The Wild Robot (2024)

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As much as I like Lilo & Stitch, something about the 2002 Disney movie always feels a bit off to me. Sure, it has a very non-Disney sense of irreverence that I can appreciate but it’s also a bit difficult to warm up to the blue alien serving as one-half of the title duo. And his bond with Lilo never felt fully fleshed out. Writer/director Chris Sanders actually conceived the idea for Stitch as a children’s book back in the ‘80s. While it never got off the ground, Disney — looking for a simpler tale in the 2000s unlike the sweeping epics they’d been churning out the decade before — gave Sanders the chance to bring his character to life.

However, his original concept of putting Stitch in the wilderness, interacting with forest creatures who treat the weirdo as an outcast, was dismissed by an executive at the time in favor of a more “human” approach. And so, Sander’s directorial debut revolved around the alien and a young girl longing for a stable family unit following the death of her parents.

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Unlikely bonds would continue to be at the center of nearly all of Sanders’ films, including How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods. It would be kismet that over 20 years later, Sanders would get his chance to helm a project that saw his original Stitch idea come to fruition, in a way. Now at DreamWorks Animation, the filmmaker was given the task of adapting and directing a feature-length adaptation of Peter Brown’s children’s book series, The Wild Robot.

In this movie, we open on a female-voiced robot (Lupita N’yongo) emerging from a shipping box to find that she’s on some remote island surrounded by wildlife. Everything from otters to opossums to beavers are terrified of this foreign creature. Even the local grizzly bear lashes out in a panic when he encounters the robot, who calls herself Roz (short for the product name, ROZZUM). She’s eventually able to communicate with these organisms after quickly learning their languages through a sort of computerized osmosis. Being a bunch of animals within an autonomous ecosystem, they never really need her help at all despite her programming. This leads her down a path to find her purpose without having to shove aside the reason for which she was actually created.

In cinema, we’re used to robots interacting with humans but rarely do we see them exclusively communicate with animals. After all, robots are typically built to aid humans. ROZZUM bots are no different, made to perform tasks for us and adapt to any situation we need them to thrive in. The futuristic world in which The Wild Robot is set aims to convince society that it’s actually possible to be prepared for everything. This is ROZZUM’s main value proposition.

Preparation is a running theme in film, as Roz finds herself parenting a young gosling, who she names Brightbill (Kit Connor) after accidentally killing his mother and siblings. With the help of a fox (Pedro Pascal), she’s able to figure out what to do despite it being outside of her programming. As a parent, I’m always hearing people put off having children until they’re “ready.” I inform them that no one is ever ready to be a parent. If we waited until we were actually ready, we would parent our children like robots.

Where your standard robot might be taught to learn and/or to know information, Roz is exclusively designed to adapt. She’s built to be like humans but learns to be human by tapping into the animal instincts required for child-rearing. It’s these lessons learned from animals, like a motherly opossum (Catherine O’Hara), combined with the human-embedded logic that helps her thrive as the central caregiver and teacher for Brightbill. “We must become more than what we’re programmed to be,” says an impossibly wise old goose voiced by Bill Nighy.

When Roz first meets Brightbill as a hatchling, the two have a moment where they touch foreheads (an instance that recalls Hiccup and Toothless in Sanders’ How to Train Your Dragon). Everything we know about movies tells us that Roz is reciprocating an immediate sense of unexpected love for this baby. That is, until she says, “Was this task completed to your satisfaction?” We snap out of this brief moment of emotion to remember that she’s a robot, and robots can’t love. Or can they?

What initially begins as an extension of obligation and attention transforms, over time, into what we can conceive as actual love for Brightbill. Most parents will tell you that they love their children before they even meet them. But is this also a biological inclination that combines our own love of self with a sense of responsibility gifted by some divine intervention? I’ve often wondered how easy or difficult it would be to love a child that’s not yours. And while I can’t give you an answer, I can guess that it at least requires more emotional adaptation.

The Wild Robot is more than an emotional supernova hitting us on every level. It’s a ton of fun. Yeah, there’s the whole fish out of water thing, which supplies a majority of the humor in the first act — and it’s all genuinely hilarious — but our investment in the story, as well as the comedy, doesn’t fade as Roz gets acclimated with her environment.

Sure, the narrative becomes a little sprawling once Brightbill flies south for the winter and we see an almost bathos sequence where Roz attempts to save the entire forest from a harsh winter. But we end up loving the world that Sanders creates for us that we don’t care about this digression; I could’ve watched another hour of Roz performing tasks that are detached from the central storyboard. Fortunately, the hibernation stuff is at least supplementary to the main plot and its motifs.

The Wild Robot employs a style of hand-painted animation that we saw in DreamWorks’ recent achievements like Puss in Boot: The Last Wish and Bad Guys, but this time it’s less stylized — less directly associated with the movie’s action sequences. It’s the first time we get so lost in the story that this art-forward style of animation is a mere ancillary detail. That’s what the best animated pictures can do. As much as The Lion King and Toy Story were groundbreaking technological achievements at the time, it’s not until the second or third viewing that you’re even able to focus on what’s happening on a technical level.

The Wild Robot is one of the best films that DreamWorks Animation has ever made. Visually dazzling and emotionally triumphant, it also makes a strong case for the best animated movie of the past decade. It may have taken twenty years, but director Chris Sanders has finally realized his vision where a robot has much to teach us about love and what it means to be truly human. Just be warned; this one may require a box of tissues. Maybe more than one.