(courtesy IMP Awards)
Underestimate the power of animation to tell a profoundly moving and important story at your peril.
As The Wild Robot, based on the book of the same name by Peter Brown, underscores again and again during its perfectly judged 102-minute running time, animated features can move the soul in a way every bit as powerful as their more frequently lauded real-world cousins.
Perhaps this unfair and poorly weighted demarcation between animated movies and their flesh-and-blood counterparts comes from the fact that animation is seen as a kids’ genre, and while, yes, kids do well and truly relate to this most artistic of cinematic artforms, the fact is that people of all ages can, and do, watch these films and walk away fundamentally affected and changed.
It’s near impossible to watch The Wild Robot and not feel every last one of the expansively diverse range of emotions that the eponymous protagonist goes through after they and four of their robotic companions wash ashore on a remote, forested island after an accident at sea sees them topple off their cargo carrier.
ROZZUM 1734 (Lupita Nyong’o) is the only one to survive this unexpected journey intact, and when she is accidentally brought to life by a skittish family of curious otters, her first programmed impulse is too help the animals directly in front of her, and then those she later encounters.
Her algorithmic motives, for initially that’s all they are, are pure and untrammeled by any other impulse, but the animals she meets from Fink (Pedro Pascal), a conniving but ultimately goodhearted fox to mother opossum Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), beaver Paddler (Matt Berry) and Thorn (Mark Hamill), a grizzly bear see her only a monster, a manufactured outlier in a hitherto untouched natural world.
ROZZUM 1734 aka Roz can’t understand why these creatures are reacting like this because she knows her programmed heart is firmly in the right place, but it takes her a while to begin to understand that not everything marches to the same 0s and 1s drum and that she must begin to move beyond her programming if she’s ever going to truly fit in.
Of course fitting in when you’re a human-made robot of metal and glowing diodes and your environment is not the home or factory or farm you were designed for but a natural world of trees, streams and meadows is not going to be an easy task and Roz finds herself struggling to work out how to be accepted by animals for whom she is only ever viewed as a threat.
Her journey to finding an unlikely home among the denizens of the island, which is represented in surprisingly honest biological truthfulness – in this animated feature, animals actually attempt to eat each other which is a far cry from the anthropomorphic surrounds of most of these types of movies – only really begins when she is rescues the lone surviving egg of a nest of Barnacle geese.
She, to her horror, and it’s here that it becomes clear that she is transcending her programming in some quite remarkable and wonderfully affecting ways, is the one who causes these deaths and while she initially shrugs off the care of Brightbill (Boone Storms as a baby then Kit Connor as a young adult) who hatches from the sole surviving egg, she soon adopts the role of mother and all of the consequences, physical and emotional, that that implies.
One place where The Wild Robot diverges somewhat from the book is the way in which Roz takes on the role of mother to her most unlikely and unusual of sons.
The book, with all the interior narrative time in the world, focuses heavily on how Roz “feels” about raising her son, and what she has to go through to adopt a role she really isn’t even remotely programmed for; the film, of course, doesn’t have that kind of time to let the bond slowly forge itself but it’s no less effective in demonstrating how beautifully and profoundly Roz takes on a role that defies every last bit of programming that she arrived on the island with.
It’s the way in which the film adopts and enlarges on the book that is truly impressive.
This is not one of those films where you will be thinking the book was better; yes, the novel has a lot more of that interior journey, and should definitely be added to any audience member’s reading pile before or after viewing the film, but The Wild Robot as a an animated feature very much stands on its own two (webbed) emotional and narrative feet.
So well in fact does The Wild Robot the film becomes its own entity that while you will recognise key plot points and delight in some truly magical moments from the book, you won’t be disappointed that not everything makes it into the movie.
That’s because the spirit and feel of the book makes it way into the film completely and perfectly intact and it seizes your heart and soul every bit as much as the book does.
You cannot watch the lush, gorgeously colourful and generously evocative landscapes of The Wild Robot and fall into its beautiful story of found family, love and belonging and not feel inspired and encouraged and in awe of how wonderful life can be if only you’ll let it.
The Wild Robot is a real joy, visually arresting and delightful, full of characters who are funny and darkly serious all at once, humour that sits buoyantly alongside the film’s more poignant moments and topped up with pedal-to-the-metal action scenes that work entirely well next to the movie’s more gorgeously ruminative scenes.
This is an animated film that can more than hold its head high alongside its real world counterparts, with The Wild Robot one of the best adaptations of any kind to come along in quite some time, full of the same spirit and heart as the book on which its’s based, and proving that it is possible to take a well-loved story in one medium and make it sing and sparkle and seize your heart in quite another.