The Wild Robot review – a moving ecological parable

The filmography of animation director Chris Sanders is full of unlikely friendships between man and beast: Lilo & Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon, (both co-directed with Dean DeBlois) in particular, the latter using fantasy as an allegory for conservation. The Wild Robot plays like a little twist on this, in that it’s expressly concerned with the inevitable endpoint of human commercialism, by studying that from the viewpoint of animals.

Ironically, those animals slowly humanise its eponymous character, a household server robot named “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o, excellent here) who crash lands on their island. In her blundering to acclimatise to her new surroundings, she accidentally crushes a goose nest, and ends up caring for the last surviving gosling. The early act of the film is laced with moments of dark animal kingdom comedy as Roz fixates on her “task” of teaching her adopted child Brightbill how to fly before the migration, which has become muddled thanks to climate change.

It’s a moving allegory for parenthood, even with its unlucky proximity to the similarly themed Ultraman Rising. The Wild Robot, however, takes on messaging about the effect of human capital on the environment, which goes a long way to set it apart.

Perhaps even more than that, the film impresses for its looks. One of the best touches is how Sanders and co. use 2D, painted backgrounds in concert with rendered environments, as if we’re seeing a physical soundstage with a backdrop. It feels like a minor detail, but it’s also essential. That clear evidence of a human touch makes everything feel natural, which positions Roz as an invader with her digital polish and unnatural motion through her jointless limbs; eventually her very rendering changes with her developing personality, her look as a moss-covered robot caretaker feeling more than a little inspired by Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky. The film is full of these expressive touches, such as a beautiful sequence of more primitive animation which employs childlike illustrations for a bedtime story. (It also feels bittersweet – according to online sources, the studio is planning to scale back its in-house work).

For all its creativity, the writing can sometimes feel rushed, leaning on cliché in order to get to the next major plot beat. One of the worst culprits is a pivotal scene overplayed by a Bill Nighy-voiced character that only seems to speak in motivational quotes (derogatory), coupled with an insert song full of rather painfully on-the-nose lyrics (a lot of the score is similarly heavy-handed). The rest the film moves with an admirably light touch, treating moments of silence as sacred, which makes the heavy-handed parts stand out more.

The Wild Robot is innovative in many ways but perhaps too traditional in others; some moments bring it back to feeling like the median DreamWorks film, despite its many flashes of brilliance. Still, it’s a moving ecological parable, and its visuals are an encouraging continuation of the general trend in 3D animation towards graphic textures and away from the restraints of realism, even if it’s something as small as a leaf being represented by an abstract splotch of paint.