The Wild Robot

"If I Could Talk to the Animals"

or

"What Do You See When You Look at Him?" 

"Crushing Responsibility"

 

Watching movies is always subjective. Your favorite movie may be someone else's bane (I don't plan or participate in "Movie Nights"). And one becomes selective. I'm particularly selective when it comes to animated features—I grew up watching Disney and Looney Tunes (the best!) and the output of Hanna-Barbera (limited animation and derivative plots), but also recognized those elements that were excellent where others left a lot to be desired—the Jay Ward output had really limited animation but the writing was clever and often brilliant). 

I'll hold off watching the Troll movies, or the Sing! movies or anything else that looks like it might push my negative buttons (the one that goes "Eject" for example) because I'm older in years and I'm at the point where I don't want to waste the fleeting hours I have left to me.*

 

So, yeah, I'm picky, as are you. I will not MISS a new Pixar Studios release and SEE it in a theater—I don't care how big your flat-screen is, it can't do justice to Coco—and I will usually see a new Disney feature because the early Pixar brain-trust is involved with those. With everything else, I'm choosy.

The Wild Robot was an easy "go". Based on Peter Brown's children's book, it tells the story of a utility robot, a model of the Rozzum series (this one's #7134 and voiced by Lupita Nyong'o, who is both precise and subtle), who, after a freighter capsizes in a typhoon, is washed up on an uninhabited island, more or less intact, and switched on accidentally by curious otters and proceeds to perform its duties—which is to help, solve a problem, and complete a task. Simple. Like a robot! But a robot in a forest does not compute. It's digital and everything on the island is so...organic! The animal-life is scared of this chrome trespasser and they just want to run and hide, despite the Rozzum's constant inquiries "Do you need...assistance?"

But, if there's anything about the Rozzum, is that it can learn—emulating a crab climbing a cliff saved it from being smashed by a large wave—and so, it sits and goes into "Learning Mode" until it is able to decipher the squeaks and grunts and chirps the animals make and understand it as communication tools, and the first thing they ask is "Are you here to kill us?" "Negative," it replies, but seeing the futility of trying to help these animals, Rozz decides to activate its homing retrieval beacon, but it attacked by the bear, Thorn (Mark Hamill), who breaks it. No retrieval, no "phone home."

Speaking of breaking, Rozzum's initial clumsiness leads to disasters several minor instances and one major familial one. It falls into a nest, destroying the family, with the exception of one egg. As the rest of the family is beyond repair, "Roz" takes the one egg and, seeing as there's a life-form inside, decides to keep it safe—a herculean task as there's a hungry fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal), who just happens to be peckish for an omelette. After the two come to a self-beneficial truce, Fink, in his own conniving way, helps Rozzum to understand what it is she is protecting, and once the egg has hatched a gosling—that imprints itself on Roz—instructs Roz on what goslings (and some foxes) can eat.

Now, there's already a lot of story there, and this Wild Robot is made up of a lot of recycled material: the "fish-out-of-water" trope, the Chuck Jones cartoon "8-Ball Bunny" ("Oooo! I'm dyyyyyin'!"), E.T.:the Extra-terrestrial, Wall•E, Noah's Ark—that will come later—and several other bits and pieces snatched from other media and cultures. But, there's another one that it takes a final page from and that's Bambi—like that movie, The Wild Robot acknowledges death and that "nature is red in tooth and claw." There is a pecking order on this little island and the small things get eaten by larger things and there is the risk that a character you might like won't last too long.

This makes the care of the newly-hatched gosling—Rozzum labels it "Brightbill" (played by Boone Storm and Kit Connor, at different stages of development)—that much more imperative. Roz has no idea how to raise a gosling and complete the task, so Fink suggests a neighbor opossum named Pinktail (Catherine O'Hara), who has plenty of off-spring, thank you, for some mothering advice. This comes down to three skill-sets: keeping the gosling fed, teaching it how to swim, and teaching it how to fly before the geese on the island make their winter migration off the island.

Food's not a problem, Fink is good at finding food—especially food that Brightbill can't eat (so, more for Fink) and Roz builds a shelter out of stones to make an enclosure to ensure its charge's safety. Teaching it to swim and teaching it to fly are other matters in terms of complexity. Oh, Roz can pull up facts on buoyancy rates and aerodynamics, but it's not the same. This little runt is going to need some extra-mentoring if it is ever going to leave the nest that Roz has constructed.

All this with the added story-rule that there are predators and there are prey and Brightbill is a tasty little morsel of a nugget. And as one gets to meet other creatures, like Matt Berry's grumpy beaver, Ving Rhames' falcon, or Bill Nighy's old goose, you realize that not every living thing on the island gets along. As someone says in Nature, "kindness is not a survival skill." All Roz wants to do is complete the task, as is its protocol. But, motherhood is just not in the programming.

So, there's a lot of basics familiar from other sources, but, the trick is trying to do it better and make it unique despite the provenance. That is something The Wild Robot does very well, taking the story places that the others hadn't and giving you fresh insights, while also charming the heck out of you. That seems to be the Dreamworks Animation trick—taking familiar things but making them seem bright and shiny again. They do that in the story...and in the artistic side of things, as well.

Where the Pixar pixelators seem to have the goal of making things look as photo-realistic as possible, Dreamworks goes another direction. I noticed it with their Puss-in-Boots: The Last Wish, a push against the reality of things and, instead, making things more impressionistic. It might be that it helps reduce the render-time of complicated images, but one can safely say that the complexity of images isn't sacrificed—there's a scene with a tree that explodes into a kaleidoscope of butterflies that is simply breath-taking to behold. The result, especially in the animation, is to give it a story-telling schmere that only increases the wonderment of what you're watching.

That is some amazing creativity on display, and between that and the directions that the story takes (and despite a jolting action-oriented third act), The Wild Robot is one of those great animation products that deserve to be considered a classic, going beyond its programming to become something very special.

 

It's the easiest "go/no go" decision you could make at the movies this year.

* I just finished reading "Opposable Thumbs," a not-bad book by Matt Singer about the history of "Siskel & Ebert at the Movies" in all its incarnations, and as much as those guys LOVED movies and LOVED reviewing movies, they got to a point where they said "if you think the movie's garbage, get up and leave! Life is too short and too precious to waste."