Good for the goose

THE WILD ROBOT

2024

Written and directed by Chris Sanders (based on the novel by Peter Brown)

Spoilers: moderate

DreamWorks Animation, here at the start of 2025, is in the sourly ironic spot of having just had its best year in a while, financially—maybe in the last decade, but I'd have to look it up, and I've already spent most of an hour reading about geese—while also having its weakest year, artistically, in most of a decade.  Last March, the studio released a legacy sequel to one of their big moneymaking franchises, Kung Fu Panda 4, earning $548 million on an $85 million budget (the latter in keeping with DWA's general 2020s economizing).  This past September, they released today's subject, The Wild Robot, which, as an original film (or an original-to-cinema adaptation, anyhow), was the more prestigious of the two; but even without any firmly-established IP behind it, it still brought in a healthy $324 million on an investment of $78 million.  And between these*, and 2023's Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (a financial disaster, but also a film of such resolute mediocrity it seemed wholly deliberate), I really don't know what to do but to declare whatever DreamWorks Renaissance there was to be over, this being a term that very few people have ever used besides myself, and which I'm not wholly sure I ever used before January 2023, partly because I only then realized that I'd loved (almost) every single thing DWA had done since 2016, and mostly because Puss In Boots: The Last Wish had just come out, and for one beautiful moment in time, "the DreamWorks Renaissance" didn't seem like a completely embarrassing thing to say.  It's sad, but that moment has passed.

Well, that's just, like, my opinion, man—right?  And, given that asterisk, not all that well-founded.  And sure: animation studio "renaissances" are subjective, vibesy things, and any organization is entitled to a little slump; except if there were such a thing as a DreamWorks Renaissance, it would, by definition, still have to end with The Last Robot.  Now we find the real irony, and the real sourness, of DWA's good year, each being magnified exponentially (far beyond some random observer's suggestion that your hit movie sucked), for with The Last Robot, DreamWorks Animation ended too.  That's only a slight exaggeration: as a result of decisions made since 2023 (seriously, thanks Ruby Gillman), large swathes of DWA's staff were laid off throughout 2024, and while the name "DreamWorks" will persist and Glendale will remain a development hub, substantial amounts of their animation are going to be outsourced (principally to Sony Pictures Imageworks), and I understand that DWA's remaining employees are, naturally, not very optimistic about their futures.  For this and other reasons, I wish I liked The Last Robot more, and didn't have to be so unbearably crabby about it; hence I do still appreciate that this crypto-finale for the studio has been embraced as thoroughly as it has been, and I'll take this opportunity to reflect those others' affections coldly back out into the void, like a lonely old moonray.

That's not the tack the rest of the review is going to take, though, since I slightly hate The Wild Robot.  I started out hating it, and it took a serious recalibration of my expectations to realize that this at least was—kind of—my own fault, for somehow allowing myself to have had expectations of the film that the film itself never had any interest in fulfilling.  By the time I'd dispelled my biases, it was already heading into the end of the middle, whereupon I liked the movie going on about thirty minutes—even loved it, albeit only for roughly five.  I get the feeling that if I rewatched The Wild Robot, a whole lot of its first half would play better that second time, with my standards lowered to appreciate the movie for what it is—the kind of talking animal cartoon where the animals are basically just people in animal bodies, one that's taking outright enormous pains to pretend it isn't, but nevertheless operates on essentially the same plane of anthropomorphism, and for the same reasons, as (e.g.) Zootopia—but that rewatch isn't likely to happen soon, because once one gets through The Wild Robot's front half, one arrives at The Wild Robot's back half, and that back half is truly very bad, without anybody needing to worry about being "fair" to it.  It's a movie that thinks it's Bambi, or at least wants you to think it's Bambi, but born out of such a divergent, 21st century mentality that the way it thinks Bambi ought to end is, as before, with an all-consuming forest fire, but now because it's been started by a giant laser battle; also the animals should potentially be able to work together to effect some quite stunning feats of hydrological engineering to stop it.

Perhaps this is the stamp of its auteur, Chris Sanders, amongst whose claims to fame is ending E.T. with a giant laser battle and calling it Lilo & Stitch, though I think we can spot the impulse a little more readily for Lilo & Stitch, where the film that inspired that was already about a sci-fi alien, rather than the life cycle of a fawn.  Sanders has had a long and storied career—not an exclusively successful one; arguably he's better when paired with his frequent co-writer and co-director, Dean DeBlois, but then, DeBlois did executive produce here—but one of the less pleasing rhymes which that career is now poised to take on is how Lilo & Stitch constituted an isolated success for Disney, when its Renaissance had faded.  Though it'll be a lucky break if The Wild Robot retains the same currency as Lilo & Stitch twenty years after from now.

The other little rhyme is that Sanders just seemed destined to eventually wind up with The Wild Robot, to the extent that I had previously assumed that it wasn't adapting anything except abandoned development ideas from Lilo & Stitch, which had started, after all, back when it was still just post-it notes with ideas written on them appended next to Sanders's Stitch doodle, as a tale of the alien landing in the North American woods and—how about that—meeting animals.  (While I don't have any reason to believe Brown's novels were written with any awareness of this, I don't know how loudly I'd publicize it if they were, and my novel had been picked up to be adapted by the very man whose story idea had first inspired me.)

But The Wild Robot is that story idea, with the added swerve that now Stitch is a square.  So: at some nebulous point in the future history of Earth, a whole shipment of ROZZUM robots is lost in transit, but Unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong'o) activates, due to the accidental meddling of the wildlife on the western coast of what's probably Canada.**  Programmed to perform useful tasks, and presuming one of these beasts must be her master, "Roz" is initially stymied by the fact that she cannot understand them; after spending several weeks listening and analyzing, however (in a rather neat "time-lapse"), she learns their speech, which appears to be a language common to all of them, from the opossum (which would place us, at a maximum, barely north of Vancouver, in a movie that does not benefit from being pegged to "barely north of Vancouver," though I guess their range isn't set in stone; Catherine O'Hara) to the jarringly-British beaver (Matt Berry) to the grizzly bear (Mark Hamill).

In a terrible accident instigated by her awkwardness, she knocks down a tree that editing seems to suggest is home to a Canada goose, killing the mother (no word on the father, but I reckon that if I asked Sanders, "so what species did you think you were depicting?", he'd punch me in the nose), and leaving only one unhatched egg.***  Something about this activates Roz's programming, and she defends it from Fink, the fox (Pedro Pascal), who'd like to eat the egg, though by the time it hatches, and Roz decides that she is obliged to raise it, at least in the absence of any other instructions (the gosling also breaks her long-range transmitter), Fink strikes a deal with her to provide advice as "a goose expert," in exchange for Roz's technologically-mediated helpfulness and company.  Thus the gosling, which Roz would give a numerical designation though Fink prevails on her to give him a name—Brightbill (Kit Connor)—becomes their responsibility, and some responsibility he is, since he's a runt, and to other geese he's a freak, what with having been reared by a robot and a fox.  However, like all Canada geese (this also isn't true), Brightbill must migrate south to avoid the winter, and Roz embarks on a step-by-step plan to teach the gosling to eat, to swim, and to fly.  But is Roz's metal heart warmed by her new maternal role, and will she exceed her programming and learn to love her adoptive son?

I mean, yes, and everything successful here grows out of the analogue to a unconventional family that Roz, Fink, and Brightbill forge over their months together; if it weren't mixed in with such a surfeit of action-adventure crap, I'd probably be willing to forgive it the missteps it's frequently still making even when it is playing to its strengths.  One of those missteps, perhaps, is that it takes its time even getting to Brightbill's hatching, and you could make a case that the structure incorporates an entire first act ahead of it, where Roz meanders ignorantly around the wilderness, and that gets us to The Wild Robot's really wonky approach to tone, and even to what genre it's in.  Some of this is, I suppose, just the fundamental contradiction here: it wants to celebrate "nature" with a story that's basically about an equivalent to, or at least an emotional stand-in for, an untrained (but fortunately more-durable) modern human stranded out in the boonies and interceding in natural processes in ways that make her soul smile, and usually by means of imposing her preferred order upon the chaos.  I don't think it even realizes that this is a contradiction.  Accordingly, the movie constantly but also extremely half-assedly insists on the notion that Roz is navigating some sort of legitimate ecological reality; hence one of the first things we get to witness is a bird's freaking head flying off, trailing blood.  But it's always how you tell it.  The bird's head flies off, but it's played as a joke, and the punchline is the scrum of various small-fry predators who vie for the corpse, who become a big blurry cloud of dust.  It's akin to the meditations upon nature pursued by such mid-century pioneers as Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, William Hanna, and Joseph Barbera, back when they perfected such realistic depictions of predator-prey relationships in animated form.

In other words, it's somehow more incredibly childish than if it didn't bother, because it feels like it's doing it to be "edgy" and not even achieving that modest aim, because there's no real violence inherent to this vision of nature (not long after the flying bird head, the film makes the single darkest feint it ever will with the opossum, who barely reacts, because she's an r-strategist who barely cares, to the apparent sound of one of her seven marsupial fetus-babies being snatched up by a predator, and the movie falls over itself within sixty seconds to assure you the little bastard lived after all; meanwhile, though I'm very sure there's a shot of him with a distended belly, so I must be wrong, but I would swear on a Bible that Fink never actually consumes a single meal in this film).  But if there were real violence, vast stretches of the movie would not work, because at a certain point—tellingly enough, it's after the "mom plot" has ended and the movie's drunkenly stumbled into its second half—Roz just up and establishes a grand inter-species confederation that might as well have a constitution and a legislature.  It's very stupid, but only ever the natural extension of a film that just straight-up, no-two-ways-about-it, runs at least a half-hour longer than it has a story to tell, and which all along has been supplying as many human traits to its menagerie as it can, while removing any narratively-troublesome animal traits it desires, for instance, "goslings hatch knowing how to swim, and do so almost immediately."  And if I've been tedious about "this isn't what geese are like," it's because this talking animal cartoon keeps trying to convince you that it's "about geese." 

Once you get used to that, it's a very nice little motherhood fable, though Roz isn't really much better than the animals: by the time you get used to them—by the time you, say, learn to be charmed by the character embroidery of the British beaver's lifelong ambition to chew through the forest's biggest redwood for the glory of it (in the big and small things this movie does not know what to do with its runtime: that "character embroidery" is significantly more charming before it turns out it was "brutish foreshadowing")—Roz's robotic nature also gets anthropomorphized, and she's generally less interesting the more "just human" she becomes.  (Nyong'o isn't really great in either mode, though I think she does alright at threading hints of consciousness into what's nominally empty-headed chatbot cheerfulness, and the limited but expressive repertoire of Roz's character animation helps; but Pascal is by leagues the best here, if only by achieving "the most archetypal cartoon fox dad imaginable," feigning sincerity but also feigning insincerity, and constantly threatening to eat other characters and the like.)

And there's some built-in drama, thanks to the movie never letting you forget that Roz did kill Brightbill's real mom, and it just plain works on its chosen level of translating the mistakes of unprepared motherhood, and the travails of a developmentally-delayed son, into the form of a well-meaning-but-clueless robot and a goose who needs to learn to fly, respectively.  So for about half an hour—increasingly so as that half an hour comes to a close!—you also, to your peril, begin to believe it's left open to itself some genuinely fascinating options to keep going, either on a really heartrending path that no longer has recourse to its science fiction conceit, and thereby shades into some meaningful stuff about the end of childhood (if not so much "goslinghood"), or a path that leans as hard as possible into the artiest side of that science fiction conceit, which, after all, is ultimately about a somewhat-immortal non-animal with no further reason to exist still existing out in nature.  (I have some deep, deep suspicions that, whatever the novel series gets up to, Sanders's own instinct was to make this a whole lot more like Bambi once it arrives at that juncture, and there are a shocking number of shots scattered around—finished shots, in this animated film, which just perplexes me—that seem to exist solely to foreshadow Roz's wear-and-tear and eventual demise.  Well, guess what doesn't happen.)

But, for the purposes of its second act, it all comes together in a grand spectacle of migrating geese that is, unfortunately, also where the film's chalkscrawl/digital paint aesthetic—a cousin to The Last Wish and The Bad Guys, but quite distinctive—just flat fails by descending into a mush of pixels.  (In a departure for me, I haven't really talked much about the animation and style here.  That's because I think it's largely handsome without being worth talking about as much as people seem to be talking about it: the backgrounds are, modally-speaking, a lovely impressionistic portrait of the Canadian Pacific, boosted by some very good lighting effects; the characters are generally a little more abstract than Roz, either because of her simpler textures or entirely deliberately, which would "make sense," but it's not really in ways that pay off.  I'm almost convinced this one might have benefited from Pixar Photorealism, honestly, and while that might've just made the tensions in the narrative approach worse, maybe it would've gotten the animators to think twice about that "survival struggle becomes a giant dustball" and other such dysfunctional cartoon flourishes.  Anyway, when the layout sends the camera sweeping over landscapes of single colors—the field where the geese have congregated, or that laser-sparked forest fire—and sometimes when we're just sitting and looking at orange Fink, the absence of detail feels as much "unfinished" as "impressionistic."  I was, however, enraptured by the "illustration" look of a sequence where Fink tells Brightbill a bedtime story about Roz's origins, which is still very cool, and sweet, even if one's tendency is to smirk at the "ecology tale" where the animal requires "a bedtime story.")

Then we get that third act, effectively a totally new movie starting up about evil (and preposterously dumb) robots attempting to retrieve Roz, and it's just such "family animation" nonsense.  (It also makes its world-building fall apart, and "world-building" wasn't even something I was prepared to worry about: the way the first scene is edited—this is not a well-montaged cartoon, I might have mentioned—I thought Roz crash-landed from space, and throughout the impression The Wild Robot gives is that it's the far future with humans having abandoned Earth.  They still kind-of have: they live in domed cities now but I sure don't know why, because despite some glimpses of pronounced climate change, the Earth is obviously fine.)  But it's like if in the second half of Bambi, instead of mating, Bambi wandered into the third act of Snow White, to take up arms for the princess, and these are not, even remotely, compatible things; and throwing a laser battle into Snow White isn't, really, all that much better than putting one in Bambi.

Score: 5/10

*Now, I am speaking out of turn here, because I'm basing half of this appraisal on information and belief, rather than firsthand experience.  But at least nobody I know thinks that Kung Fu Panda 4 is good.

**And if that reminds you of another Disney cartoon besides Lilo & Stitch, you're right, it's even more like Brother Bear.

***Told you.