DreamWorks Animation Tries Its Best with The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot is the final animated film, at least for now, to be produced entirely in-house by DreamWorks Animation. It’s by no means the end of the House that Shrek Built; three DreamWorks cartoons (relying, reportedly, on outside studios) are scheduled for 2025, and Shrek himself will soon return, doubtless armed with a bunch of meme references and hacky music cues. In the meantime, though, here is a DreamWorks animated feature that doesn’t begin with the protagonist introducing themselves and their world via voiceover. Here, even, is a DreamWorks animated feature that doesn’t feature much upfront dialogue at all, surely a terrifying prospect for a studio whose creative signature has long been pure yammering. At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney.

This happens most frequently by the hands of Chris Sanders, writer and director of The Wild Robot, who also had a hand in the first How to Train Your Dragon and Croods movies. Most prominently, Sanders is the creator of Stitch, who became something of a golden goose at Disney after Lilo & Stitch hit in 2002. This doesn’t mean that Disney had any particular use for Sanders as a filmmaker, mind – he still voices Stitch for them as needed! – and soon both he and his frequent collaborator Dean DeBlois were some of the strongest players at DreamWorks. The Wild Robot continues his streak, adapting Peter Brown’s book with DreamWorks’ later-period visual style, favoring more brush-like, illustration-friendly textures.

The book is a middle-grade novel, but the movie actually looks more like a picture book, setting the harder, shinier surfaces of ROZZUM-7134 (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot who washes ashore on a remote island, against the warmer, bushier, more painterly surroundings. Following programming urging it to perform services for some kind of a master, the ROZZUM unit solicits various animals and fails to help them navigate through the harshness of nature. Eventually, the robot – assuming the nickname Roz – absorbs animal languages, allowing her to communicate more directly with various creatures, who then communicate to the audience using various celebrity voices (though the celebs are less ostentatious, and the yammering, thankfully, is taken down several notches). When Roz accidentally destroys a nest of goose eggs, she saves the final egg from the hungry fox Fink (Pedro Pascal, sounding a bit like Ben Schwartz) and winds up raising the runty hatchling, eventually named Brightbill (Kit Connor). Parent-child friction derives from Roz’s terrible secret, and Brightbill’s need to migrate with the other geese before winter comes to the island.

Movies that attempt to convey the bittersweet experience of parenting to a younger audience are usually Pixar’s department, but Sanders has dabbled in this area with How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods. The Wild Robot is closer to those movies – in tenderness, in the energy and variety of its character designs, in fluidity of its animation, and in reference-light humor – than many other DreamWorks productions, and, for that matter, it’s better than some Pixar movies, too. Yet despite Sanders’ abiding interest in remaining an animator, rather than a calculating one-man board room, there is something – forgive me – programmatic about The Wild Robot, particularly in its attempts to tug at the heartstrings.

The Wild Robot is refreshingly upfront about the fact that parenting includes plenty of mistakes – can even, in fact, spring directly from mistakes, rather than picture-perfect intentionality. Yet as the movie drives an emotional wedge between Brightbill and Roz, it leans with awkward weightiness on parental guilt trips, as Roz continues to labor selflessly for the well-being of a child who no longer fully trusts her. It starts to feel strangely self-pitying, like something out of a Sirkian melodrama; rather than gazing with wonder at a machine defying its utilitarian origins to become more fully alive, the robot seems to be pleading and suffering for our affections.

It doesn’t need to: Nyong’o gives a characteristically lovely vocal performance, covering the gradual and subtle shifts from deadpan robotic boilerplate to a more complicated array of emotions, mirrored by her increasingly scuffed and depleted exterior. She and the animation are so expressive that some of the movie’s other creative decisions feel like they’re gilding the lily. Bill Nighy, for example, turns up as an older, wiser goose who mentors Brightbill and also understands Roz’s devotion, even when her adopted son does not. In a sense, he’s good casting; who doesn’t instinctively respond to the gentle wisdom of Nighy’s distinctive tone? His presence also allows the movie to take a shortcut, feeding Nighy a bunch of pap to say with great conviction where, frankly, silence and animators could probably say it better.

Maybe these complaints are churlish; watch any given Illumination movie to discover a litany of ways that Wild Robot succeeds and so much contemporary studio animation fails. This is a sweet, entertaining movie that parents and children will likely enjoy, and it has more to offer than chattering Minions. But given its resemblances to Wall-E, Finding Nemo and Zootopia, among others, DreamWorks Animation is also ending one phase as it began: with imitation, rather than invention.

Director: Chris Sanders
Writer: Chris Sanders
Stars: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Catherine O’Hara
Release Date: September 27, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.