The Wild Robot has what the best animated family movies have: endless watchability. This is not only a kid’s movie. This is for everyone. Everyone can gather around and the range of emotions are so specific yet universal, the animation so wonderful in its depth and feeling, that the whole family ought to be enamored. That’s what some of the best animated movies are, wondrous showcases of empathy that key into what moves all of us. That’s the joy of The Wild Robot, the spectacular new film from DreamWorks Animation, that opens and closes 2024’s Best Animated Feature conversation. For any consensus-chosen awards, that door is now firmly shut. The Wild Robot is the year’s Best Animated Feature and also one of its best movies.
It’s buttoned up however you look at it, a two horse race between The Wild Robot and Inside Out 2 and all of us win. What makes this wonderful movie more worthy than that wonderful movie? Movies aren’t generally made for that sort of 1:1 comparison, they’re not sports and they’re not usually not directly enmeshed, but perhaps these two are, as they are top-tier examples of the DreamWorks and Pixar house styles.
The Wild Robot operates from a place of aesthetic innovation. It stays close to heart of the Peter Brown book series being adapted and translates it with such fluid contextual grace, as though the story was born for the screen. It does not thud along with plot and exposition, opting to show and not tell, and does so with such illustrative gusto. The story is told, get this, gorgeously through the medium of animation. The animation is what moves every frame along. It is like a platonic ideal for how these things ought to go: it looks beautiful moment-to-moment and has so much grace in developing its storytelling audiovisually.
Style-wise, The Wild Robot is fluid and expressive. We’re immediately won over by this world of programmed robots and woodland creatures. Lupita Nyong’o puts on a masterclass in voice-acting, one of the best performances of the year, playing Roz, the eponymous Wild Robot. It all develops so naturalistically, Roz is dumped out of some crates into the wild and befriends some animals who give the robot a new motherly directive: to care for an orphaned baby goose she names Brightbill (voiced by Kit Connor). Joined by the clever fox Fink (voiced by Pedro Pascal), Roz’s meets all manner of animal friends — otters, deer, vultures, cougars, porcupines bears, etc., etc. — and makes a go of surviving her fish-out-of-water story on this uninhabited island, while learning something about motherhood and chosen families along the way.
Every step of Roz’s journey is expressed through contextual storytelling driven by the environment and the characters inside of it, specifically evoked by strong animation. There are no disconnected threads, as The Wild Robot is so deeply embedded in what makes its medium great, that it sings and shines as a work of animation. So much of the design is hand-painted, imbued with the vibrancy and fluidity of motion of classically drawn animation. This lends personality to the sense of a style that vibrates through all of the designs, matching the good impressionistic approach that so uniquely defines how The Wild Robot looks and moves — a testament to the original vision of Director Chris Sanders, which has clearly followed into the final product; the vision is so clear and so well-expressed, you’ll have no doubt what the movie is trying to do.
Call upon a slew of your favorite animated movies and you’ll find their appeal here. It does not feel like design-by-committee at all, but art designed around the history of the medium. It’s The Iron Giant (1999) by way of Bambi (1942), and reminds you of some of the 20th Century’s finest animated works and not too many works from the following 24 years. It’s stylistically astute, well-written, defined by character, and intricately nuanced work, that appeals to everyone, but in the right way.
What’s so lovely about The Wild Robot is that it’s a movie with a deep heart and feels like it is made out of love. Love for humanity, told through a story about robots and some animals. Our most human story told through proxies. A classical adventure animated with the height of modern tools to evoke something nostalgic. A true classic in the making. So, you have two choices for Best Animated Feature this year that would be chosen by awards committees, and both of them are very good, but The Wild Robot is astounding — let the campaigning begin!