Is it mere coincidence or already a new trend? Animated films about the unlikely friendships between robots and animals are thriving. Earlier this year, Pablo Berger's heart-warming retro tale Robot Dreams proved that fur and metal can go a long way when it comes to creating a kids' film that is in touch with the times. In The Wild Robot, things are a little more complicated: machines and feral creatures get to learn from each other the hard way.
The story starts simply enough: Rozzum "Roz" Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is a service robot, designed to help people, always efficient and polite. But when a storm washes her up on the shores of a deserted island inhabited only by animals, suddenly her customers are beavers, squirrels and wild boars.
At first, the optimistic metal chatterbox tries to adapt and bond with her new hairy "clients", which tends to put off the animals even more, causing some of them to keep their distance and others to head straight for confrontation or fight. Things get worse when, one day, Roz stumbles upon an orphaned baby goose whose mom died in an accident not entirely without the robot's fault. The close bond that forms between her and little Brightbill, who is teased by the other geese because of his stunted wings, is the heart and soul of the story, as Roz teaches him how to swim, fly, and find food.
The seemingly insurmountable contrast between Roz's task-oriented mind and the feathered, scaled and furry animals is what makes this new DreamWorks animation such a treat, with some funny mutual learning curves at either side. At the same time, Roz gradually ages due to wear and tear. She becomes increasingly dented and covered in moss, softer and greener, and brings more and more feelings and fantasy into play, as when she improvises a wooden prosthesis to replace her defective metal leg.
The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders, poses the old question from Philip K Dick – do androids dream of electric sheep? Or, in other words: can machines develop emotions? In times of AI, it has become a reasonable query for mankind. For now, at least in the movies they can, starting with the little yellow tin box Wall-E in the Pixar film of the same name, to Roz whose story is based on the popular, witty children's books by Peter Brown.
Of course, the company that invented Roz is trying to get the precious missing model back to the factory at all costs and, at times, the story dissolves into the madness of a Transformers movie, told with similar bumps and misses along the way. But unlike his colleague Michael Bay, the Disney-trained Sanders knows his ways around to bring the magic back to the screen.
Visually, The Wild Robot combines cute animal animation with colourful landscapes that are somewhat reminiscent of the enchanted worlds of Japanese anime master Hayao Miyazaki. And although some might miss the hidden pop culture references that DreamWorks was once famous for, the film wraps its messages so elegantly into slapstick-like comedy à la Looney Tunes that, in the end, this well-tuned paean to solidarity and empathy feels both poignant and subdued.
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