The mild robot
Dreamworks' latest (and arguably last to be fully animated in-house) movie has at least two things going for it: 1) the flattened handmade painterly look of the Spiderverse movies and Puss n Boots: The Last Wish that's currently all the rage; and 2) the fact that it's not Pixar or Disney.
On the minus side are two: 1) It's not Pixar or Disney but sure as hell feels like a Pixar or Disney movie; 2) most everything else.
The Wild Robot starts out as a fish out of water story, or in this case a stranded bot on an island (presumably off the Pacific Northwest coast). Rozzum Unit 7134 (voice of Lupita Nyong'o) lying in her damaged casing ('ROZZUM' being a veiled nod to the grand patriarch of literary artificial intelligences, Karel Capek) is accidentally activated. She looks around, realizes she has been delivered to the wrong location, attempts and fails to signal for retrieval, and-- interesting concept-- goes into 'learning safe mode' till she can speak the locals' language and find a new purpose.
Long story short: Rozzum 7134 ends up cohabiting with a fox named Fink (voice of Pedro Pascal) and a standard-issue fluffy n adorable gosling named Brightbill (voice of Kit Connor), shifting genre from 'fish out of water' to 'mother and adopted child.' 'Roz' (as Fink nicknames her) is tasked with teaching Brightbill how to feed, fly, migrate for the winter, the process and in fact the movie's whole first half chock full of the usual slapstick. Why do moviemakers keep assuming folks 18 and younger-- sometimes older-- are afflicted with ADHD? The jokes fly fast and furious and the storytelling is almost frenetic; no time to pause and, say, drink in the atmosphere of a pine forest, or mull over the beauty of a sunny afternoon meadow, or gaze blankly at the view from a craggy peak. Nature's beauty ain't enough no matter how lovingly rendered, you need to throw in a few yuks to keep the young uns occupied.
To the movie's credit we see the fox, a predator, gangpressed into Roz's cause but still feeding on other small creatures to live. Fox may be able to talk (and who's to say animals don't communicate, even across species?) but he's not violating his essential nature, he's still a fox, and he likes to snack on small critters, sometimes the occasional crab.
Interesting too the choice of crustacean or rodents, quickly dispatched, as snacks-- the movie softpedals Fink's carnivorous appetites as much as it can without being too upsetting, tho as we see later even this tenuous grip on the natural order will soon be broken.
Things get complicated between Brightbill and Roz, to the point that Brightbill flies south for the winter without really saying goodbye to Roz, and Roz contemplates returning to her company for another mission, setting off the plot of the movie's latter half. Again to the picture's credit it manages to come up with a character I actually enjoyed-- not Roz (please) or Brightbill or even the occasionally amusing Fink but Vontra (voice of Stephanie Hsu), the octopuslike bot sent by Universal Dynamics to retrieve its stray. Vontra is beautifully malevolent and chirps in the bright cheerful manner of a customer service AI about to put you on hold; one has to love the spin she puts to lines like "Your memories are what we came for!"-- you sense the glee of a more than slightly cracked scientist gloating over the fact that she's about to siphon yet another central processing unit of its database soul.
A few howlers spoil the fun-- the idea that a bunch of forest creatures can stand up to a troop of armed robots without incurring casualties; the idea that a robot can just activate itself out of love (cue eye roll); the idea that predator and prey can hibernate together in a winter hut Roz has built and, later, forge a lasting alliance. The latter's especially egregious; matters start out chaotic (I'd have thought a few smaller critters would've been eaten at this point) but when Roz and Fink calm everyone down and big bear Thorn (voice of the wonderful Mark Hamill-- much prefer his voice work in animation over Luke Skywalker any day) rumbles out a solemn vow that while in this shelter he won't start anything... he sounds a lot like Vito Corleone with hand raised, declaring he will never violate the truce while plotting the massacre of his enemies.
And yes there are moments when predator and prey do sit alongside each other in the real world: 1) when they've grown up with each other in a household (a very special case), and 2) in watering holes in the African or Australian grasslands or desert-- but not as often as is popularly believed. Only occasionally do they drink peacefully; a pecking order exists as to who gets to drink first; and lions have been observed to lie in wait in the long grass nearby, waiting to ambush prey.
One can argue that Roz is the domesticating force that allows all to get to know each other, and come together-- but once that happens and everyone on the island knows and loves each other, how are the predators supposed to feed? Do they go vegan or starve to death? If they can eat, will some creatures assigned as 'livestock'-- and who gets to choose? Knotty questions and in fact interesting questions that it would be nice to answer but-- O yeah. The kids.
The movie has its poignant moments-- Roz and Broadbill taking their leave of each other in the face of oncoming winter is largely wordless, and effectively staged, with a fair amount of unspoken emotions. Towards the end Roz's fate is appropriate and logical-- but Sanders has to tack on a coda suggesting a friendlier ending-- again, presumably, for the kids, and a possible future franchise. Whatever.
Roz's design and behavior takes inspiration from a number of sources including the Star Wars droids and Robby the Robot but I'd say, looking at Roz lying there in the forest covered with moss that her most direct descendant are the abandoned robots in Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Sanders has only admitted to the connection once or twice, which I'd call a smart move-- Miyazaki's robots have a wordless eloquence and pathos, lying there dormant for hundreds of years, rousing to cut a destructive path through people and castle alike, dying without protest in service to their queen-- that Sander's creature can't even hope to match; wouldn't do to be reminded of the far superior film. At one point Roz is informed "You are ordered to return home!" and Roz replies "I am already home-- and I am a wild robot!" and lets out a whoop. Maria, Hector, Ash, Proteus IV, The Gunslinger, Roy Batty, and Hal 9000 among many others would like to have a word.
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