Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is back from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, but our coverage isn’t over yet! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
Either I’m a sucker for animated movies about robots bonding with animals, or TIFF has just been killing it with their choices in cartoons for the last two festivals. In 2023, the absolutely delightful Robot Dreams won my heart; this year, it was Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot. While the title might conjure up memories of Chopping Mall if you’re an adult or Ron’s Gone Wrong if you’re a kid, this adaptation of Peter Brown’s award-winning children’s novel is the rarest of Dreamworks releases. It’s a true all-ages family film, a visual splendor stuffed to the gills with genuine laughs and warmth.
The Wild Robot of the title is ROZZUM unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o), who washes ashore on an island seemingly untouched by human hands. She’s a model meant for domestic purposes, and if she’s assigned a task, she’ll take to it with aplomb. But what does she do on an island where there are no tasks to be assigned, and all of the local wildlife is terrified of her? Well, she knuckles down and puts those self-learning processors to work: within a few weeks, she can translate animal sounds into functional English and tries to re-engage with the animals. Things still go poorly — she’s attacked by a bear and ravaged by scavenging raccoons, and circumstance causes her to fall down a cliffside, accidentally crushing a goose’s nest when she lands. Only a single egg remains, and she takes it to safety. Or, she tries to, before a sly fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) intervenes. She prevails, but she shows Fink something he’s never seen before — a measure of kindness. The egg soon hatches; she assumes her task is completed, but the little gosling won’t stop following her.
A mother opossum (Catherine O’Hara) tells her that the little fellow has imprinted on her, and she needs to do three things before migration season to ensure he survives: She has to feed him, teach him to swim, and help him fly. Taking on the name “Roz,” she takes on the job, giving the little fellow the name Brightbill, or “Bill” for short. Months pass, and Bill (Kit Conner) has grown into an adult runt goose. Despite Roz’s best efforts and even with the help of Fink, who’s abandoned his trickster ways to serve as a father figure to the kid, he’s still an outcast among the geese. He can’t swim well or fly, and he comes to learn the truth about his past. After all, he was raised by the forest’s “monster,” and despite Roz’s best efforts, she can’t substitute for a mother goose — at least to begin with. With the support of the flock’s leader, Longneck (Bill Nighy), Roz and Fink begin a mad-dash crash course in all things swimming and flight. But will Bill survive his migration? And will the company that made Roz try to seize her before he gets back?
It should go without saying that this is a kids’ movie, so things do work out. But Sanders is a student of the Don Bluth school of storytelling, so the journey for these characters is significantly more arduous than you might assume. Think Secret of NIMH, with the formative trauma dial turned down to medium-low. The film’s darkness, if there is any, comes out most in the humor, which is gut-busting yet mild enough for kids to enjoy (chief among the best jokes are O’Hara’s baby opossums, who have a thousand different ways of playing dead in full method style, and her laissez-faire reaction to them being put in danger). The voice cast is fantastically assembled, and their work compliments the impressive art design and computer animation. It feels occasionally like it stepped off an accomplished children’s book illustrator’s easel and made its way to the screen, richly detailed and colorful. Yet Sanders hasn’t merely crafted the Dreamworks equivalent of The Good Dinosaur, a tech demo in search of a story. No, he’s assembled the whole package: a moving yet always engaging tale about finding one’s place in unusual circumstances.
He doesn’t patronize any audience member, either — everyone’s welcome here, free of the sermonistic nature of Disney moralizing. The lessons learned are hard-fought and less forthrightly delivered, its metaphor achieving meaning through storytelling rather than an easily parsed, high-concept conceit. This hoary moralizing has always been my issue with Disney/Pixar in recent years, despite my agreement with them on many of the values they claim to feature in their films, which is aimed less at their original audience and more at the adults. It’s true (and also not a bad development) that folks feel less embarrassed about a childless date night trek to the multiplex to see Inside Out 2 — families and lack of competition alone don’t push a movie to a billion-dollar gross. The difference is in the tailoring: we wind up with tales about preteen emotional growth that are less pitched at those that age (and those younger) and more for those who have already lived through that process, and its lessons are more prescriptive than empathetic.
Conversely, The Wild Robot may be about “parenthood,” but its approach is closer to “responsibility.” A kid who’s raised a pet — a puppy, a kitten, or a parakeet — or has grown up alongside a parent’s will be able to relate to Roz, and anyone who’s ever felt estrangement from a parental figure, whether they know to call it that or not, can see some of themselves in Bill. But the journey is more entertaining and rewarding in Sanders’ hands — it’s an adventure with the frights and thrills that accompany it, endowed with a generous sense of humor. Had Dreamworks made movies like this from their inception, they’d be pound-to-pound favorites in a match with this century’s Pixar and perhaps wouldn’t be in a position where they’re outsourcing their future productions instead of creating them in-house. But if The Wild Robot is truly the end of Dreamworks as we know it, it’s one hell of a way to go out.