Review: The Wild Robot (2025)

The Wild Robot

Rating

Director

Chris Sanders

Screenplay

Chris Sanders

Length

1h 42m

Starring

Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara

MPAA Rating

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Review

Animation means many things to many people. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to appease all of them but The Wild Robot tries very hard to do both.

Having a simple story does not always mean its ideas and themes aren’t complex. The Wild Robot places itself in humanity’s future. Automatons are taking the place of caregivers and performing tasks that are intended to save their human owners valuable time and energy. The audience isn’t told if this is to the detriment of society but can infer such given the programming of the film’s titular figure. ROZZUM Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who ultimately goes by the name “Roz,” is destined for the household of a little girl but ends up stranded in a remote wilderness where she struggles to find her purpose until her antics lead to the orphaning of a young gosling (Kit Connor) and from there her purpose is set, to learn everything there is about nurturing and raising a species she hasn’t been programmed to care for.

When looking at this kind of narrative, it’s easy to see where the moralizing would appeal to fans of early animated features. However, while there was a lot of simplistic themes in those early years, the complexity began ramping up in Disney’s 1990s renaissance. The depth of these concepts increased in that period and while there was still something of a superficial veneer, The Wild Robot would fit well into those halcyon days of animation. Apart from ideas related to better parenting and protection of acceptance, the film employs sci-fi concepts of challenging the status quo, improving life outside of societal constructs, and it even speaks to an era of intolerance standing in the way of social progress.

From a purely artistic perspective, the film is an intriguing blend of painterly backdrops with smooth, computer-generated animated characters. A nice turnaround from the disappointingly soulless uses of CGI in recent years. It’s not surprising that the result is coming from DreamWorks, a studio that has had its share of disappointments but when they approach something that requires a genuine eye for beauty and refinement, they can outperform their rivals. This is probably the best film they’ve put out in years. The voice cast is solid with Nyong’o standing out.

The Wild Robot has many layers but audiences won’t have trouble grasping many of the overarching concepts: being accepted because you’re different and employing patience and tolerance in the midst of catastrophic upheaval. These themes can grow with the child, and like Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, will act as a teaching tool to help the younger audiences understand social contracts and to mature with its concepts.