‘The Wild Robot’ is a Heartwarming Masterpiece

The Wild Robot

★ ★ ★ ★

The Wild Robot is a wonderful, charming animated film that’s sure to please all age groups. It’s heartwarming, well written, and the animation is stunning. The final animation has a slight watercolor effect to it that enhances the CGI, making it visually captivating.

An intelligent robot named ROZZUM-7143, or Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) for short, finds herself stranded on an island after being washed ashore from a shipwreck. When Roz awakens, or boots up as it would be here, she discovers the island is uninhabited except for a massive amount of forest animals.

Roz and Brightbill
© 2024 Universal Pictures

Roz is designed to help humans complete tasks. Void of a task, Roz is designed to seek out things to do in order to be helpful in some way. We are told this is a part of Roz’s core programming.

Roz tries to help the forest animals, but because she doesn’t understand their nature, her fixes do more harm than good. She creates such a ruckus in the forest that the animals begin to revolt against her.

She comes to the realization that she doesn’t understand their language and sits down in the forest and studies all the animals in a time lapse that shows the changing seasons over the course of a year. When her analysis is complete, she’s able to talk and communicate with the animals and understand how she can help. She realizes how her previous efforts were unsuccessful.

Roz helps Brightbill learn to fly
© 2024 Universal Pictures

This was a clever way of breaking the animal-robot language barrier. Instead of accepting a film with talking animals, we’re given a scientific reason why she can understand them and they her.

Roz has yet to find favor with the animals as they have shunned her. With no purpose on the island, she activates a beacon that comes out of her head that is supposed to alert her makers, a corporation called Universal Dynamics, to come retrieve her. She is promptly struck by lightning and a pack of thieving raccoons steal her beacon. When she chases them to retrieve the beacon, she upsets a bear named Thorn (Mark Hamil).

The chase with Thorn sends Roz tumbling down a hill where she falls and crushes a goose nest. She has accidentally killed the mother and all the eggs but one. As she tries to examine the egg, a fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) tries to steal it from her. She manages to keep the egg from Fink until it hatches.

When the egg hatches, the gosling that comes out imprints on her. Fink tells her that it’s Roz’s job to keep it alive. She needs to feed it, teach it to swim and help it learn to fly so it can migrate in the winter with its kind. Roz is pleased to finally have a task and enlists the help of Fink to complete it.

Roz, Fink and Brightbill
© 2024 Universal Pictures

It’s a simple story told elegantly. The forest animals work as a great supporting cast, including a group of possums composed of a mother named Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara) and her seven children. The possum children are obsessed with death and dying and come up with innovative ways to play dead.

This really is a film for all ages. It’s beautiful, heartwarming and very well done. The script is expertly adapted from the New York Times bestselling middle grade novel written by Peter Brown.

Put simply, ‘The Wild Robot’ is a masterpiece.

Kids & Family, Adventure, Animation