The wild robotthe latest release from DreamWorks Animation (in one of the last in-house Films), arrived at the Fantastic Fest just days after none other than Guillermo del Toro, a luminary of cinema and master of animation. summed up the struggle between artificial art and human artSpeaking at BFI in Conversation, del Toro said: “The value of art is not how much it costs or how little effort it requires. It’s how much you would risk to be in its presence.”

Art, del Toro stresses, requires courage, just as growing up requires courage, and just as raising a child requires courage – knowing that at every moment you run the risk of failure. Just as it takes courage to simply exist in a world that feels increasingly swallowed up by inhumanity. The wild robot is a film about courage in all its many forms, reflecting on the loss of everything we hold dear and wondering what is even worth saving in the face of that prospect. Along with all the heavy-handed ideas about what we can create in a new world and what is worth saving in the old one, it is also a charming animated adventure about a robot and some forest creatures. Its ability to succeed on both levels makes it one of the best animated films of the year.

Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) was conceived as a kind of family butler à la Rosey. The Jetsonsbut instead washes ashore on an idyllic island, where she activates and begins exploring. Roz starts by looking for a customer to serve and printing out QR code stickers while encountering raccoons, rabbits, bears, foxes, and more. All of these critters think she’s a monster and want nothing to do with her. Then, quite by chance, Roz holds a gosling in her arms as it is just hatching.

Brightbill (Kit Connor) is a gosling who imprints on Roz, and with his real parents dead, Roz sees an opportunity to fulfill her prime directive, which is, “Fulfill a task.” Her task, she later learns, is threefold: she must keep Brightbill alive, she must teach him to swim, and she must teach him to fly in time for the next migration. But Brightbill is a runt, and his life with Roz has made him an outsider. Roz, meanwhile, has no one to help her navigate a forest so densely packed with strange new encounters that it might as well be an alien landscape.

During this journey, screenwriter and director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to train your dragon) delivers the kind of family movie experience that’s worth the price of admission for everyone. Sanders has a proven track record with these kinds of films, and he hasn’t lost his head. His DreamWorks team conjures up a dynamic, beautifully realized world that’s part Disney and part Ghibli, with a touch of impressionism around the edges and a wonderful retro-futuristic design for Roz. The images are airy and light, whether we’re talking dreamy forest landscapes or a glimpse into the futuristic manufacturing world that Roz created in the first place. Sweeping seaside storms are rendered with gorgeous drama, while a brood of opossum kids emerge like Saturday morning cartoon characters; both are given equal weight in this story. You can see, Across the Spider-Verse in these pictures, but you can also see Princess Mononoke.

This mix of hyperkinetic and comic with stirring and epic also affects the work of the cast. Nyong’o plays a cold and distant character, a product of design who has to become more heartfelt and more informed by the world around her with each scene—sometimes with each second. There are moments when she has to feel a deep, devastating emotion while simultaneously playing a character who doesn’t know where that emotion is coming from or what to do. Nyong’o makes Roz not only believable but identifiable. As Finch, Pascal brings a naturalistic, warm note of brutal honesty to the picturesque forest, while O’Hara contributes a dose of maternal realism and Mark Hamill shows wonderfully rugged vulnerability as the local alpha predator. And then there’s Matt Berry, who just about steals the film’s show as a selfish, over-the-top beaver who deserves his own spinoff.

But apart from being a pure dose of family entertainment, there is something else in The wild robot that stays in your mind long after the credits roll. It’s a film about a robot that learns to become more and more like a living being, at a time when people are constantly saying that robots are becoming more and more like living beings.

Not a week goes by without someone showing off a machine-made film reel and boasting about how lifelike and beautiful it is, claiming that in the future we will be able to queue up art on demand. There is obviously a cultural tension between what machines can do and what humans can do; at first glance The wild robot may seem like an example of how far you can push an artificial being to create real emotional resonance. But The wild robot is really about what can’t be constructed or predicted, a treatise on what it really means to feel things. The more Roz looks for the roots of what drives her to do her job, the more she understands that what she thinks and, yes, feels, exists beyond her, beyond the people who created her, beyond what anyone can achieve with a line of code or a piece of circuitry.

Parents can certainly understand that you love someone so much that it motivates every step, even if they don’t understand exactly where the love comes from. In addition, we all understand that our humanity is unpredictable and chaotic and greater than the reactions that any system can generate. How WALL E And Toy history before, The wild robot understands that sometimes these emotional truths are best expressed through inorganic objects that give us a new perspective on our own biological lives. And like those films, it navigates emotional complexities with grace and precision, never sacrificing depth or holding back its punches. And right now, observing these complexities through the camera-lensed eyes of a machine parent is a perfect reminder that some things are beyond what we can manufacture.

In The wild robotthe future is not about what we can build, but what we can save, and what we will risk to save it. At a time when cold calculation seems to permeate so much of our cultural life, from financial problems to cultural discourse, it offers a balm for technology-dominated souls and a reminder that it takes courage to simply exist as a thinking, feeling human being in such a noisy world. With its unexpectedly moving images, its remarkable ensemble of voices, and the sheer clarity of a humanist vision, The wild robot is an amazing achievement.

Director: Chris Sanders
Writer: Chris Sanders
Stars: Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Catherine O’Hara
Release date: 27 September 2024