At first glance, The Wild Robot, a new movie from DreamWorks Animation (and one of the studio’s last in-house productions), seems to target the voguish cultural anxiety over sentient, talking computers – technology designed, to borrow the dubious promises of companies like OpenAI, to seem more and more like a human. The titular robot here is Rozzum Unit 7134, assumedly a Silicon Valley invention, if Silicon Valley tried to update the Jetsons’ household assistant, whose delivery is foiled by a typhoon. Instead, she washes ashore on a remote Pacific north-west-esque isle. The robot, convincingly voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has the flat affect of Amazon’s Alexa and the purely task-oriented mindset of programming, plus enough of a hint of confused yearning to immediately root for her.
For The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) performs a sly, absorbing and extremely effective sleight of hand: the more time we spend with the robot – the more its programming trains on new input, to use the parlance of generative AI – the more it underscores the deep, inarticulable and sacred wells of human feelings, the exact things that cannot be programmed or manufactured. That this film, based on the book series by Peter Brown, does so while also being a highly enjoyable and lusciously detailed story about a misfit, amid a community of charismatic woodland creatures, makes it one of the best animated films of the year, rightfully considered the frontrunner for an Oscar.
