Review: The Wild Robot: The most moving animation in decades

Roz, Fink and Brightbill in The Wild Robot. Photo / Universal Pictures

REVIEW

Recent studio animation hardly lacks technological dazzle, but it’s hard to recall a time when the state-of-the-art felt this much like art.

The extraordinary new film from DreamWorks Animation takes place almost entirely on a thickly forested isle, where an obliging droid, Lupita Nyong’o’s Roz, washes ashore one stormy night. The beach on which she awakes the next morning is gravelly and grey, while a wall of basalt columns stretches up behind it, like the flank of a fort.

Re those columns, though: just how columnar are they? As the camera moves around, we’re aware they occupy 3D space on screen, but their forms are suggested by swishes of silvery gouache, with stipples of moss that look as if they were flicked there from the bristles of a toothbrush.

Thanks to similar technological advances that led to the eye-popping living-comic-book style of the two recent Spider-Verse films, The Wild Robot is computer-built but also hand-painted. It’s tempting to describe the technique as groundbreaking – except within the handful of minutes it takes Roz to scale that cliff, it stops seeming “new” at all, and more like the closing of a loop between the medium’s present and past.

A scene from The Wild Robot. Photo / Universal Pictures

DreamWorks was founded 30 years ago this month, and this well-timed anniversary release is its richest, most moving film since 1998′s reputation-making The Prince of Egypt. An adaptation of the first in a trio of children’s novels by Peter Brown, it was written and directed by Chris Sanders, a veteran of both DreamWorks’ own How to Train Your Dragon series and the 1990s Disney renaissance, and essentially exists at the crossover point between the two. Its plot is as sweet as it is simple: after initially unnerving then annoying the local wildlife, Roz adopts an orphaned gosling called Brightbill (voiced by Heartstopper’s Kit Connor) and vows to teach him to fly before the flock’s migration begins.

What elevates it? First, the supremely crisp storytelling, which builds towards an Inside Out-level emotional wipeout in the final act. And second, the ways in which Sanders and his team use the film’s own graphic approach as a living metaphor for Roz’s move into her new maternal role. Her body begins as a clean CG render, but the work of raising Brightbill leaves her increasingly weathered and scuffed. Yet this wear and tear has an organic beauty, and the marks don’t feel accrued so much earned.

Roz’s own shape and physicality place her in a very specific animated lineage – she’s a descendant of Hayao Miyazaki’s gardener bots from Castle in the Sky; of Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant; of the mechanical monsters the Fleischer brothers pitted against Superman in 1941.

There are a number of quietly moving tableau shots of the robot in the wilderness that tap into that strangely serene design. But the film still moves with the snap of a DreamWorks production: the antics-heavy opening hardly screams Studio Ghibli wannabe, while the climactic arrival of Roz’s manufacturers allows Sanders to push the film’s already expressionistic visuals into overdrive. From Pixar to Despicable Me, studio animation in the past few decades has hardly lacked technological dazzle. But it’s hard to recall a time when the state-of-the-art felt this much like art.