The Wild Robot: a compassionate eco-fable

Interspecies friendships in fiction often model a pure kind of love – one unshaped by societal expectations, or defiant of them. They crop up time and again in the films of Chris Sanders, between a girl and an alien in Lilo & Stitch (2002), a boy and a dragon in How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and a man and a dog in The Call of the Wild (2020), the director’s live-action debut. In each case, the relationship throws into relief some deficiency in the surrounding human society.

The central relationship in The Wild Robot, Sanders’s third film as director for DreamWorks Animation after How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods (2013), is yet more exotic, as it doesn’t involve a human. Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) is an AI robot who comes into consciousness marooned on an uninhabited island. But her situation is different from the isolated bot in WALL-E (2008). For one thing, she isn’t short of company: the place is teeming with animals, whose language she swiftly deciphers. And unlike WALL-E, she lacks a clear purpose, having been programmed to help humans.

The book series by Peter Brown which this film adapts (with a script by Sanders) features simple, monochrome illustrations in a cut-out style. There’s little trace of them in the film, which keeps its lush woodland setting in soft focus with painterly textures, joining the growing number of Hollywood animated films that break away from photorealistic rendering (see also DreamWorks’ The Bad Guys, 2022, and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, 2022). Some narrative beats are framed as attractive tableaux: the lone robot standing small amid rock columns, for example. But the whole thing is soaked in oversaturated colours that sit as heavily on the screen as the slushy orchestral music does on the soundtrack.

Unaware of the food chain and physically resilient to the island’s dangers, Roz blithely disrupts the natural order, baffling and angering the animals she encounters. Her ultimate transgression is her decision to adopt orphaned gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor), who readily imprints on her, although the childlike need for connection runs both ways – Roz is just as guileless and trusting as Brightbill. In raising the bird, Roz finds a purpose and learns to love. It’s a different dynamic from the one between the robot and the savvy boy in The Iron Giant (1999), a film which in some other ways this one resembles. Roz and Brightbill are joined by friendless fox Fink (Pedro Pascal), completing a nuclear family of misfits. Fink is a sardonic wisecracker, straight out of cartoon central casting. Indeed, many of the supporting characters are there to serve up familiar gags; we even have token British eccentrics, including an irritable beaver voiced by Matt Berry.

The scene is set for a quirky tale of unlikely parenthood, perhaps in the vein of another recent big-studio animated feature, Ultraman: Rising (2024). But the story takes a sharp turn in the second act when Brightbill, successfully raised to maturity, is accepted by his fellow geese and joins them in migrating. The perspective broadens and the stakes escalate as it becomes apparent that the threats facing the island animals aren’t just internal. A typhoon is mentioned; an unusually brutal winter comes; Brightbill flies over a Golden Gate Bridge submerged in water. Glimpses of human society suggest a people grown estranged from and even hostile toward nature. Roz sets out to protect the fauna from new existential threats, and the film develops into a full-blown eco-fable as she forms a universal compassion for wildlife. The framing is increasingly Christian, ending on a vision of ascension and anticipation of a second coming.

The most intriguing element in The Wild Robot is the bond between Roz and Brightbill, two equally unworldly naïfs who enact an unusual kind of parenthood. But their relationship is sidelined as Roz grows into her messianic role. Ambitious efforts to keep the two storylines tied together just show the strain. This isn’t a problem we’d find in Lilo & Stitch or How to Train Your Dragon, which Sanders directed and wrote with Dean DeBlois (with Will Davies co-writing Dragon). Those films are finely paced, their characters coming into focus through ingeniously conceived interactions: think of the boy and the dragon sketching together in the dirt. With more focus and flair in the storytelling, The Wild Robot might have equalled them.

► The Wild Robot arrives in UK cinemas 18 October.