Chris Sanders has become the default American animated filmmaker of our present age, and not just because he’s made movies for both Disney and Dreamworks. His themes are generically wholesome while his means of storytelling feels ever more fantastical with each production. His latest is another robot story, meaning it’s about how a programmed entity “learns” to be human, and while it works well enough on that level, it doesn’t always reach beyond its own contrived purview toward something sublime. It’s enough just to be touching. 

Based on a book series, the movie distinguishes itself as a Sanders project with its humor. The titular android is a disarmingly commercial thing, a robot made by a big company to be sold as a consumer good, an all-purpose helpmate that is nothing without someone to serve. During an ocean-set typhoon, a cargo ship loses the container in which ROZZUM 7134 is packed, and the box washes ashore on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Northwest; uninhabited, that is, by humans. There is plenty of wildlife, perhaps too much, in fact, and all manner of species interact with the suddenly operational Roz, as “she” is called (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), whose first “impulse” is to find something to help, but, of course, none of these animals—though anthropomorphized to within an inch of their instinctual existence in the American animated manner—need help, but Roz herself has no existence otherwise. Certainly the cleverest thing Sanders does to get past this problem is to have Roz’s A.I. function process the sounds the animals make to interpret them as English speech, so we’ve got the expected menagerie of cutups, including a cynical fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), whose predatory proclivities extract the most jokes; a mother possum who seems to have the strongest grasp of the island’s zoology; and a gosling whose natural need for imprinting provides Roz, who inadvertently has killed his mother and siblings, with the “customer” she needs for self-actualization. In other words, Roz herself must become a mother, and Brightbill, as the gosling is named, eventually grows up and has to be a goose (Kit Connor) who migrates, a learning curve that Roz, which is programmed to “complete tasks,” and Fink attempt to facilitate in what turns into a very interesting partnership. 

The goal, as it is for every animated robot character from Wall-E to the smiling tin can in last year’s Robot Dreams, is for Roz to override her programming, and in the end she is called upon not only to let Brightbill be the goose he is, but to protect herself and the island that has become her “home” from the automated outside world whose own impulse is total control. Though I’m sure the source material is where the idea of instinct versus artificially bred values comes from, Sanders has become nothing if not adept at wrangling this sort of conflict into a workable story that’s exciting for kids and edifying for adults. The central irony is that these animals and this robot convey more humanity than the nominally “human” beings who run the world outside—and whom we never really see—even if it’s not an irony that feels at all distinctive. 

Now playing in Japanese dubbed and Japanese subtitled versions in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Wild Robot home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Dreamworks Animation LLC