed wildness is open rebellion against that sanitized existence, not all that different from the movement that has people replacing their lawns with native plants and soundly pissing off their HOAs in the process. We could all use a little more wildness in us, it seems.
DIRECTOR: Chris Sanders; CAST: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: September 27; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
