The Wild Robot: A Heartwarming Tale of AI and Nature Hits the Big Screen

The Wild Robot review - heartfelt animated adventure is a soaring success

Peter Brown's much-loved novel gets turned into a dazzling big screen film for all-ages that's one of the year's most entertaining animated offerings At first glance, The Wild Robot, a new movie from Dreamworks Animation (and one of the studio's last in-house productions), seems to target the voguish cultural anxiety over sentient, talking computers - technology designed, to borrow the dubious promises of companies like Open AI, to seem more and more like a human. The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons' household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong'o, has the flat affect of Amazon's Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her. For The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) performs a sly, absorbing and extremely effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot - the more its programming trains on new input, to use the parlance of generative AI - the more it underscores the deep, inarticulable and sacred wells of human feelings, the exact things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. That this film, based on the book series by Peter Brown, does so while also being a highly enjoyable and lusciously detailed story about a misfit, amid a community of charismatic woodland creatures, makes it one of the best animated films of the year, rightfully considered the frontrunner for an Oscar. Rozzum Unit 7134 - Roz, as she eventually becomes known - is greeted with understandable suspicion by the furry inhabitants of the island. Transformer-like, with spindly metal arms, veins of neon lighting and large, easily anthropomorphized screen eyes, Roz neither looks nor thinks like a living thing. Her logic is pure binary - execute task, then return to manufacturer, no failure allowed - successfully played for laughs and sympathy in the cutthroat forest food chain. Devoid of a clear purpose and thwarted in her return by the natural world's chaos, she stumbles into the possession and care of something she does not understand: a lone goose egg, the rest of the family crushed beneath her. As a household assistant device, Roz has no conception of caretaking (or of geese), but she is very good at the task at hand, even if that task is rescuing the egg from wily fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) - an early action highlight in a film with several impressive, invigorating wordless sequences. When the gosling hatches and, by the laws of nature, identifies the first face it sees as its mother, a world-weary possum (standout Catherine O'Hara) dryly points out that Roz has a new mission now: parenting. Or more specifically, in this hard-edged yet never harsh natural world (the possum remarks that she's a mother of seven, until a chomping sound amends that to six), Roz must teach the gosling, a runt named Brightbill (Kit Connor), to swim and fly by the fall, in order for him to endure the flight south and survive the winter. The path forward is clear, the stakes high yet never too overwhelming for young viewers, but the way The Wild Robot gets there is a surprising emotional journey that launches it into the pantheon of elite animated films. All elements are working here, from the performances - a collection of woodland creatures voiced by Bill Nighy, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames - to clearly defined characters to increasingly grand stakes, as Roz's manufacturer, suspicious of her emotive adaptations, sends another robot (Stephanie Hsu) to retrieve her. The animation style, as Roz begins to not only recognize and understand yet treasure feelings, is appropriately prismatic and sweeping - part photorealism (brushtroke precision for pine needles or otters' fur) and part impressionism, a world that sublimely toggles between the naturalistic and the surreal. (Roz's gait, as she takes on the different movements of the forest creatures, is particularly striking.) Though Pascal, as the sardonic straight man to Roz's 1s and 0s and corporate cheeriness, is the easy charmer, Nyong'o delivers the film's essential voice acting, her performance shifting as Roz begins to understand emotions, experiencing a relatable bafflement at one's own strange attachments. It's a deft and tricky performance that pays off in the film's slightly rushed final section, which ups the ante to near existential levels as (off-screen) humans send more robots to retrieve Roz, with devastating, if quickly passing, results for the ecosystem we have come to love. Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one's throat. And it delivers on the promise of a truly great animated feature: to express universal truths - love that defies logic, feelings that come from places we don't understand, the bittersweet bargain of letting someone go so they can flourish - through the inorganic. If only all robot stories had this grand of a humanist vision.

The Wild Robot Humanizes AI Responsibly - IGN

This article is part of IGN's Fantastic Fest coverage and is a spoiler-free look at Chris Sanders' The Wild Robot, featuring the voices of Lupita Nyong'o and Pedro Pascal. I had some concerns going into The Wild Robot. While I quite love a kid's movie with heart, I've been trepidatious around anything surrounding robots and AI lately. With everything going on with regulation of AI or, rather, the complete lack thereof, as well as our inability to compete with the technology's carbon footprint, I've lost any patience for even the tool's most practical applications. That, combined with the issue of Big Tech sticking its nose in the arts far too much over the past 5-10 years, had me worried about The Wild Robot. Sure, the film being written and directed by Chris Sanders (the man who brought us Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon) should have eased those concerns right out the gate, but the last two years of creatives fighting tooth and nail to protect the film and television industry has left me cynical. Mea culpa, Chris. My cynicism was unfounded. The Wild Robot does make you fall in love with Roz (Lupita Nyong'o) who is, yes, an AI-powered robot helper created by an evil tech giant. After a storm sends her shipment off course, Roz is stranded on an island inhabited only by animals. She learns to speak their language by studying them for some time, and basically does nothing but cause severe damage to her surroundings for much of the first act of the film. Roz eventually finds herself forced to care for a baby gosling, and the story sort of snowballs from there. By the third act, it becomes apparent that Sanders and the team behind the movie were very aware of the tightrope that they needed to walk to make something heartfelt without accidently celebrating a technology that has created an existential threat to their preferred medium and continues to exacerbate the severe climate risk we are facing around the globe. Roz may be an AI-powered tech, but she eventually learns that she is a "dysfunctional" one. Her emotions -- which she discovers partway through the film -- are not a feature, they're a bug, and they separate her entirely from the rest of the robot fleet that she was created with. The filmmakers take that thoughtfulness seriously not just with Roz, but with the world around her. By the time we see the rest of the planet outside of the island the robot's been stranded on, it becomes apparent that climate change took a major toll across the globe. The consequences of that are not explicitly tied to AI -- which is logical since this is a children's film and that is a lot of big information to unpack -- but it does make the choice to depict a climate disaster as a clear part of the future world Roz and the animals inhabit. It even offers some glimmers of hope so far as life after said disaster is concerned -- but digging too deep there will take us into spoiler territory. All of this no doubt makes it sound like The Wild Robot is a hyper-serious film that tackles big themes, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The film, like all of the best kids movies, has complicated concepts woven into its D.N.A. to help introduce munchkins to its ideas, but otherwise it's just a fun, emotional (and quite pretty) journey that encourages us all to ignore our programming and choose kindness.

Review | Mechanical mom meets nature in 'The Wild Robot'

From DreamWorks Animation, based on a best-selling children's book, a tale of high tech gone AWOL. (2.5 stars) There's a subset of family movies that's obsessed with humanoid technology -- robots, personal helpers and the like -- and that is determined to work out the conflicted feelings we human beings have toward them. "The Iron Giant" (1999), "Robots" (2005), "WALL-E" (2008), "Ron's Gone Wrong" (2021) -- the list goes on, and why not? Our children will be living in a world where telling artificial intelligence from the real thing may be a survival skill, so why not prime the pump and tiny minds early? What makes matters even more interesting is that for every "The Mitchells vs. the Machines" (2021) -- technology is out to kill us, ha ha -- there's a movie like the new DreamWorks Animation production "The Wild Robot," which says that a child's best friend is his metallic mother. Here's your popcorn, kids -- discuss. Adapted by writer-director Chris Sanders ("Lilo & Stitch," "How to Train Your Dragon") from Peter Brown's 2016 best-selling children's book, the film is just fine for the little ones and engaging for the grown-ups, if not the groundbreaking work of family animation that early reports have made it out to be. There are almost no actual humans to be seen, just a collision of critters and high-tech cyborgs, the latter in the form of a Rozzum domestic servant automaton, Unit #7134, that washes ashore on an unpeopled island somewhere in Northern Europe after a storm at sea. There's a lot of comedy and more than a little food for thought watching the robot power up and approach every mammal, bird and bug offering help and asking for instructions in the dulcet tones of Lupita Nyong'o. Bonus for history nerds: The brand name Rozzum is presumably a tip of the hat to the 1920 play that introduced the word "robot" to the English language, Karel Čapek's "R.U.R.," an acronym for "Rossum's Universal Robots." There will not be a quiz. In any event, the robot soon renames "herself" Roz and, after scaring half the woodland silly and adapting to her environment in a long, funny, harum-scarum action scene, settles down to befriend a cynical fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and raise a runt of a barnacle goose (after accidentally squashing his parents, but never mind, never mind). The runt evolves from an adorable gosling to an ungainly teenager named Brightbill (Kit Connor), and much is made by Fink and the other island animals of the fact that runts aren't meant to survive at all. Further alienating Brightbill from his fellow geese (a mean-girl goose voiced by Stephanie Hsu, a wise elder voiced by Bill Nighy) is his habit of talking like a robot's owner's manual. Will he be able to join the annual migration south before winter comes? Will Roz be able to come to terms with this new, unprogrammed emotion she feels called maternal love? Only a child would call this suspense, and maybe not even a child weaned on a steady diet of Hollywood family films. Sanders is one of the animation business's artistic elders, so one wants to cut "The Wild Robot" slack, but the movie lacks the manic weirdness of "Lilo & Stitch" or the high-flying charm of "How to Train Your Dragon." Plus the flat, geometric rendering of the characters that is DreamWorks' house style has always felt too close to CAD modeling software for my tastes -- it's an aesthetic choice, but one that seems a step short of final. (The film's backgrounds are painterly and quite beautiful, though.) "The Wild Robot" has reduced a lot of respectable early reviewers to happy tears, and chances are that you and your children will feel the same. So go already! And allow me to be the Scrooge who says machines can always only mimic emotion and never, ever feel it, and a movie that tells you otherwise is selling you something. The next iteration of Siri? The Matrix? "The Wild Robot 2"? I don't know, but something. PG. At area theaters. Contains action/peril and thematic elements. 101 minutes. Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.