Movie review: ‘Wild Robot’ an animated gem

The best children’s films have a simplicity that almost amounts to profundity. Kids aren’t stupid, but their attention spans are shorter, and they have less taste for complexity. Ergo, children’s films — the great ones, anyway — have to communicate with a brevity and clarity that often puts “grown-up” movies to shame.

“The Wild Robot,” a little gem of an animated movie, manages to pack more action, emotion and comedy together into its compact run time than most bloated modern blockbusters.

Adapted from a series of books by Peter Brown, “The Wild Robot” opens with the titular character — a robot nicknamed “Roz” (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) — crash landing on a forest island apparently uninhabited by human beings.

Roz is a service robot, built to execute tasks for her prospective human owners. On this island where wildlife either run from her in fear or attack her, she’s at a loss.

While fleeing a bear, Roz accidentally destroys a bird’s nest. Only one egg is left intact, and Roz’s new task becomes preserving the egg, and helping the gosling that hatches from it learn to swim and fly in time to travel south for the winter.

Roz is aided by a tricky fox named Fink (voiced by Pedro Pascal), and receives parenting tips from a weary opossum (voiced by Catherine O’Hara). Roz’s programming is advanced enough, you see, that she’s able to analyze the noises made by the animals around her and translate them into comprehensible speech.

This at first feels like a misstep. I frankly would’ve been fine if it had gone the “Wall-E” route of keeping dialogue to a minimum, allowing the animals to just remain animals. The character animation is precise enough that we often don’t need dialogue: look, for example, at a touching moment when the fox lets his guard down and cuddles underneath Roz’s arm, a wordlessly effective bit of animated acting.

But “Wild Robot,” to its credit, mostly avoids making its talking animals too “cutesy.” The knowledge that these are wild animals who eat each other, not cuddly little mascots, is maintained. The island critters can be mischievous (an early sequence where a pack of raccoons treat poor Roz like a junk drawer has some of the energy of a classic Tex Avery cartoon), but at other times they can be legitimately intimidating.

Thus, when the film’s third act leads to a “we’re all in this together” moral, it’s implausible, but feels emotionally earned — we’ve seen enough of these animals behaving like “real” animals that their big, heroic final stand doesn’t just feel like phony theatrics.

The film manages to be kinetic without simply becoming noisy, as so many children’s films are wont to do. Kids will be amused and enthralled by the action and gags. Parents might mist up a bit in the second half of the story, as Roz becomes essentially an adoptive parent and has to learn to let go of her “child.”

The look of the film brings to mind some of the best hand-drawn animated films of the last century — a pinch of “Bambi” here, a hint of “Princess Mononoke” there — but also manages the cartoon elasticity of recent CG-animated films in its slapstick set pieces.

The scale of the action perhaps tips over the edge in the film’s final act — a story that been driven mostly by character and emotion suddenly introduces a villainous robot antagonist so that we can have a big action climax, complete with a crashing star ship and a slightly goofy animals vs. machines battle, and it’s all a bit “much.” But in the moment it’s eminently satisfying, and carried off with great skill.

Roz herself is a pretty remarkable creation. Her simple, seemingly inexpressive face reminds one of the little robots in “Wall-E,” and like them she’s able to express a whole gamut of emotions within her minimalist form. Her movements have some of the gangly grace of the robots in “Castle in the Sky.”

Nyong’o’s voice work is exquisite — one of our best performers, she proves to be a great voice actor as well, admirably underplaying her big emotional scenes so that they don’t get too goopy and getting a lot of big laughs in the early section of the story through her cheerful obliviousness.

The film ends on a surprisingly bittersweet note that feels like a perfect open ending for the story — but if the powers that be want to follow up with additional adventures, I certainly wouldn’t complain. I’ve grown awfully fond of Roz. I suspect you will, too.

C.B. Jacobson is an Annandale native who makes independent films at Buddy Puddle Productions, and writes about movies at picturegoer.substack.com. Keep an eye peeled for him at the Emagine Monticello movie theater on Tuesday nights — seated in the middle of the auditorium, with a book in hand.