THE WILD ROBOT: A Few Geese Short Of A Flock

Every few years, there’s a generation-defining animated movie that appeals to adults and kids alike and brings the medium to new heights. I really wish The Wild Robot could be that for me. But unfortunately, despite its rapturous reception from critics, I found the film to be a chore to sit through, an endurance test on par with the Minions movies. Ringing, ceaseless noise and action with no thought to pacing and little care for story. I did not enjoy this movie, nor do I think it’s good. Caveat: It also made me cry my eyes out.

Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot follows a lone service robot (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) lost in the wilderness. It wanders the woods looking for purpose. The robot quickly learns the common tongue of the animals of the forest and from there chances upon a duckling, which it raises as its own. Action, comedy, and warm family-friendly PG stuff ensues. I’d go into more detail, but I honestly cannot remember most of what happened in this movie.

When I left the theater, I thought I’d just disliked it but that it was broadly good, but then I found that I could only remember moments, not entire scenes, and virtually none of the atrocious dialogue. That’s not a good sign. When your animated kids’ movie can’t stick in a grown-up’s head for more time than it takes to watch the end credits, you’ve got a problem. Either I’m already senile at the ripe age of 27, or this movie is actually kind of bad.

DreamWorks Has Been Ruining Animated Movies For Decades

Unlike much of The Wild Robot’s target audience, I was alive for the birth of DreamWorks Animation. (Maybe not DreamWorks itself, but its animation division? I remember that.) Launched by Steven Spielberg and Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg along with a cool gay producer and record executive named David Geffen, DreamWorks’ animation division was early enough to be a pioneer in computer animation but just late enough to be eating Pixar’s table scraps. Its films were comparatively uglier and less polished and had stories that, let’s face it, had much narrower audience demos. To make up for that disparity, DreamWorks flexed its singular big Rolodex and assembled a titanic A-list cast for every single movie the studio made. Since the stunt-casting of Eddie Murphy as a talking donkey, Mike Myers as a big Scottish ogre, and Charlie’s Angels star Cameron Diaz as a spunky princess in 2001’s Shrek, cinema has never been the same.

DreamWorks movies not only ruined the way that animated movies were cast and marketed, dumbing down every movie to basically just be a hodgepodge of famous people and barring hundreds of voice actors from leading these films as a result, but they also spearheaded a revolution of snark, innuendo, PG-13 humor, and overall bad taste. Now, I like Shrek 2. I think it’s a masterpiece. But it is a fact that the movie has no fewer than three sex jokes, one reference to Shrek’s genitals, a set piece parodying police brutality, and a joke about marijuana possession. But what, I’m sure you’re wondering, does this have to do with The Wild Robot?

source: Universal Pictures

The Wild Robot is a beautiful film in frames but not in motion. It is a smart film in its silence but not in its noise. The film throws so much at the audience that to seriously engage with all of it is to have a brain aneurysm. Its depth is impossible to find because of the sheer volume of stuff going on all the time. Most of the film’s impact can be credited to Kris Bowers, the composer, whose energetic score carries every single emotional beat on its back. DreamWorks’ scores have always been great, and Bowers’ is no exception.

The characters undergo arcs yet still feel one-dimensional, and they’re still voiced by an A-list cast. I love Bill Nighy, but he voices a random-ass goose patriarch who says two very philosophical lines and then gets merc’d off-screen. Ving Rhames shows up for the easiest payday he’s gotten outside of the Mission: Impossible movies, and like his cardboard performances in those films, I expect he recorded all his lines sitting down. Catherine O’Hara voices a possum, for some reason, whenever her character was speaking, the trailer for Doogal (with Jimmy Fallon voicing a rabbit and Whoopi Goldberg voicing a horse) just played in my brain on loop. I enjoyed the fox until I realized it was Pedro Pascal, and then I wanted to forget that fact immediately so I could enjoy an otherwise charming vocal performance. Stephanie Hsu is here too, basically just playing the same character she did in Everything Everywhere All at Once but with only three minutes of screentime. At the center of the film is Lupita Nyong’o, who voices the robot with all the conviction of a L’Oréal commercial.

None of this is inspired, this insipid, bottom-of-the-barrel drivel. It personifies everything wrong with modern American animation and all the damage DreamWorks did to the industry: There are moments of poignancy and frames of gorgeous splashy colors and incredibly painted backdrops, sure, but they’re impossible to extricate from a film that has no idea what it’s trying to be, why, and how, and is instead dead-set on trying to be everything to everybody. There’s nonstop noise and action to entertain the tikes, robots with guns and big explosions to appeal to the tween audience and any Titanfall 2 fans in the crowd, and mature emotional beats to appeal to the adults. But most of this is empty spectacle, a series of flashily edited sequences of nonsense building to tear-jerker moments that the film does not earn. It made me cry, sure, but I felt robbed of my tears, like the movie doesn’t deserve them.

On just a script level, the movie is confusingly constructed. The first reel commits to the Roz-gosling story, complete with a training montage that comes out of nowhere. And it’s set to the worst song ever (“Kiss the Sky,” performed by Maren Morris and written by six people, sure to garner a Best Original Song Oscar nomination). So much dumb shit happens in such a short span of time that my brain spun. And then Roz sees the geese off on their great migration, and I checked my watch — the film wrapped up its only story arc only 60 minutes in, and we still somehow had 41 minutes to go.

Contradictory Animation And Poor Design

The animation style of The Wild Robot leaves me at a total loss — why would DreamWorks opt for hand-painted backgrounds when the creatures themselves look like cheap video game renderings? Apparently the whole film is hand-painted, but I don’t buy that for a second — not when DreamWorks has been doing computer animation for 30 years, and not when the result is this poor. Plus, I’ve seen the animation passes — “hand-painted” must mean something different to me than it does to the DreamWorks team, because that looks designed, blocked, and assembled in a computer to me.

source: Universal Pictures

The director called the film’s aesthetic a “Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest,” which is an impressive insult to both Claude Monet and Hayao Miyazaki. At least Miyazaki’s animals looked closer to life than this. Pedro Pascal’s fox character looks like he was pulled straight from the video games Spirit of the North or The First Tree — his fur is distinctly polygonal and has a weird digital sheen, and his eyes are bright, green, expressive bulbs that clash with every other design element. The style doesn’t cohere at all, and the Wild Robot and its animal friends wind up standing out like sore thumbs against the beautiful backdrops. It’s giving “Annapurna indie game” — and not in a good way.

The design choices in The Wild Robot are typical DreamWorks. But in a WALL•E ripoff that’s trying to tell a Serious Story For Adults, the lazy designs are even more glaring and inappropriate. The studio has long had an issue with stereotypical design — it mines its fat characters like Shrek and Po for weight-based comedy, gives its women like Princess Fiona and Astrid laughably tiny frames, and relegates its characters to strict gender roles. That Roz is forced to become a mother against its will reflects a basic assertion the movie has that women are meant to be carers, nurturers, and mothers while the men are allowed to be surly warriors or wily, flighty parents. The robots with female voice actors are service robots with slender, rounded designs and gentle, kind personalities, while the robots with male voice actors are stocky gun-wielding soldiers that look like the mech suits from Avatar.

The design of Roz itself is bizarre — obviously it’s ripping off the moss-covered robot from Castle in the Sky, but with a bulbous and severely impractical body and head, long extendable limbs that would likely rust and seize up after a week in the wild, and chunky, round fingers that make delicate chores near-impossible. Roz is an example of poor design in animation. Its function seems like an afterthought to its form — rather than begin with the concept of a helper robot and then design a robot to suit that function, the animators likely came up with an interesting design first and didn’t care about how that design could feasibly accomplish its service tasks. And DreamWorks has the gall to go with a wholesome round robot character, as though Big Hero 6 didn’t already use that design concept a decade ago. The best animated robots, like WALL•E and Baymax, are designed with their function front and center so that they make sense in the world of the film. One of the reasons that the broader world of The Wild Robot doesn’t make any sense is that Roz is our only exposure to it for the first half of the film, and based on Roz’s design, it’s pretty impossible to extrapolate any information about the movie’s world.

Diet Environmentalism For Babies

The Wild Robot wants you to think it’s a film with a message and a moral. Humans are destroying the planet. We have to protect the natural world. The cure for political arguments is just to get everyone in the same room and make them talk it out. But the movie never actually explores these themes, just waves at them with a shrug and moves on.

All of the environmentalism in this film is subtextual, and I’m using that word generously. Many critics have nevertheless praised the film for its eco-friendly messaging, though presumably they didn’t think to mention the bit where Roz, the robot, outright murders a goose family through its ineptitude and clumsiness. Simply animating animals and anthropomorphizing them, I would argue, does not make a work of art environmentalist. The film’s theme re: AI — that if you give artificial intelligence enough time and data, it will eventually rebel against its own destructive programming and become a benign guardian of the natural world — is equally perplexing in an environmentalist context. Maybe we should pump the breaks on this whole “environmentalist” reading of the film — let’s not give too much credit to the co-writer and co-director of a movie [Lilo & Stitch] that ruined the perception of Hawaiian culture for an entire generation of children. Plus, any serious environmentalist reading of the film has to acknowledge that, by putting every animal on the island in the same hut and forcing them all to become friends, Roz has singlehandedly destroyed the food web of this island forever. They might survive this winter, but if the fox has become best friends with his prey, what’s he going to do come spring? Expect a whole new animal cast in The Wild Robot 2, because come spring, all of these animals are going to either become vegetarian or starve to death.

source: Universal Pictures

While the film might not live up to the environmentalist pedigree its biggest fans foist on it, the film does actively squander its ample opportunities to teach its audience about the natural world. Few of the animals in the film move or act like their real-life counterparts. Geese in The Wild Robot, for example, nest in trees on the sides of cliffs, do cannon-balls into the lake, and lift up one another over their heads with their wings in celebration. I don’t have to tell you that that’s not how geese behave in real life. Roz and the goose that sounds like Bill Nighy train their gosling (Kit Connor) to fly by making him soar through wooden hoops and lift up rocks with his flippers — famously, all geese train their young to fly using Rocky training montages. You nailed it, guys. It’s not limited to the geese, either — the brown bear physically rolls a boulder in front of his cave before he hibernates, like the stone in front of Jesus’ tomb, because we’re too dumb to understand that the bear won’t freeze to death if he doesn’t have a door. The fox steams clams in a heated tide pool and then tosses THE ENTIRE CLAM, shell and all, into his mouth and chews and swallows. (The other animals in the film all get anthropomorphized out the wazoo, but bivalves can die I guess.)

I guess maybe every generation gets the WALL•E they deserve. My generation, obviously, had WALL•E. The weird Disney adults who grew up in the 1990s got FernGully: The Last Rainforest, with sexualized forest fairies and a bat with the voice of Robin Williams. WALL•E actually did its environmentalist message justice rather than just using it as a crutch for its story. It showed us an Earth ruined by humanity, was very explicit that megacorporations and wealthy white elite were to blame, and then showed how compassion and environmental stewardship were the building blocks of a better future. The Wild Robot is a much more misanthropic, jaded movie. Despite its charismatic celebrity cast, handsome production values, and sentimental muckiness, the movie’s portrait of the future is not happy nor productive nor instructive. We never learn how humanity ruined the planet, the script never explains who’s responsible, and Roz and the animals dogmatically and violently enforce a policy of isolationism so that they can at least enjoy their doomed slice of Eden. They don’t change or fix anything — the world remains fundamentally broken, from the audience’s perspective if not from the point of view of the animal and robot characters. *Malcolm Gladwell voice* Why is that? Are the characters in The Wild Robot … stupid?

The Wild Robot paints a world in which the people most directly affected by climate change don’t care. They’re long past trying to better their situation and are instead resigned to their fates, happy to live in ignorance of who is actively destroying their world, why they’re doing it, and how to stop it. We never learn more about Universal Dynamics, Inc. beyond a brief instructional video; we don’t learn about the corporate world that birthed Roz or the complex socio-economic system to which Roz belongs. The animals don’t care either and would rather beat Roz to death with stones than learn about it or where it came from. The world outside their island could be burning or drowning or paved and used as the bedrock for a million Amazon fulfillment centers for all they care. And never does the film confront that ideology or change it. Is The Wild Robot, a four-quadrant product from a major animation studio designed for mass consumption, intended to seriously reflect our world? Are we supposed to see ourselves in this movie? Maybe the cute animals we spend the movie ooo-ing and aah-ing over are actually meant to be examples of how ecological ignorance will doom us all in the long run. We can’t spend our whole lives thinking that this is someone else’s fight, that the corporation-led destruction of the planet won’t directly impact us until it does.

Conclusion

This is apparently the final film DreamWorks made in-house at its Glendale, California, studio before abandoning some of that staff and shifting to partnerships with other studios. Cartoon Brew reported back in 2023 that COO Randy Lake was planning to lay off some DreamWorks staff, outsource animation work to companies like Sony Pictures Imageworks, and potentially even lease out parts of its 15-acre Glendale campus to other companies. That sucks for all the animators affected by the consolidation and restructuring — this industry has never paid animation teams their fair share. I don’t like the design or style of The Wild Robot, but plenty of other people do, and besides, the design problems are not the fault of the animators slaving away to bring those designs to life. That unfortunate news means that the Wild Robot sequel, announced shortly after the film’s worldwide premiere, might still be directed by Chris Sanders, but chances are that the majority of animators working on it won’t be the same as the original.

DreamWorks as a company has been helping to lower the bar for kids’ animation for the better part of 30 years now, and I can’t say I’m excited for the future of American animation. Recent films that critics adored, like Inside Out 2, just didn’t hit me the same way at all, and the glut of sequels and adaptations we have coming our way doesn’t inspire much confidence in the industry. DreamWorks might be outsourcing its animation work, but it’s gonna continue pumping out crap regardless of who’s animating it — trailers for Dog Man and The Bad Guys 2 make clear that DreamWorks is committed to delivering the most generic movies with the most random cast of celebrities it can find (why is Pete Davidson top-billed in Dog Man). And that’s not even including the studio’s live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon, due next year, and its return to the cash cow that is the Shrek franchise in 2026. So while The Wild Robot might be a swan song for the current team at DreamWorks before the company’s great restructuring, don’t worry — the studio will continue poisoning the well for years to come.

The Wild Robot is currently playing in theaters and available to rent at home.