The Wild Robot (2024) is a film that can be perceived as simple. Being an animated film aimed at children, it is normal that we have that feeling of lightness in its narrative. But what lies beneath the surface is much more complex and emotionally challenging. This is how the director and screenwriter Chris Sanders understood it when he learned about Peter Brown’s book of the same name. Since its publication in 2016, the book has not stopped receiving awards and two sequels have followed.

DreamWorks Animation, the studio responsible for animated franchises such as Sherk, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar, announced the adaptation of the The Wild Robot book series in 2023 and the premiere of the first film took place at the Toronto Film Festival in 2024. The film is set on a desert island, after what we presume is the shipwreck, we see a box with a robot on the shore of a beach next to some reefs. In that opening sequence, we meet Rozzum 7134, a service robot programmed with artificial intelligence. “Roz’s” sole purpose is to accept tasks from her owner and complete them satisfactorily. With no humans to interact with, Roz must connect with the island’s wild animals.

Existential Dilemmas of a Wild Robot

The first act of The Wild Robot is loaded with light but effective humor, ensuring it hook its target audience. In this agile and fluid introduction, the central characters are introduced and the bond that generates the story’s main conflict is established. The narrative focuses on the relationship between Roz and a baby goose nicknamed Brightbill. The little goose perceives the robot as its mother and the robot perceives the goose as its task to complete. The narrative arcs develop perfectly for all the characters. Roz and Brightbill carry the greatest weight of the story, the secondary ones such as the fox Fink, the opossum PinkTail, and the beaver Paddler, give greater depth and weight to the film.

On a visual level, the film departs from modern standards of animation with computer-generated graphics. It is already common to see hyper-realistic images in animated films, but The Wild Robot takes us down a different path. Raymond Zibach’s production design makes us think more of hand drawings on the pages of a book, rather than the images generated by animation software. We can best appreciate the visual style is during the great final sequence that includes a fire in the forest. For director Sanders, the entire concept of the film had to be “a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest.”

The Wild Robot has the unique ability to connect on different levels with very disparate audiences. His script has the candidness to reach the naive spirit of an infant and at the same time has the strength to pierce the harshest fibers of an incredulous adult. Themes such as the sense of belonging, motherhood, friendship, coexistence, the meaning of life, love, will resonate on very different levels, but in a very effective way depending on the viewer.