The Wild Robot arrives in the UK off the back of its impressive US success. Here’s our review of the latest DreamWorks animated film:
The Wild Robot opens with what to my eyes looks like a fresh animation title sequence for its parent company, DreamWorks Animation. It’s the last film to be animated on site at DreamWorks’ California campus, and the logo alteration reinforces what the company has been successfully breaking of late: its visual house style.
You used to be able to spot a DreamWorks movie a fair distance away, just from a handful of images. But it moved away from its usual gloss in earnest with The Bad Guys, and has thoroughly accelerated its changes with The Wild Robot. It’s a beautiful movie whose parent company you’d be hard pushed to identify from its aesthetic.
Based on the book series by Peter Brown, it’s a fairly straightforward young adult story told with lavish, ambitious brushstrokes. There’s no disguising that the narrative at the heart of it is relatively familiar – but still, the visuals really are quite something.
The setup sees a ROZZUM unit – number 7134, if you’re attending a very niche pub quiz – that’s landed on a seemingly human-less Earth, instead surrounded by birdlife and a lot of water. Voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, ROZZUM Unit 7134, or Roz, is a task-driven robot, sitting somewhere between WALL-E and Ron’s Gone Wrong.
Not wishing to go full The Guardian and spoil the plot, the basics are that she has a device to signal to her creators to alert them that she needs help. But also, she ends up hatching a gosling. What’s a robot to do?
Writer-director Chris Sanders – he of Lilo & Stitch and the original How To Train Your Dragon fame – knows his way around a family film, so with economical dialogue, his adaptation swiftly establishes the rules of the robot, gives out a few stickers, and shows us the best fox plucking scene DreamWorks has committed to DCP.
It’s a movie that quickly drew me in, even if – on top of other films it reminded me of – I was getting visions of The Iron Giant and a bit of Amblin.
What I wasn’t getting too much of was a distinct narrative identity to the film, but also, I accept that the source material is a tale targeting a younger audience than me who haven’t seen these ingredients cooked together as often as I have. That exploration of when technology and nature come face to face.
Instead, what Chris Sanders and his team offer us is a mix of the familiar, with a few twists. Here’s what things are knocked a little offbeat. On the one hand, there’s a swirling mass of water that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Twisters spin-off movie. But set against that is a picture book-style fox called Fink – voiced by Pedro Pascal – who sits against the realness of the world he’s part of.
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I was really taken with that. And there’s no denying too that Roz herself is a fine creation. Sanders too has clearly zeroed in on a cinema screen, with a third act sequence that looks incredibly at home on a very big screen. A hat tip too to Kris Bowers’ score, that’s swirling as notably as the water on screen.
It’s a little bit paradoxical then. That on the one hand, DreamWorks Animation is pressing hard to chart new visual ground and rip up its own unsaid list of rules. On the other, it’s married to a tale that stays comfortably on home territory. It doesn’t entirely glue together for me, yet I couldn’t give you a way to improve it.
If the idea of a family film though is to offer something for the younger members of the audience, and something for those who had to pay for the tickets? Well, The Wild Robot certainly does that. It just leaves a small, lingering suspicion that it’s nowhere near as bold as it looks. Yet the numbers coming in from America suggest otherwise, and I have no quarrel with that at all.
The Wild Robot is in UK cinemas now.
