The Wild Robot

If you're old enough, or are pop culture-savvy enough, you remember the Hollywood Minute segment from the Weekend Update on SNL. It featured David Spade doing a riff on Entertainment Tonight-style shows, but instead of relentless celebrity worship, it was a merciless roast. One of the most infamous jokes was a roast of the band Stone Temple Pilots, of whom Spade said he liked them, but he liked them better the first time I heard them when they were called Pearl Jam. This came to mind after I watched The Wild Robot. 2024's animated movies came down to this and Flow.. Flow was a unique art piece, a wordless movie in a surreal landscape, with animals that didn't talk, while The Wild Robot was described as DreamWorks Animation's shot at the Pixar throne. An emotionally driven movie with resonant themes that adults would love while balancing humor for the younger half of the audience. It was a Beatles vs. Stones kind of argument. And all I could think of was David Spade's murder of STP. Because, to me, there was no contest at all. I'd seen The Wild Robot before. And I liked it a lot more the first time, when it was called WALL*E, and Finding Nemo, several other movies. That isn't to say The Wild Robot isn't done well. Unlike most animated movies that would tackle the ideas of found family and belonging, this one does so from the parent's point of view, showing how it changes a person's identity and purpose. Watching the robot -- an all-purpose industrial helper robot designed to do do menial labor and day-to-day tasks -- take on parenthood and treat it as a checklist, only to find it is anything but and how that changes you as a person, is resonant in ways I cannot describe, but that every parent fundamentally understands at their core. There were so many times in the first 45-60 minutes where my wife and I nodded or say some form of "damned right" at moments as we identified them from being parents ourselves. When the robot says how being the gosling's adopted guardian has irrevocably changed her, including breaking down her body and "voiding [its] warranty", we got it. When it was building a shelter out of logs, and the gosling wanted to participate by putting a useless twig in the wall, and once the robot let the gosling do so, it wouldn't stop, slowing down the task, we got it. These moments are humorous, but also heartfelt and real. They were obviously written and directed by parents. When The Wild Robot focused on the relationship between the titular robot and the gosling it adopts, it has its hands on the Pixar crown, ready to grasp it. The movie is so very, very, very close to taking it, even if the themes of parenthood and learning to let go and let children grow (especially a child who was born different) was taken right from Finding Nemo, and a robot becoming humanish is directly from WALL*E, or the lonely fox who nobody trusts taken almost wholesale from Zootopia. But The Wild Robot is still a DreamWorks animated movies, and that means that signature DreamWorks schmaltz and sense of humor has to creep in. It feels like two movies were smashed together here; one, a human, heartfelt examination on parenthood and letting go and how it changes you, and one a wacky movie with wise-cracking animals that had crudely drawn caricatures for personalities, and a whizz-bang, action-packed third act with lasers and explosions and a group of scrappy rebels standing up to the man. I swear if I looked hard enough at the edges of the movie, I could see the studio notes; "needs more of the obnoxious British beaver!", or "can we get a little more of the sassy possum mom?", or "needs an antagonist in third act, and spaceships!". Every time the movie has to stop and find room to squeeze in one of the many tacky, hacky, one-dimensional, trademark DreamWorks characters, I could feel like my appreciation for the movie bleed out drip by drip. It doesn't help that the side characters all have to have celebrity voices that are so distinct, it's all you can hear. The robot itself is voiced by Lupita Nyong'o, and you wouldn't know it. She actually gives a performance. Ditto Pedro Pascal as Fink the Fox. But Bill Nighy as the wise old good Longneck? Matt Berry as Paddler the beaver? Ving Rhames as Thunderbolt the owl? They stand out like a clown at a funeral. I kept waiting for Rhames to say "ARBY'S -- WE HAVE THE MEATS". I couldn't hear past them to care about their characters, but to be honest, there's nothing TO care about past their voices; they're stunt casting, recognizable voices and nothing more. They got Catherine O'Hara, a comedic legend, to do a standard sassy, exasperated (possum) mom that we've seen a hundred times. Hell, we've seen HER do it before. I'm surprised there wasn't some kind of Home Alone reference, it feels that hackneyed and forced. And speaking of hackneyed and forced, the last 20 minutes. Murder-bots shooting lasers at the animals. WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THE MOVIE'S CENTRAL THEMES OF THE MOVIE. Why does this turn into an entirely different movie? Oh, right, because it's DreamWorks, and they can't trust the movie to land itself based on emotional resonance and internal conflict alone. It has to become this spectacle of a confrontation that doesn't fit with the rest of the movie, feeling more like a riff on Return Of The Jedi's battle on Endor, and an emotionless AI relentlessly following programming to capture the main character in pursuit of their greater mission. It is so clunky and ham-handed, and it absolutely does not fit in this movie, and it is absolutely a studio mandate. It has to be. And it, frankly, pisses me off, because this was a really good movie up until then. If it had kept the tone and stuck the landing, let this movie deliver its natural conclusions and force the audience to reckon with difficult and complex emotional concepts (like, say, Toy Story 3), I would've understood the praise this has gotten. Not to say this doesn't deserve some of the praise. When the DreamWorks of it all isn't getting in the way with "oh, that guy!" stunt casting and wise-cracking animals and schmaltzy montages driven by a popular song of the moment, it can be emotionally resonant in that classic Pixar way. But between the studio notes forcing it to serve two masters, and so many elements of The Wild Robot being either unmistakable homages or lawsuit-worthy plagiarisms of other excellent movies, it leaves The Wild Robot being an effective copy of something I've seen before ... but still, in the end, just a copy.