Alright! Today I'm reviewing DreamWorks' 2024 film The Wild Robot, which adapts the 2016 novel by Peter Brown for the big screen. The Wild Robot tells the story of ROZZUM unit 7134 ("Roz"), who gets lost in shipping and winds up in a forest in Oregon, where she learns the true meaning of love after accidentally adopting a baby gosling.
The very first thing you'll notice about The Wild Robot is that it's a visual masterpiece. It's not the completely 1000% photo-realistic animation we see sometimes in the modern age, nor is it like the glitchy Kpop and Spider-Verse animation - no, this is more along the lines of what we saw in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, matching the gouache strokes while maintaining its cartoon dignity. The way they designed the forest is breathtaking, looking painted à la The Wizard of Oz in some scenes and hearkening Bob Ross in others. The animals are all incredibly anthropomorphized, and the robot animation is properly shiny and satisfying in the way it clicks and snaps together.
The voice acting is superb as well - while the trailer gave me the impression the dialogue would be sparse, Roz quickly learns how to communicate with the wildlife and the entire movie suddenly becomes hilarious. Between possums playing dead, the sly fox, mean grizzly bears, and peculiar beavers, much of the film's humor is actually derived from very smart subversions of the fairy tale tropes and feels very natural. I'd say the two standouts are the two leads - Kit Connor is wonderful as the goose Brightbill, and Lupita Nyong'o turns an unforgiving role as "emotionless robot" into a complex vocal story as she goes from stereotypical robot voice to an emotionally versatile (But still distinctly robotic) voice.
Another definitive highlight - and the reason I loved the movie - was the emotional weight of it all. "Robot learns to feel love by taking care of gosling" is a terrific hook and one that is sure to hit you in the feels if they do it right, and The Wild Robot doesn't just do it right, they knock it out of the park. Despite the fact that I see geese every day in my backyard and I know that they're not particularly majestic creatures, I have never seen a flight scene more epic than the one in this movie. The geese leaving for migration is given more majesty than the portals scene in Endgame, and the emotional charge doesn't stop there, because for the last half of the movie I was misty-eyed and the credits were punctuated by a loud sob. Maybe not everyone will be as deeply affected by the robot/goose mother/son dynamic, but I sure was.
With that in mind, I'd also praise the musical score to the maximum extent that I can. Those emotional moments that I just barely mentioned are all underscored by one of the best film scores in recent memory. While they might depict mundane things like geese migration, the score matches the emotion of the scene in a way that only a beautifully composed orchestra can, and Kris Bowers (The film's composer) did a wonderful job turning the film's melody into an anvil that crushed my heart.
On the negative side, I'd say that the movie feels kinda slow. Since the movie doesn't have a defined villain and focuses more on the relationship of Brightbill and Roz over the course of a year, the second act lags as it transitions from that emotional threat to the main physical threat of the movie. It's still deeply rooted in the emotional journey of the characters that we know and love, which is why it doesn't completely derail, but the transition felt choppy as the cold winter connects the two ideas.
I'd also say that a few emotional beats were reminiscent of WALL-E, not as a strictly bad thing, but as an interesting thing to take note of. It's obviously different enough that it's not wholly derivative of WALL-E, but there were a few moments where I found myself thinking, "Hey! They pulled a WALL-E!" Aside from these two mild criticisms, I can't find a single fault in The Wild Robot, and it endeared itself to me through the heartwrenching emotional autumnal voyage. I have no doubt it will go down as a children's classic for the new generation.
Overall, I give The Wild Robot a 9/10. "The Wild Robot is an emotional rollercoaster."
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