The Wild Robot
Chris Sanders shared in an interview that when he was working on the film, he had in his mind a “Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest.” Sounds crazy, but he did it.
The very first shots of the film already declare, in loud announcer voices, that all the frames of the picture consist of the artistic work and craftsmanship “The Wild Robot.” It’s a pleasant change from the mediocrity that has become the hallmark of American CG-animated productions, while most dont care about the image at all, Sanders and his team show us how pale the majority of the rest of the industry is. Their approach isn’t the cold and antiseptic type that modern day audiences are accustomed to. It’s like moving art, almost as if you’re staring at an active painted canvas. It follows, in that regard, more in the footsteps of classic animation such as “Wolfwalkers” or Studio’s Ghibli work that the usual US cartoon figures. This film contains hundreds of images that could be enlarged and framed. One could mute all sounds and still enjoy “The Wild Robot” but turn it on and you get one of the best animated depictions of this century.
Lupita Nyong’o uses her wonderfully perfect voice to play the character of a robotic lady called ROZZUM 7314 which conveniently short forms to ‘Roz’ who gets lost and embeds herself in an uninhabited island. Roz is designed to be an assistant for the buyer; thus, she searches throughout her new habitat to seek her master. She doesn’t want to avoid any tasks before deploying a call back signal to go home. These opening scenes where a robot goes out of its way to be useful to any living thing around it are rather comical, full of love and laughter, and an ideal appetizer shall we say, of what is in store next.
The search takes her round some of the more obstreperous inhabitants of this island setting such as Fink the fox voiced by a Pedro Pascal or Pinktail the opossum voiced by Catherine O Hara or Thorn the grizzly bear voiced by Mark Hamill or Paddler the beaver voiced by Matt Berry. She also fears how she understands nature as it is terrifying. One of many brilliant aspects of american director Sanders interpretation of the book by Peter Brown is how fearless this movie is about violence. Something that was an element designed for child’s literature to be understood was violence, particularly in children’s animation as it now feels taboo. Nature is cute, yet nature has a lethal side to it.
Roz meets death and hunger in a single accident when she falls on a nest, killing a mother and almost all the eggs except one. A baby in the last egg (Kit Connor), however, hatches and immediately bonds with the robot, whom he calls Mom. If things in nature were normal, Brightbill would have been dead by now a typical runt seldom survives in the wild. But most runts don’t have a robot for a mom.
“The Wild Robot” has the same genetic makeup as Sanders’ brilliant “How to Train Your Dragon” and another one that I like most, “The Iron Giant” another classic story of a robot who turns against his creators. But Sanders doesn’t want to just copy his sources, he manages to find his own style combining tension along with humor and grace.
This is a film rich in surprises with its off-beat as it includes some self-referencing jokes on the death of animals within the wild but appears very real at every moment and very rarely artificial. The brilliance of the painterly compositions of the visuals extends up to other aspects of the movie like the incredible casting of voices (especially Nyong’o, who could have been monotone, gave the character subtleties) and a stirring score by Kris Bowers. There is something different when a movie project is commissioned to make money and when it is made for appreciation and passion and The Wild Robot is a movie that everyone put their lives into Ah! A timeless reminder of what a beautiful world is. This world may be ugly in many respects, but there is still beauty which is relevant in a world where children’s entertainment has gone fascist, this is merely great. It is a movie that is made in one way only, the heart. And that’s why it is so easy to listen to your heart in movie.
‘The Wild Robot’, is a story of machines and wild nature at its core, however, it also touches on the tender emotions of parents and their child. Roz is finally shown the harsh reality of discovering how to care for a child and realizes that caring for a child has nothing to do with the instructions she had on how to care for one. There is a time for everything and sometimes there is no alternative but to take the risk. Sometimes you have to be ruthless.
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