Oct 295 min read

Film REVIEW: The Wild Robot (2024) - ★★★★★

Meet Robot-son Crusoe! Adapted from Peter Brown’s best-selling children’s book about a shipwrecked droid – with a voice cast led by Lupita Nyong'o and Pedro Pascal.

Here’s our guide to the new DreamWorks movie rewriting the laws of animation.

Director: Chris Sanders

Writer: Chris Sanders

based on The Wild Robot by Peter Brown

Stars: Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O'Hara, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames.

Genre: Animation, Sci-Fi

Themes: Robot, CGI Animation, Fox

After a shipwreck, an intelligent robot called Roz is stranded on an uninhabited island. To survive the harsh environment, Roz bonds with the island's animals and cares for an orphaned baby goose.

The film received universal acclaim for its story, animation, emotional depth, and vocal performances, particularly from Nyong'o.

In Cinemas Now

MIX UP REVIEWS:

Stewart - ★★★★★

"A stunning animated film - a bit of a tearjerker also. Nature vs machine and in a day and age where artificial intelligence is advancing at an alarming rate, this story of a machine who finds her heart and home is quite apt.

Voice cast is excellent with Nyong'o doing some really special vocals. A wonderful animated tale."

Mix Up Junior (Age 5) - ★★★★★

"I give it 10 out of 5 - the best bit was when they were cuddling each other."

Have you seen it yet?

Will there be a movie of The Wild Robot? Buzz and backstory

Of all the bedtime stories we’ve stolen off our kids and read in secret, Peter Brown’s 2016 novel The Wild Robot might be the best. At first glance, it’s a simple tale of a futuristic droid – ROZZUM 7134, or ‘Roz’ for short – that washes up on a desert island and bonds with the local fauna. But by the end, we realised Brown had held up a mirror to society, explored how science interacts with nature and unpacked themes of family, home and the meaning of soul.

No wonder The Wild Robot pricked up ears at the story-hungry animation studios of California – and this funny, touching, profound adaptation definitely isn’t just for pre-schoolers. “There was just something about it that appealed to me, and as I read the book I realised it was a good fit for me,” director Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, The Croods) told JB Hi-Fi. “The funny thing is that I mentioned to my daughter that I was going to be working on The Wild Robot and she said, 'I read that book' and she pulled it out immediately.”

What is The Wild Robot about? Plot and themes

Roz is one of a million ROZZUM units shipped daily across the world. But when the robot’s ship goes down and her container lands on an uninhabited island, she must evolve beyond her factory settings to survive. Roz isn’t wired to think, feel or become emotionally attached. But from cagey first encounters with the wildlife, she masters language, forms bonds, experiences kinship – and even becomes the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling. When’s the last time you saw the Terminator being this touchy-feely?

But there’s trouble brewing. Roz might have gone feral, but she’s still a high-value product and soon a sinister squad of ROZZUM robo-enforcers touch down to reclaim the “defective” droid. “We had The Wild Robot book at DreamWorks and the message to us felt incredibly timely because it’s about humanity, really,” says studio CEO Margie Cohn. “It’s about nature, it’s about humanity, it’s about how people can be kind to each other."

Cast of The Wild Robot - Who is in The Wild Robot voice cast?

The master animators at DreamWorks put their own spin on Peter Brown’s original illustrations, but it took a stellar voice cast to make them jump off the drawing board. Get ready to hear Lupita Nyong'o (Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, Black Panther) as Roz, flanked by Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian, The Last of Us) as mischievous fox Fink, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s Catherine O’Hara (Home Alone series) as a possum, Bill Nighy (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest / At World's End) as an elder-statesman goose and Kit Connor (Ready Player One, His Dark Materials) of Heartstopper as the gosling that Roz takes under her wing.

“You launch off the characters,” The Wild Robot movie director Chris Sanders told The AU Review. “You make a choice in what character you want to create. Pedro is a fox, and he does foxy things, and he has that clever, impish appeal going on. Roz, to a degree, is unwritten. The journey in finding Roz’s voice was that we went to Lupita first and foremost, because she’s such an amazing talent. Casting her was just the beginning of finding and creating the character.”

Expect some A-list cameos, too, including Mission: Impossible’s Ving Rhames (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2), Star Wars’ Mark Hamill and fruity-voiced British comedy legend Matt Berry in roles still to be confirmed.

The Wild Robot trailer - What footage have we seen so far from The Wild Robot film?

Technology and nature don’t usually mix. But that’s why The Wild Robot trailer is so striking, with the impressionistic animation style catching the tug-of-war between Roz’s gleaming metallics and the untamed island. “Put simply, the style of this film needed to be worthy of the story we were telling,” Sanders told Animation Magazine.

“The Wild Robot film is set in the natural world, and the business-as-usual photorealistic CG look we’ve become habituated to would look tired and cheap. We needed grace, power and poetry in our visuals. I proposed a question: can the painterly studies we generate in early stylistic exploration be identical to the end goal? Can our visual departure point also be our destination? Can this film look like a painting? The answer from our artists and engineers was a resounding, ‘Yes!’”

The Wild Robot trivia - What's an interesting fact about The Wild Robot?

Having recently starred in A Quiet Place: Day One, Lupita Nyong'o told Entertainment Tonight she ended up living it during production of The Wild Robot film. “The hardest part for me was Roz’s first voice, which is that very high-pitched, positive sound – it's a different resonance from my own, so it was quite acrobatic for me to do that. The repetition of going to that high-pitched, highly resonant head space resulted in me having a vocal injury. I ended up developing a vocal polyp and spent three months in silence.”

The Wild Robot and DreamWorks - Why is this such a milestone movie for the Californian animation studio?

Early DreamWorks movies were big, bold, boisterous CG-style adventures – think Shrek, Kung Fu Panda and Madagascar. Now, on the California animation studio’s 30th birthday, Chris Sanders remembers asking DreamWorks president Margie Cohn if she was comfortable signing off on a movie with such a different tone and look.

“We all agreed to be true to the book and bring that story to the screen,” the director told The Wrap. “And Margie and all DreamWorks were incredibly supportive of this movie. It’s not like it doesn’t have aspects that we love and are familiar with. But I think the sheer power of the story is another level and we’ve been in lockstep from the very beginning.”

The Wild Robot is a quantum leap for animation. “I gotta say, I’m pretty excited,” director Chris Sanders told Annecy Film Festival. “More than any other film I’ve ever worked on, I’m just so truly excited for people to see The Wild Robot for the first time. I’ve been anticipating this moment for a long time, and I can’t wait for the finished film to get out there.”

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