'The Wild Robot' review: A triumph of soulful storytelling and breathtaking animation
In the opening scenes of “The Wild Robot,” a chirpy metal android with a state-of-the-art processing unit wanders around a forest asking confused animals if it can help them, offering discount codes and stickers for future customers. “Did anyone order me?” it asks.
We did, it turned out. This adaptation of Peter Brown's winning middle grade novel is an absolute movie triumph, a soulful sweet-sad animated journey that may have your kids asking why you're tearing up so much. It is destined to be ordered and reordered.
Chris Sanders, the writer-director of “How to Train Your Dragon,” “The Croods” and “Lilo & Stitch,” is the writer and director here. The assignment is daunting: Turn a beloved book with a few illustrations into a full-length movie without losing its tangy heart. Sanders didn't just nail it; he lasered it.
“The Wild Robot” is the fish-out-of-water tale of a futuristic helper robot who ends up marooned on an island when a storm sinks its container ship. It learns to adapt and connect with critters it has no programming for, even adopting the cutest gosling you'll ever see (sorry, Ryan).
The robot — ROZZUM unit 7134, or “Roz” for short — is voiced by Lupita Nyong’o in a spectacularly nuanced performance, sprightly robotic at first and eventually natural and wry. The other voice actors — Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames — aren't like the hired guns that other animated movies use to entice an audience. Each is wonderfully calibrated.
The movie keeps the basic structure of the book but ups some characters — like elevating the importance of Pascal's red fox — and has a tendency to go a little Hollywood, like sending a robot army after Roz and setting everything on fire. But it never lags, the visual effects are startling, and its soul is intact.
“The Wild Robot” is often a story about programing — natural and artificial — and how that can help and hinder. “I do not have the programing to be a mother," Roz tells a mother possum (a superb O'Hara). She replies: “None of us does.”
Roz has ended up on an island where survival of the fittest and instinct are the rule, where animals don't sing and dance but struggle and hunt each other. “Kindness is not a survival skill,” our robot is told by the fox.
“The Wild Robot” is also a celebration of adoption and found families. The push-and-pull of being a parent is there, as is the celebration of friendship. And there is death, an honest reminder of the struggle to stay alive.
Visually, it is stunning, a textured world that is almost painterly. You can see snowflakes settle on mottled fur, moss on rocks, individual leaves in a den. The images of a tree covered in butterflies is so spectacular it should be a poster we all can frame. No offense to Roz, but regular computer-generated efforts — “Transformers One,” we're looking at you — look lackluster in comparison.
Roz accidentally causes the death of a goose family, save for an unbroken egg. That orphan is now Roz's obligation — she must teach it to eat, swim and fly, culminating in winter migration. And she must face tough questions — about how a robot came to raise a little goose. “He found where he belongs,” Roz says with cheerful sadness when her gosling swims to a group of geese.
What is home is another theme: Roz feels the pull to return to her factory but only out of obligation. Her heart is on this island and the friends she has made, especially after making a safe place for all creatures during a freezing winter. Her kindness changes the way the animals see each other, even if it cannot change their appetites.
Being a mother changes Roz, too, unmooring her from her ones and zeroes, making her improvise and even willing to break some rules, like learning to lie to create a creative bedtime story. A busted-up robot from the shipwreck is stunned by what Roz has become when she stops by to consult: “You should not feel anything at all.”
As for you? You're going to have all the feels. Surrender. Is this the best animated movie of the year? Totally, so far. It might even be the best movie of the year. See you at the Oscars, Roz.