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The Wild Robot poster

The Wild Robot

“Discover your true nature.”

8.3
2024
1h 42m
AnimationScience FictionFamilyAdventureDrama
Director: Chris Sanders
Watch on Netflix

Overview

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.

Trailer

Final Trailer Official

Cast

Reviews

AI-generated review
The Algorithm of Tenderness

In the landscape of modern American animation, there is often a frantic race toward hyper-realism—a desire to count every pore on a character’s face or trace the physics of a falling leaf. Chris Sanders’ *The Wild Robot* halts this breathless sprint, asking us instead to sit in the grass and watch the paint dry. The result is not merely a technical triumph for DreamWorks Animation; it is a profound meditation on the violence and vulnerability required to be a parent, disguised as a family survivalist fable.

Sanders, the director who gave us the bruised, misunderstood hearts of *Lilo & Stitch* and *How to Train Your Dragon*, returns here to his favorite leitmotif: the alien creature crashing into a hostile natural world. Yet, *The Wild Robot* feels like the maturation of that theme. Where Stitch sought a family to quell his chaos, Roz (voiced with architectural precision by Lupita Nyong'o) seeks only a task to complete. Her transition from a utiltarian machine to a mother is not presented as a magical awakening, but as a grueling, terrifying system error—a glitch that becomes a soul.

Visually, the film is a revelation. Moving away from the plastic sheen of standard CGI, the film adopts a painterly aesthetic explicitly inspired by Tyrus Wong’s impressionistic backdrops for *Bambi* and the lush, breathing forests of Hayao Miyazaki. The screen is awash in visible brushstrokes; the light does not just hit objects, it saturates them. This stylistic choice is crucial to the narrative: Roz, a creature of geometry and vector math, is quite literally trapped in an Impressionist painting. The visual dissonance emphasizes her isolation more effectively than any dialogue could. She is hard lines in a soft world, a binary code trying to decipher the analog mess of nature.

At the film's center is a daring performance by Nyong'o. It is easy to play a robot for laughs, but Nyong'o treats Roz’s vocal evolution as a delicate gradient. She begins with the chirpy, hollow helpfulness of a corporate assistant (think Alexa with a god complex) and slowly, almost imperceptibly, cracks the voice with warmth. It is a masterclass in vocal control, mirroring the film’s central thesis: that love is not a pre-installed software, but a rewriting of one’s own code in real-time.

The narrative strikes a difficult balance, refusing to sanitize the brutality of the wild. The inciting incident of Roz’s motherhood—her accidental crushing of a goose’s nest, leaving only one egg—is a moment of genuine horror that hangs over the film. This is not a Disneyfied nature where the lion lays down with the lamb; it is a world where "winter" is a villain more terrifying than any fictional antagonist. By refusing to sugarcoat death, the film gives weight to its gentler moments. When the script suggests that "kindness is a survival skill," it earns the sentiment because we have seen the alternative.

As the final film produced entirely in-house at DreamWorks, *The Wild Robot* serves as a poignant closing chapter for an era of the studio’s history. It rejects the cynical franticness of franchise-building in favor of a story that breathes. It argues that to survive—whether as a robot on an island, a parent raising a child, or an artist in an industry of algorithms—we must eventually exceed our programming. We must allow ourselves to be overwritten by the people we love.

Clips (6)

The Robots Attack!! Brightbill's Wild Goose Chase

“I Could Use a Boost” – Full Film Clip

Are You My Mother? Roz Finds an Egg!

A Baby Hatches

Roz Becomes One With Nature

A Goose That... Can't Swim?

Featurettes (14)

Scene at The Academy (Feat. Lupita Nyong’o, Chris Sanders, Kris Bowers, & More)

Script to Scene (Longneck)

Script to Scene (Rescue)

Interview | Dir. Chris Sanders

Storyboard Side By Side

Lupita Nyong'o on being inspired by AI for The Wild Robot #lff

Pedro Pascal on his first animated voice role in The Wild Robot #lff

How To Draw

The Love & Kindness Behind THE WILD ROBOT | TIFF 2024

Sustainability

Mark Hamill On The Heart Of THE WILD ROBOT

'The Wild Robot' with filmmakers | Academy Conversations

National Read A Book Day With Lupita Nyong’o

Maren Morris Announcement

Behind the Scenes (16)

Chris Sanders Legacy

Overall Achievement

"The Heart Of The Film" - Bonus Feature

The Magic Behind The Movie (Featuring Lupita Nyong'o)

Lupita Nyong'o And Pedro Pascal Talk The Wild Robot Origins

A Deep Dive Into The Original Music - Bonus Feature

Behind The Scenes (Featuring Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal And Mark Hamill)

Behind the Animation "Migration"

Behind the Animation "Beach"

Score

Actors Going Wild "Vontra"

Actors Going Wild "Fink & Thorn"

Actors Going Wild "Brightbill"

Wild Voices

A Look Inside

A Wild Vision

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