The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot Movie Review Rating:

Star Cast: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy and Stephanie Hsu

Director: Chris Sanders

What’s Good: The film has many strengths, including its characters, animation quality, and even action sequences that raise the stakes to a new level.

What’s Bad: The film is forced to create villains very late into the second act, which makes them feel like an afterthought and hurts the pacing and structure of the film.

Loo Break: The Wild Robot goes fast, so there is no room to miss anything.

Watch or Not?: This is one of the best-animated films of the year; watch it now.

Language: English (with subtitles).

Available On: Available In Theaters and on Digital

Runtime: 102 Minutes

User Rating:

DreamWorks was initially the most significant response to Disney’s complete domination over the animated film market. Initially, the studio successfully created franchises such as Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon, but sadly, the studio lost its way at one point. They ended up making a series of films that failed to connect with audiences on a fun or emotional level, destroying all faith in the studio, but now, starting with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Wild Robot, it seems the studio is back on track.

The Wild Robot Movie Review: Script Analysis

The Wild Robot is Chris Sanders‘ baby. This director started at Disney before moving to DreamWorks, where he helmed one of its biggest hits, How to Train Your Dragon. Although the journey from there to The Wild Robot has been long, Sanders proves he still has the chops to create a film that is visually stunning, funny, emotional, and exciting. With a script of his own authorship, he delivers an engaging story, despite a few stumbles along the way.

The Wild Robot begins with an entertaining but familiar premise: a strange creature finding its way into a place it shouldn’t be. In the case of How to Train Your Dragon, that was a dragon finding its way into a society of dragon-hunting Vikings, and in the case of The Wild Robot, it is that of a state-of-the-art robot finding its way into the wilderness.

So, the film spends a lot of time telling us how our main character, Roz the robot, carves a space for herself in the wild and finds friends and a purpose that she didn’t know was out there for her. On the other hand, there is also a latter section of the film that feels a bit overlooked and ends up feeling like an afterthought, not managing to take the film’s idea to its ultimate consequences or the complete emotional and intellectual impact it should have.

Other than a clear motivation or any build-up to the final conflict in the third act, the movie understands and creates a beautiful sense of emotion between the characters; it is deep, but it is never too complicated because that would only hurt the film storytelling, and as the film is trying to talk to both children and adults at the same time, it is better to remain loud and clear about everything, and in the end, the emotional bits land as they should.

The Wild Robot Movie Review: Star Performance

The Wild Robot has an impressive cast of actors who voice the characters, and they all perform amazingly well. However, Lupita Nyong’o’s performance as Roz wins the cake. The actress manages to bring feeling, emotion, and coldness to the serving robot all at once, resulting in a character that feels unique and worth following throughout the entire runtime.

The rest of the actors do a fantastic job, like Pedro Pascal, who plays Fink, a devious Fox with a heart of gold, but the breakthrough performance is that of Kit Connor, who plays Brightbill, the youngest in our trio of protagonists. Connor has the challenge of feeling believable while playing a teenage goose who cannot fly, a role that, in the hands of any other actor, could have been an annoying disaster.