Great cinema has the fundamental superpower to help an audience see the world through different eyes, and in Chris Sanders’ remarkable, gorgeous film, we watch the mechanical eyes of a domestic robot, Roz, stranded on a remote island, struggle to make sense and adapt to the sometimes harsh, always challenging natural world she encounters.
In the multiple Annie and VES Award-winning, Oscar-nominated The Wild Robot from DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures, written and directed by Chris Sanders and based on the novel by Peter Brown, a Universal Dynamics robot wakes up lost in a natural wilderness. Forced to care for an orphaned gosling, she learns to abandon the logic of her programming and embrace the messiness of her own evolving emotions.
Great cinema has a fundamental superpower – it enables its audience to see the world through different eyes. At the beginning of The Wild Robot, the mechanical eyes of ROZZUM 7134 – soon to become known as Roz – fill the screen as the lost robot watches waves crashing against the shore of the remote island on which she is stranded. Instantly the theme of the film is established – here is an artificial entity faced with the challenge of adapting to a natural environment. Just as Roz uses her vision to make sense of the living world, so we, the audience, use our own eyes to share Roz’s point of view and accompany her on her journey towards enlightenment.
Starting with intense close-ups of Roz’s highly expressive eyes, The Wild Robot expands its point of view ever-outwards. The film’s generous camera is always ready to go wide, bringing us gorgeous vistas of the natural world. From a flight of dancing butterflies to the breathtaking spectacle of migrating geese… from a devastating winter storm to a raging forest fire… nothing is too grand, and the eye of the camera sees it all. For all this grandeur, however, the filmmakers never let us forget the one who is watching. It is Roz we return to time and again, with those beautifully intimate close-ups, as these amazing sights are reflected in her gaze.
Roz’s expressiveness is a triumph of character design and animation. Her face is little more than a collection of circles, yet it betrays her emotions with a subtlety that is truly breathtaking. The movement of her body is equally effective. Echoing the physicality of movie mimes like Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati, Roz’s body language is frequently broad and always entertaining. It establishes a visual language that is instantly appealing, and which tracks her character’s gradual evolution with astonishing effect.
Early in the film, Roz uses her pre-programmed “mimic” capabilities to copy the physical movements of the animals around her. This is her first crude attempt to fit in with the natural world. Later, as she abandons this reductive approach, her movements become more organic. The changes to her gait coincide with alterations to her physical appearance. Her body panels become scratched and dented, grimed, and speckled with rust. Eventually, moss and grass start growing out of the seams in her metal shell.
Slowly, Roz is becoming wild.
Such physical changes are merely the external manifestation of Roz’s more profound inner growth. Her spiritual evolution is driven by the need to care for Brightbill (Kit Connor), a young gosling who was accidentally orphaned when Roz inadvertently crashed into his nest. In the company of Fink (Pedro Pascal), a fox who is as keen on eating Brightbill as he is on helping Roz, the robot begins a crash-course in motherhood.
Initially, Roz fixates on the practicalities of childcare. Through trial and error – and despite her assertion that “I do not have the programming to be a mother” – she eventually teaches Brightbill how to feed and fly. Roz’s practical actions become increasingly tender until, eventually, she learns how to love.
We see how much Roz’s emotional intelligence has grown when she temporarily resurrects Rummage, another ROZZUM robot, also played by Nyong’o. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Roz confides to Rummage, who is in many ways her mirror-image, “but I have to, because he’s relying on me.” She has finally learned the universal truth that parenting is not about having the answers, but about being there for your child even when you don’t.
Having learned to love, Roz also learns to share her wisdom with those around her. She saves the animals by giving them shelter from a terrible winter storm, yet the animals continue to fight among themselves. After Fink has berated them, Roz takes the role of tribal matriarch, dispensing her new-found wisdom as she tells the animals, “Sometimes to survive we must become more than we were programmed to be.”
Roz has reached this new level of understanding through her personal experience. She has grown precisely because she has discarded her own programmed preconceptions and developed the ability to improvise. She has learned to invent – in other words, to make up her own story as she goes along, in response to all the demands and influences of the natural world around her. She has learned to lead not with her head, but with her heart. She has finally heeded the advice of Fink who, driven by his in-built urge to howl, once suggested to Roz: “You’ve got to find your inner ‘Aaa-oooh!’”
In a similar way, Brightbill too becomes more than what he was meant to be. Appraising the young gosling’s progress, goose leader Longneck (Bill Nighy) remarks to Roz that, “Brightbill was never supposed to get this far.” Longneck goes on to observe that real strength lies not in the wings, but in the heart. Brightbill’s tenacity and resilience ultimately prove he has a heart that is big enough to encompass the universe, and which communicates with Roz’s own heart in a way that goes beyond mere language.
The campfire setting in which Roz makes her matriarchal speech reflects another central theme of The Wild Robot – namely storytelling and the questions which drive it. At the beginning of the film, Roz wants to understand her own story, encapsulated in the question: “How did I get here?” At the same time, she must fulfill her programming: “How can I help?” Later, Fink narrates a sugar-coated version of Brightbill’s own origin story in response to the gosling’s questions: “Who am I? Where did I come from?” Finally, Fink proves himself to be a seasoned storyteller as he retells Roz’s adventures to his wide-eyed audience of animal friends.
As with the camerawork, the film’s powerful sense of story zooms effortlessly from large to small, especially in its treatment of time. For every tiny moment where a character makes an intimate leap of understanding, there is a sweeping presentation of time in its most mythical form. Like the forest in Bambi, the natural world of The Wild Robot is powerfully driven by the passage of the seasons, the endless cycle of the weather, the flow of life between predator and prey. We are undeniably in the space of myth, the primal land in which all stories are forged.
The visual appearance of the natural world in The Wild Robot – not to mention Roz’s presence within it – is utterly breathtaking. Every scene plays out like a moving painting, with impressionistic brushwork folding itself delicately around a thousand living forms. The setting is often primordial, frequently monumental, always majestic. There are echoes here of the work of Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and, in a hilarious scene where an army of raccoons is catapulted from a tree into the great beyond, Isao Takahata’s animated classic Pom Poko.
The cinematic references continue throughout the film. Roz’s home city brings to mind the work of master designer Syd Mead, whose conceptual art has influenced films from Blade Runner to Tron and beyond. When Longneck leads his goose flock in an airborne assault against the Universal Dynamics dropship, the apocalyptic action echoes not only the “Night on a Bald Mountain” sequence from Fantasia, but also Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.
In The Wild Robot, the synthesis of hand-crafted sensibilities and technological expertise has reached new heights. Remarkable visuals combine with innovative sound design and a gorgeous musical score to create an unforgettable cinematic experience. As she faces down the hostile forces of Universal Dynamics, Roz’s final assertion that “I am a wild robot!” is accompanied by a chorus of primal howls from her and the animals she now calls family.
Roz has truly found her inner “Aaa-oooh!”
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Dr. Maria Elena Gutierrez is the CEO and executive director of VIEW Conference, Italy’s premiere annual digital media conference. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a BA from the University of California Santa Cruz. VIEW Conference is committed to bringing a diversity of voices to the forefront in animation, visual effects, and games. For more information about the VIEW Conference, visit the official website: http://viewconference.it
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