I first heard about The Wild Robot last August, months before the movie came out. I was talking to a friend, and she told me that she was excited to watch the movie as it was based on a book she had read and enjoyed as a kid. I didn’t know anything about the plot, or the genre, or anything except that it had my friend’s seal of approval, so I was willing to give it a chance.
The new movie is based on The Wild Robot trilogy of middle-grade science fiction books by author and illustrator Peter Brown. The first book, titled The Wild Robot, came out in 2016, and served as the source material for the movie adaptation. Director and screenwriter Chris Sanders was first introduced to the book by his daughter, and years later got an opportunity to create a film adaptation. He had previously worked on How to Train Your Dragon, an elementary school favorite of mine and Dreamworks’s best-rated film, directly in front of The Wild Robot.
The first emotion I felt at The Wild Robot was confusion. It opens with a scene of the main character, the robot Roz, washed up in a delivery box on the beach. What follows next is a montage of her, a futuristic personal assistant type machine, asking bears, crabs, and deer if they needed assistance grocery shopping or doing their taxes. The plot of the movie then follows Roz finding her place among animals on this island in a touching and emotional way. My confusion soon gave way to sympathetic wincing at her blunders and excitement at her successes. As the plot progressed, the audience was also introduced to a charming and eccentric cast of supporting characters. No matter the context or the characters involved, the movie did a good job of balancing humor, plot, and playfulness.
At times, I could tell that the animation was supposed to seem beautiful, but it never connected with me on an emotional level. I am, admittedly, not someone that watches many movies, and very few of them are animated. As such, I don’t have a developed taste in what is supposed to be impactful in a piece of art like this, and so I have no idea if this inability to really sit in the aesthetics of this film was just the way I saw it, a nod to animation enthusiasts that went over my head, or just a product of it being good-looking enough, but not particularly groundbreaking visually. In trying to remember examples of animation I actually liked, the only thing that came to mind were the Spider-Verse movies, which are commonly cited as groundbreaking in the way they combined a choppy, bright style with modern animation conventions. In terms of art in general, I tend to resonate with that sort of thing; tension between different elements of a whole. The Wild Robot went in a whole different direction; it is obvious in screenshots of the movie and apparently to everyone else that the movie’s visuals were a more watercolor-reminiscent and soft style. A more developed eye could have caught that, but to me it looked like pretty standard modern 3D animation. Overall, it had no glaring flaws visually, but was fully acceptable while the script was exceptional.
The score of The Wild Robot, while not groundbreaking either, did exactly what it was supposed to do and did it very well. Soft swells of music actually added to the softer, more contemplative bits of the movie, while its more upbeat parts upped the ante on rapid-fire plot points. This soundtrack is not entering any halls of fame, but it did something arguably more important in making the movie better.
I found that there were several points along the movie where it could have ended and been a very good experience. One would have provided a neatly presented “happy ending”, one would have been more contemplative, one would have felt triumphant. The movie, however, avoided seeming dragged out or bloated by making each emotional peak higher than the last, and providing ample time to breathe between each one. The actual ending of The Wild Robot was the best possible option, ending the whole experience on an open but optimistic note.
I don’t often watch movies, and haven’t watched an animated family movie in a long time, but The Wild Robot is worth the time even for those that don’t normally go for that sort of thing.
