The Wild Robot

THE WILD ROBOT   ***

Chris Sanders

2024

IDEA:  Stranded in the wilderness after a storm, a service robot comes to care for an orphaned gosling.

BLURB:  The Wild Robot contains a thematic density and complexity that feels uncommon to contemporary American mainstream children’s media. Starting from a simple but fertile premise based on the collision of artificial intelligence with the animal kingdom, the story touches on such rangy ideas as social conditioning, adaptation, otherness, parenthood, the relationship between technology and nature, and the necessity of empathy as a survival mechanism. With its factious woodland critters and the robot interloper who manages to civilize their community, the film operates as a kind of allegorical Western that grafts (somewhat problematically) the social dynamics and psychology of human society onto a diverse species of wild animals. Yet if we take anthropomorphism as a given in the landscape of Disney-fied kids’ films, The Wild Robot proves to be a rather more mature example, tempering its sentimentality with a recognition of mortality and, arguably, an anti-essentialist and transhumanist view of evolution. All this within a gorgeous, texturally- and chromatically-rich animation style that combines painterly strokes with the weight of 3D rendering, further enlivened by a strong voice-acting cast. The Wild Robot distinguishes itself frequently enough from the pack that it’s disappointing when it doesn’t, especially in the frenetic pacing and overbearing soundtrack that have become endemic to modern-day Hollywood filmmaking (for kids or adults). Maybe that’s a quibble for a movie that is also so wise and big-hearted you can’t help but admire it.