I think I love you, but I wanna know for sure
I must start this review the way I do nearly every newly released animated film: a check-in on the state of the various major animation studios. I’ve already crowned DreamWorks the most interesting working studio among the biggies, and I’d say that’s pretty irrefutable at this point. It doesn’t seem likely to be challenged in the near future — both Pixar and Disney have publicly stated they are building their brand around sequels (and Illumination is Illumination).
But with The Wild Robot, DreamWorks takes another leap. They are not just the most interesting studio, but the one doing reliably the best work. This was already pretty obvious, but this is the data point that really locks in the trend. Not every swing they take is a hit, and in fact there have been a couple discouraging releases recently: Kung Fu Panda 4 is exactly the kind of dully predictable film DreamWorks used to be known for, and The Bad Guys is much more style than substance. But The Wild Robot is an important achievement: a theatrically released non-sequel that is ambitious, beautiful, and successful. It is no “fuck it we ball” shameless oddity that leans into some warped postmodern ethos like The Boss Baby or Trolls (both of which I love), but an honest-to-God four-quadrant crowd-pleaser with a genuine vision and heart.
It helps that the film is the product of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois — mainly Sanders, the credited director and writer; DeBlois is executive producer. The pair are not quite John Muskers and Ron Clements in terms of reliable and tenured collaborators who have proven they can leverage the big-budget, mainstream animation process into excellent entertainment, but they’re one (admittedly big) tier below. When you see both names in the credits, you pay attention: How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch are their two biggest collaborations, but their fingerprints, together and separate, have been on various films for decades now: Mulan, The Croods, Dragon 2 and 3, etc.
The Wild Robot is no How to Train Your Dragon; I’ll go ahead and burst that bubble now. (Actually, I’ve been a little nervous about revisiting Dragon given how much animation technology has progressed since I last saw it. Two Spider-Verse movies have set a new bar in animated sense-of-flying.) But it is quite good, especially as animation rather than storytelling. The sidewalk chalk texturing, gorgeous lighting, particle effects, and character design are all phenomenal. The shot construction is striking and artful, the virtual camera flying free but with control.
The film’s central character is a robot named Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), and she’s an especially wonderful design: essentially two circles, body and head, but with tentacle-like limbs and remarkable expressiveness. The accent lighting coming off of Roz serves the role of facial expressions, and it’s perfectly intuitive despite never feeling human. Roz is a blend of many familiar movie robots: Wall-E, Eve, Baymax, The Iron Giant, BB-8, and C3PO are all obvious inspirations in certain moments.
The story breaks pretty neatly into two halves, and the first half is considerably better than the second. We meet Roz as she boots up for the first time on a dangerous island following a crash of her shipping container. This opening stretch is genuinely terrific, evoking Bambi’s respect for the power of nature. Predators and prey are in balance and opposition. The environment is harsh but fair. Life comes in cycles. Any woodland creature who makes it through childhood is a miracle. Roz struggles to comprehend this arbitrary environment in a frenzied series of chases and slapstick bits. It’s a little broad and episodic, but very evocative.
Eventually, Roz finds herself a cog in the vicious environment. She inadvertently crushes a goose and her eggs. Only one little egg survives — flashes of Finding Nemo. Roz crosses paths with a feisty fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) who explains the essence of motherhood to Roz, who accepts the mission of nurturing the egg with a detached productivity that will gradually warm over the course of the film into “love.” The egg hatches into a runt named Brightbill (Kit Connor) who must learn to fly to migrate and survive the winter. The bond between Brightbill and Roz is the heart of the film.
This opening act contains some very funny and surprisingly dark humor about the dangers of the natural world. Most of these come courtesy a family of young possums grappling with the nature of death, which they so often have to imitate. There are some excellent scary moments, too, including a chase from a ferocious bear that reminded me of the better parts of Brave.
The film’s second half abruptly expands the scope of the story beyond the island where we spend the first half. This is to the film’s detriment, because the closed setting is part of what makes the first half of the film work so well. We encounter some evil robots and an inhumane, nature-destroy robocorp. It’s a clumsy shift that pulls the focus away from the heart of the Roz-Brightbill relationship. The whole pacing of the conflict is off, in general; the question of whether Roz and Brightbill will learn to say “I love you” is stretched out to, like, 45 minutes with multiple fakeouts yet a surprisingly forgettable payoff.
Even more problematically, the movie ditches its intense and scary portrait of nature for a kumbayah theme of all the animals becoming best buddies. At one point, the various animals we meet need to survive a harsh winter, and Roz pulls them all together into a single shared space. When the predators start eating the nearby prey, they stop because… Roz and Fink ask nicely? The film does not provide any insight on how the predators persist without their logical and textually-defined food sources.
And the film’s very ending is especially stupid, a forced attempt at a bittersweet bit of longing that immediately contradicts everything that happened in the climax. One side character even lampshades it: “Wait, isn’t what you’re about to do the very thing we all just united to fight against?” This character gets a reply of a collective shrug.
These story hiccups are a problem, but they are very far from movie-ruining. They just mean that The Wild Robot will have to settle for being pleasant and gobsmackingly beautiful: the best animated movie of the year rather than a strong candidate for the year’s best film of any genre or medium, like DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots 2 was a couple years ago.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
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2 replies on “The Wild Robot (2024)”
Man, everything I hear about this makes me think it’s going to be super-inconsistent leaning towards worse at it goes on. Still, it’s DWA and Sanders (the good Chris, not that Sea Beast guy) who presumably at least took a meeting with DeBlois, so I’d like to see this before it escapes theaters. (Seems like it’s doing semi-okay so I don’t have to feel terrible I haven’t seen it yet.)
Re: HTTYD, though I may not have even seen it more recently than you, I remember it holding up pretty well. The human character animation is slightly janky (by modern standards at least, but it is in all of them, 3 getting it the closest to right) compounded by all non-Hiccup humans being kind of miserable (which they also are in all of them), but I’m reasonably sure I recall Toothless and the finale still looking surprisingly great for a now-14 year old movie. Though, again, at the time it would’ve only been a nine year old movie. But at some point things stop improving anyway, the best CGI character animation (if obviously not texturing) that I’m aware of is still from a movie from the same year in Tangled.
Yeah, as a fellow DreamWorks liker you should check it out if you can for sure.
Based on your estimate I’ve probably watched HTTYD around the same time as you, maybe slightly more recently, but I’ve never watched movies at a higher density of my life than the past four years so I probably would have a lot of new opinions about it.