Wild About The…Wild Robot
A charming animation, in a less harrowing style of Watership Down/Bambi, during which we learn about the circle of life; life and death and seasons happen suddenly and swiftly, and most of all about hidden beauty, kindness, community and value. Like Fast and Furious, it’s about family!
Inadvertently washed up into a wilderness, the not yet wild robot ‘Roz’ (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is programmed to help — only none of the animals on the island want this or appreciate it. Scratched, bashed, fragmented and crashed, she begins to over-ride her programming to watch, listen, learn and re-evaluate her current situation in this strange new world. And to speak their languages! Additionally, as she seems unable to fulfill her helping mission, she keeps setting up her distress beacon to summon the mothership and take her back to the factory to start all over again. Only to have it stolen by the pesky critters who won’t let her help them!
Unfortunately, in a terrible accident, she ends up destroying a nest and encountering a lone surviving hatched egg — gosling Brightbill, (voiced by Kit Connor), who imprints on her. Ever task-focused, the Wild Robot get flying, swimming and feeding — learning along the way that life and its actions is much more complicated, as feelings get in the way and task/life stage completion doesn’t always follow in a list-ticking way. And that she’s keeping alive a creature, which naturally wouldn’t have survived and thrived. Then there are the consequence of her fall, which one day her adoptee will come to learn about…
The animation is stunning, full of depth and charming — like WALL-E. Best of all, the animation remains child-centric at all times and remembers who its audience are and their capacity; there is some peril and creatures get eaten at will, whilst keeping things grounded and focused. Even better is when legendary Bill Nighy turns up — hoorah!!! Pedro Pascal was delightful too as the voice of tricksy fox Fink. Goodness, Mark Hamill is in there as a grizzly bear’s voice! and Ving Rhames will get us all dreaming and believing that we can fly as master flier Thunderbolt, the peregrine falcon. Then there’s comes Catherine O’Hara’s death obsessed brood of possums, who provide a lot of funny comments along the way, cheerily opining about mortality.
I didn’t know how it was going to end — or want the movie to end. The animation, storytelling and character depiction is deep, emotional and thrilling, supported by a beautiful Kris Bowers score. Overtime, Roz helps the animal community (and is appreciated by them), and then they learn to help her back when she needs them as the factory mothership returns to take her back, clean her up and reset her back to factory programming standards, erasing her new ways of thinking and feeling.
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