The Wild Robot

The key to a great literary adaptation is not to slavishly replicate but to find a way to change everything for the new medium except the heart. The Wild Robot, the 49th animated feature from DreamWorks Animation, doesn’t just put a digital coating on that heart, but celebrates every vibrant beat.

In the original trilogy of illustrated books by Peter Brown, the robot is simple, almost monolithic – a gray dome of a head, a lump of a body, two pipe legs, and two bendy arms. In keeping with the modern ideas of CG animation, Roz (voiced by Nyong’o) is more complex – a little bit Baymax, a little bit Iron Giant – with interlocking armor plates, a more rounded body, and lines of lights around her body. Those lines change color to reflect her mood: blue for calmness, red for danger, and pink for love. Or rather, that's what it comes to mean. When she first crashes from the skies onto this arboreal paradise of an island, it means purpose. That’s what she's built for: to fulfill a request. Purpose is her motivation, and she finds it when she finds an unhatched goose egg. She'll protect it, raise it from a chick (Storm) to a gosling (Connor), and send it on its way.

Yet Roz is completely alien here, and that's reflected in the animation. Not just how she moves, with a mechanical fluidity, but smooth and metallic, like she exists in an engineering design package. By contrast, the island and its residents have the rough, drawn-out lines of watercolors. Look at the details on the fur of Fink (Pascal), the rascally fox who attaches himself to Roz and helps her with the task of raising the kid, who she names Brightbill. The hairs on his brush splay out like they were drawn with a crayon. Yet there's no clash between the mechanical and the organic, merely contrast. It's astoundingly gorgeous – so much so that, after I saw the first, dialogue-free trailer, I was initially disappointed to find out that The Wild Robot wasn't going to be free of speech. After all, why would it need it, when so much is communicated visually? And how could the filmmakers possibly find an excuse for how Roz can talk to the animals?

Luckily, the justifications are smart and fitting. Roz is a robot who finds solutions, and if her problem is that she can't understand animals, she'll work it out. How she breaches the language barrier is how she, inadvertently, starts to build a community. It’s all perfect material for writer/director and animation veteran Chris Sanders, who proved with Lilo & Stitch and the original How to Train Your Dragon (both co-written and co-directed by Dean DeBlois) that he understands how to create an unconventional family unit and fill it with life without avoiding the emotional rough edges. How Brightbill became an orphan is a particular tragedy that will inevitably color the story and center the narrative even more sharply around his relationship with Roz, his adoptive automated mother.

Maternity is undoubtedly the focal point of the story, as a helpful possum (O’Hara) breaks the news to a baffled Roz that a mother is exactly what she’s become. Yet motherhood is really a narrative vessel for universal questions about commitment, dedication, obligation, and how they are part of love. Just because Brightbill fulfills Roz’s need for purpose, that doesn’t make him just a checklist to be completed – nor is his absolute devotion to her just a result of hardwired avian imprinting. The edges of love may be messy, but as The Wild Robot understands and expresses beautifully, we’re all more than our programming.