iMovie: "The Wild Robot"

DreamWorks Animation's The Wild Robot, released as the studio marks its thirtieth anniversary, has been conceived as a throwback to animated fantasias of yore. No egregious celebrity voice artist showboating; no revivals of half-forgotten Nineties Eurodance hits; not a single squeaking Minion to behold. Writer-director Chris Sanders goes back as far as 2002's Lilo & Stitch, and gave DreamWorks an enduring hit with the tangible old-school craft of 2010's How to Train Your Dragon: the look he oversees for this new film meshes digital innovation with the painterly, hand-rendered backdrops of golden-era Disney, and the messaging on parenting dates from around the same era. (The film is nominally set around 2050, but its roots and underlying belief systems predate the Eisenhower era.) In its story - reshaped from Peter Brown's 2016 book - Sanders' film recalls a more recent era, those digimation space-race days when DreamWorks and Pixar were scrapping over the same promising ideas. The pitch here must have been something like "What if WALL-E fell back to Earth?": instead of a boxy droid, we have a spherical helpmate, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o), introduced crashlanding on a planet with a familiarly leafy look and abundant flora and fauna, but also elevated water levels that have left the Golden Gate Bridge semi-submerged. In her first days on the planet, Roz befriends an egg, after which the plot starts writing itself: the egg hatches, a gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor) emerges, robot comes to care for bird, and eventually learns some creatures are destined to fly away. There is, however, something missing: any real sense of where you and I are in this picture, and with that, any reason to be especially moved or stirred.

In WALL-E, you'll recall, the human beings were slovenly creatures slumming in hyperspace, their planet done for by decades of mindless over-consumption. (Fifteen years on, you have to admit this was fair representation.) For all its pretty artistry, Sanders' film may rank among the bleakest movie visions of 2024: effectively it's describing what happens once Mother Nature finally turfs humanity out, leaving her to duel with the new pollution of AI for planetary supremacy. (It's Silent Running without Bruce Dern, just the droids and the plants.) Now: clearly Brown and Sanders intended for us to find ourselves anew in the nurturing relationship between protective robot and helpless chick, or perhaps in the sly fox (Pedro Pascal), wisecracking possum (Catherine O'Hara) or grumpy beaver (Matt Berry, on disappointingly well-behaved form). But as rendered here, they're merely agglomerations of chips and wires on one hand, and anthropomorphised pixels on the other. The animators can thus mirror certain impulses and instincts, emotions and processes - their most extensive art is reserved for rendering the changing of very extreme seasons - but they make only fleeting contact with anything that might resemble human truth, a failing underlined by the absence of a single distinctive authorial fingerprint. For that idiosyncrasy, you'd need the dirt and dust of WALL-E, the Hughesian rust with which Brad Bird speckled his adaptation of The Iron Giant or just the salty trash of a second-string DreamWorks endeavour like 2006's Over the Hedge - artefacts that weren't so relentlessly damp-eyed and pious, so determined to do all our sobbing for us. Overlook the conservatism of its message, and The Wild Robot plays harmlessly enough; there's nothing on screen you might object to, as parents did to the bit with the tumble dryer in Lilo & Stitch. That strikes me as the reason for the movie's box-office success - it's a safe bet - but it also feels like an artistic limitation: I rapidly developed a craving for the raw meat Jan Švankmajer jolts into life in his animated bedtime stories. By contrast, Sanders' film, forever sterile in its prettiness, presents as so much wipeclean product: another assembly-line pacifier turned out by button-pushing automatons. Is this the future?

The Wild Robot is now playing in cinemas nationwide.