DreamWorks Animation celebrates its 30th anniversary with the best feature cartoon from a major studio in many years. Adapted from a novel by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot owes something to Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant, but there is a zest for nature and a connection with parenthood that feels entirely fresh. We will allow Chris Sanders, one of the creators of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, a slide into brash, explosive mayhem at the close. You have to give the less sensitive kids a bit of aggro with the bonding.
The picture begins with an iPod-white robot washing up on a shore decorated with the same basalt columns that distinguish the Giant’s Causeway. We seem, however, to be on an island somewhere closer to North America. Beavers, elks and bears interact with Rozzum unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) – shortened to Roz – but her most significant friendships are with a fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and a goose named Brightbill (Kit Connor). Roz renders the bird parentless when she accidentally stomps on his mother; after initially concealing the fact, she sets out to raise the creature for the following year’s migration.
The Wild Robot is, at first, surprisingly red in tooth and claw. A mother possum, voiced by Catherine O’Hara, seems genuinely blase about the apparent loss of a baby. Fink, before becoming a proper pal, has his heart set on having Brightbill for lunch. That is the bloody cycle of existence. As events progress, the film’s approach to its anthropomorphised animal community softens considerably, but there remains a stiffening strain of mortal reality.
The core theme here is the trials of parenthood, and particularly of motherhood. “I do not have the required programming for this,” Roz bleeps. “Nobody does,” her possum pal replies. Parents will see analogues for all the painful partings of adolescence and early adulthood. Children will get a sense of challenges ahead.
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All this is represented in gorgeous, fluid images that incline towards the painterly. Voice work is spot on. Nyong’o combines the otherworldly with an audible emotional catch. Pescal is properly sneaky. Toast of London’s Matt Berry, playing a delightfully pompous beaver, just about resists (perhaps regrettably) the temptation to indulge in his trademark randomly stressed syllables.
A superb family entertainment. Maybe even a future classic.
The Wild Robot is in cinemas from Friday, October 18th
