The Wild Robot: The Popgeeks Review

Everything you’ve heard about The Wild Robot is true. It’s got gorgeous visuals. It has a moving story. It may be the best film Dreamworks Animation has ever produced. And now that Joker 2 is officially a disappointment, you have no excuse not to see it. But if you need further convincing, let us explain.

The robot of the title is Roz, an automaton built to Serve Man that winds up in a place Man doesn’t seem to have touched. The opening moments show a broken package on the shore of a wild island and Roz booting herself up for the first time, then attempting to satisfy the requests of animals that just scream and run from her. Roz starts out as a soulless blank slate. She has no idea that she is feared or how to feel about it.

Eventually Roz literally stumbles upon a bird’s nest, squashing a goose and much of her offspring — except for one. She decides her next task is to protect the egg, a chore made difficult when a fox named Fink eyes it as his next meal. Fortunately this egg is almost “done” and a baby goose starts hatching out (this confuses Roz because she thinks her goal is to keep the egg from breaking). The goose looks at Roz and, of course, believes the robot is his mother. Roz has no concept of that either and Fink has to tell her about it.

Eventually Roz takes in the information that the gosling (who she has named Brightbill) must learn how to swim and fly before migration season, or he will not be able to join the other geese and freeze to death on the island. At that point the main plot kicks in, as she and Fink are on a time limit.

You might expect a film set in nature to have a few quiet or slow moments of pure atmosphere, but The Wild Robot never pauses like that. It starts moving from the first second and doesn’t waste a minute — it’s as quick-paced as most other Dreamworks movies are. That’s something I wasn’t expecting, nor was I expecting it to work.

Dreamworks used a new kind of technique to build the environments, which was pretty much invented just for this movie. Traditionally, environments in CG movies are built with flat-shaded polygon models, which are then texture-mapped with bricks or gravel or any kind of pattern that will make the objects look like they’re supposed to. But the only polygon models in The Wild Robot are the characters — the backgrounds look like 3D paintings because they literally are. Every rock and tree was painted into existence by brush-stroking vacant virtual air and rotating the camera around to paint on the Z-axis.

So even though the movie never stops to let you look at one area for long, each location is as breathtaking as the last one, and you just take it all in. A good movie needs to do more than just look good, though, which is why a good thing The Wild Robot has a story and cast as appealing as its visuals.

The heart of the picture is in watching Roz grow, rewrite her programming and learn what motherhood and love is. But every character has their own arc. Brightbill has to learn how to fit in with other geese after a sheltered first few months with Roz have given him the mannerisms of a robot himself. Fink starts out as, well, a fink and has to learn how to put others first. The entire animal community has an arc of its own, which is best left as a surprise.

And yes, you can count on a lot of tear-jerking moments to happen, but this doesn’t mean you need to prepare for one of the central characters to die, or for one of them to fake-die and have everyone else weep over them for 45 seconds before they suddenly cough back to life. The film is smarter than that — it avoids that cliche. That scene isn’t in it in any form. And speaking of avoiding tropes, you won’t be able to predict where the movie is ultimately going or how it ends — which is a good thing.

Director Chris Sanders (How To Train Your Dragon, Lilo And Stitch) deliberately gave Roz the simplest face he possibly could — just two dots. This puts all the weight on Lupita Nyong’o, the actress performing her voice, to sell the emotion in any given scene (even the ones where Roz doesn’t know what an emotion is). And she does a fantastic job. The other actors — Pedro Pascal as Fink, Kit Conner as Brightbill, and others voiced by Catherone O’Hara, Mark Hamill and Ving Rhames — aren’t half bad either.

The Wild Robot has the makings of a cult classic, but at the moment, it could just as easily rise beyond that and become a huge hit. It all depends on how it performs these next few weeks. With the felling of its main competition (the Joker sequel), it now has a chance. If you give it a shot, you won’t regret it.

The Wild Robot is currently playing in theaters.