The Wild Robot is the newest DreamWorks Studios animated film based off of a series of similarly named books penned by Peter Brown.
The film version is directed by Chris Sanders (The Croods, Lilo & Stitch, How To Train Your Dragon) and written by Sanders and Brown (The Venture Bros, Children Make Terrible Pets).
The film stars Lupita Nyong’o (Black Panther, 12 Years A Slave) as Roz/Rummage, Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian, The Last Of Us) as Fink, Kit Connor (His Dark Materials, Heartstopper) as Brightbill, Ving Rhames (Pulp Fiction, Baby Boy) as Thorn, Bill Nighy (Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans, Shaun Of The Dead) as Longneck, Stephanie Hsu (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) as Vontra, Matt Berry (What We Do in the Shadows, Archer) as Paddler, and Mark Hamill (Star Wars, The Fall Of The House Of Usher) as Thorn.
Let me start this review by saying that DreamWorks Animation has been firing on all cylinders as of late. The latest Boss Baby and The Bad Guys films were great, kid-friendly/focused films, and the Puss In Boots sequel was, without question, one of the best animated films EVER made. It dealt with very adult themes of inadequacy, a fear of one’s own mortality, and anxiety in ways that were decidedly adult, but not necessarily FOR adults.
The Wild Robot kind of feels the same. A very adult story wrapped in a nice, safe, cutesy kid-friendly package!
It’s a film about a robot given a model designation of ROZZUM unit 7134, “Roz” for short–that is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and, due to a series of unfortunate events that takes place within the first 3 minutes, basically learns how to care for a very specific animal.
It’s a super simple, easy-to-understand premise that works, and works VERY well.
We’ve seen the fish out of water trope many, many times before, but the way it’s handled here almost feels fresh.
I’m pretty sure I’m not going to eat any shrimp any time soon after watching that sequence…
And to further compliment these intentional visual choices is some INCREDIBLE sound design! The way things SOUND makes them seem far viler and more disgusting than they are in reality, the aforementioned lunch scene being a great example. Every crunch, chew, bite, rip, and tear are amplified to very uncomfortable degrees. It’s EXPERTLY done.
Most of the film does this, especially when the yucky stuff happens. Body transformations are shown in graphic detail with macro and wide lenses, accompanied by the sounds you would imagine someone literally ripping themselves from inside your body would make. It’s very, very effective at conveying a sense of disgust. Bodies make noises when they change, ambient sounds are distorted at key points in the story-things sound off, but on purpose.
What’s really interesting in all this is that even through all that really gross, nasty body horror, there’s a TON of beauty juxtaposed. Bodies not only move in gross and disgusting ways in spots, but also in really nice, beautifully shot, composed, and well framed ways. There’s a sequence towards the end of the second act that looks like a really good music video, for example, and while being very beautiful (both in terms of framing, composition, lighting, etc. AND the actors involved) also highlights the sexist and somewhat lecherous nature of the type of content Elisabeth/Sue create. It’s really well shot and when placed in context of the rest of the film prior to that scene, very depressing and almost horrifying.
This film is basically a scathing treatise on the way Hollywood eats up youth and beauty, then spits out depression, deplorability, and despair. Watching Elisabeth fall from grace in the way she does is very sad and depressing, particularly in the ending. And I personally think that having Dennis Quaid’s lecherous, uncaring exec be named Harvey wasn’t an accident…
This film was extremely entertaining, but I don’t think it will resonate with everyone.
First of all, it’s really gross. Like, “you might not want to eat while watching this” gross. This reviewer is a diehard, decades-long horror fan with a broken soul, so it didn’t gross me out all that much. But other people who aren’t as strong willed or as desensitized to body horror as I am will DEFINITELY struggle with watching some of the more intense body horror parts.
The practical effects on display here are top notch. At no point during this film did I wish there was more CG or felt like what I was watching wasn’t real in-story. SFX makeup artist Olivier Afonso and rest of the team that worked on this did an amazing job in turning the always stunning Demi Moore into something WILDLY different from her normal, pulchritudinous appearance. I don’t want to spoil anything, but what she becomes really reminded me of some of the stuff Rob Bottin did with The Thing!
One other thing that may not resonate with everyone is the fact that this film is kind of a fable, almost a fairy tale. It’s not set in a real place, and people don’t act like you would expect them to in the real world. It’s a clearly stylized version of reality, particularly Los Angeles. This doesn’t really become apparent until closer to the end of the film (at least for me), particularly during one sequence that is VERY reminiscent of a signature scene from the horror classic Carrie. It was clear to me by the end of this film that it’s totally a fable. If you’re expecting a by-the-book, standard type of story, this ain’t it, at least not fully.
All in all, this is definitely well worth a watch. A somewhat powerful, rather sad, and kind of depressing cautionary fable about the potential dangers of chasing youth in order to fit into a system of misogyny, set in a body horror film that apes some of the best work of Cronenberg, Henenlotter, Aronofsky, and Carpenter. Oh, and Demi Moore and Margeret Qualley are fully naked for a lot of this film. Which ironically, serves to drive the point of this film home even more on a meta level-here we are ogling Demi’s and Margeret’s fully naked bodies (full frontal female nudity and everything) during a tale about the dangers of vanity, sexism, envy, and jealousy…
This movie made me cry more than once.
