REVIEW: The Wild Robot

I think I must have known that Chris Sanders had another movie on deck, but I guess I had forgotten it was coming out so soon. For whatever reason, when I saw his name at the end of the credits for The Wild Robot, out this weekend, I was caught off guard ... and then realized that it actually explained a lot. The basic premise felt broadly reminiscent of Lilo & Stitch, and there was at least one sequence that definitely recalled How to Train Your Dragon, both of which Sanders co-directed with Dean Deblois (executive producer on this film). With his latest offering for Dreamworks, Sanders cements his position as a titan in the world of animation.

The movie sees ROZ, a shipwrecked robot stranded on an island completely untouched by humans. One would think that such an Eden would be bereft of the squabbles that humans seem so happy to create, but the animals of the island revile this new intruder and put up every fence they have. The only thing on this rock that doesn't hate this giant metal outcast is the newly hatched gosling who imprints on her. ROZ decides that parenting is as good a directive as any, and a relationship takes root that may change more than one world.

So much of the distance travelled, for both Dreamworks specifically and computer animation as a whole, is on display with this film. You can recognize, for example, the footprints of 2000s Dreamworks cynicism in a lot of the humor early on in the film (a baby opossum is mauled offscreen, presumably eaten, only to crawl back to her family, assuring, "don't worry mom, I'm still alive!" to which mother opossum casually responds, "Oh. Yaaaaay ...") but that jadedness only ends up forming the bedrock for the film's larger treatise on rising above our natural programming and doing our part to make the world safer for one another. The film's ultimate landing place is not super obvious from the start, but when you check the math by the end, the balance comes out just the same.

Then there's animation itself. Not a frame of this movie that is anything less than jaw dropping. Long gone are the putty taxidermy days of early computer animation. Everything here looks painted rather than rendered. Even at its most hostile, you just want to let this world spill out over the canvas and wash over you. Adults too scared to see cartoons in theaters will miss out.

Gone also are the days of Dreamworks using celebrity voice talent as a crutch. I hadn't walked in with the cast list memorized. I remembered Lupita Nyong'o was the robot, and Pedro Pascal was somewhere in this bundle. But in staying through the credits and seeing I recognized almost all the names, I had that extra layer of appreciation for the performers whose star persona did not overpower the characters they were breathing life into. Special shoutout to Kit Connor as Brightbill, the gosling at the center of the story.

Anyways, we look forward to seeing Sanders at the Oscars next year, and maybe a little after that too.

--The Professor

Comments

What Does the World Owe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

When I say “first animated feature-film” what comes to mind? If you’ve been paying attention to any channel of pop culture, and even whether or not you are on board with the Disney mythology, then you know that Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first ever full-length animated film. (Kinda. The Adventures of Prince Achmed made use of paper-puppetry way back in 1926, but that wasn’t quite the trendsetter that “Snow White” was.) You might even know about all the newspapers calling the film “Disney’s folly” or even specific anecdotes like that there somewhere around fifty different proposed names for the seven dwarfs (#justiceforGassy). DC League of Super-Pets (2022) But in popular discourse, l ots of people will discuss Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as little more than a necessary icebreake...

REVIEW: ONWARD

The Walt Disney Company as a whole seems to be in constant danger of being overtaken by its own cannibalistic tendency--cashing in on the successes of their past hits at the expense of creating the kinds of stories that merited these reimaginings to begin with. Pixar, coming fresh off a decade marked by a deluge of sequels, is certainly susceptible to this pattern as well. Though movies like Inside Out and Coco have helped breathe necessary life into the studio, audiences invested in the creative lifeblood of the studio should take note when an opportunity comes for either Disney or Pixar animation to flex their creative muscles. This year we'll have three such opportunities between the two studios. [EDIT: Okay, maybe not. Thanks, Corona.] The first of these, ONWARD directed by Dan Scanlon, opens this weekend and paints a hopeful picture of a future where Pixar allows empathetic and novel storytelling to guide its output. The film imag...

REVIEW: Snow White

Here's a story: When developing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , one of the hardest scenes to nail was the sequence in which the young princess is out in the meadow and she sees a lost bird who has been separated from its family. As she goes to console it, The Huntsman starts toward her, intent to fulfill The Evil Queen's orders to kill the princess and bring back her heart. The animators turned over every stone trying to figure out how to pull off this episode. They went back and forth about how slow he would creep up on her. When would he bring out the knife? When would the shadow fall on her? One of the animators reportedly asked at one point, "But won't she get hurt?" That was the moment when Walt's team knew they had succeeded at their base directive to create pathos and integrity within the form of animation--to get audiences to care about a cartoon, such that they would worry that this tender-hearted girl wa...

PROFESSOR'S PICKS: 25 Most Essential Movies of the Century

"Best." "Favorite." "Awesomest." I spent a while trying to land on which adjective best suited the purposes of this list. After all, the methods and criteria with which we measure goodness in film vary wildly. "Favorite" is different than "Best," but I would never put a movie under "Best" that I don't at least like. And any film critic will tell you that their favorite films are inevitably also the best films anyways ... But here at the quarter-century mark, I wanted to give some kind of space to reflect on which films are really deserving of celebration. Which films ought to be discussed as classics in the years ahead. So ... let's just say these are the films of the 21st century that I want future champions of the film world--critics and craftsmen--to be familiar with. Sian Hader directing the cast of CODA (2021) There are a billion or so ways to measure a film's merit--its technical perfectio...

REVIEW: The Electric State

It's out with the 80s and into the 90s for Stranger Things alum Millie Bobby Brown. In a post-apocalyptic 1990s, Michelle is wilting under the neglectful care of her foster father while brooding over the death of her family, including her genius younger brother. It almost seems like magic when a robotic representation of her brother's favorite cartoon character shows up at her door claiming to be an avatar for her long-lost brother. Her adventure to find him will take her deep into the quarantine zone for the defeated robots and see her teaming up with an ex-soldier and a slew of discarded machines. What starts as a journey to bring her family back ends up taking her to the heart of the conflict that tore her world apart to begin with. This is a very busy movie, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons. There is, for example, heavy discussion on using robots as a stand-in for historically marginalized groups. I'll have ...

REVIEW: Mickey 17

Coming into Mickey 17 having not read the source material by Edward Ashton, I can easily see why this movie spoke to the sensibilities of Bong Joon Ho, particularly in the wake of his historic Academy Award win five years ago. Published in 2022, it feels like Ashton could have been doing his Oscars homework when he conceived of the story--a sort of mashup of Parasite , Aliens , and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times . Desperate to escape planet earth, Mickey applies for a special assignment as an "expendable," a person whose sole requirement is to perform tasks too dangerous for normal consideration--the kind that absolutely arise in an outer space voyage to colonize other planets. It is expected that Mickey expire during his line of duty, but never fear. The computer has all his data and can simply reproduce him in the lab the next day for his next assignment. Rinse and repeat. It's a system that we are assured cannot fail ... until of course it does. I'll admit my ...

The Paradox of The Graduate

If you've been following my writings for long, you might know that I'm really not a fan of American Beauty . I find its depiction of domestic America scathing, reductive, and, most of all, without insight. I don't regret having dedicated an entire essay to how squirmy the film is, or that it's still one of my best-performing pieces. But maybe, one might say, I just don't like films that critique the American dream? Maybe I think that domestic suburbia is just beyond analysis or interrogation. To that I say ... I really like The Graduate . I find that film's observations both more on-point and more meaningful. I think it's got great performances and witty dialogue, and it strikes the balance between drama and comedy gracefully. And I'm not alone in my assessment. The Graduate was a smash hit when it was released in 1967, landing on five or six AFI Top 100 lists in the years since. But what's int...

REVIEW: Cruella

The train of Disney remakes typically inspires little awe from the cinephilia elite, but the studio's latest offering, "Cruella," shows more curiosity and ambition than the standard plug and chug reboot. This may have just been Bob Iger checking 1961's "101 Dalmatians" off the list of properties to exploit, but with the film's clever design, writing, and performances, director Craig Gillespie accidentally made the rare remix worth a second glance. This prequel tracks the devilish diva's history all the way back to her childhood. When primary school-aged "Estella" witnesses the death of her doting mother, her fiery, nonconformist spirit becomes her greatest asset. This will carry her into adulthood when she finally assimilates herself into the alluring world of fashion and the path of the indominatable "Baronness" who holds a strangling grip on the landscape. Their odd mentorship melts into something twisted and volatile as Estel...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 1

Because the consumption of art, even in a capitalist society, is such a personal experience, it can be difficult to quantify exactly how an individual interprets and internalizes the films they are participating in. We filter our artistic interpretations through our own personal biases and viewpoints, and this can sometimes lead to a person or groups assigning a reading to a work that the author did not design and may not even accurately reflect the nature of the work they are interacting with (e.g. the alt-right seeing Mel Brooks’ The Producers as somehow affirming their disregard for political correctness when the film is very much lampooning bigotry and Nazis specifically). We often learn as much or more about a culture by the way they react to a piece of media as we do from the media itself. Anyways, you know where this is going. Let’s talk about Disney Princesses. Pinning down exactly when Disney Princesses entered the picture is a hard thi...

REVIEW: Ezra

I actually had a conversation with a colleague some weeks ago about the movie, Rain Man , a thoughtful drama from thirty years ago that helped catapult widespread interest in the subject of autism and neurodivergence. We took a mutual delight in how the film opened doors and allowed for greater in-depth study for an underrepresented segment of the community ... while also acknowledging that, having now opened those very doors, it is easy to see where Rain Man 's representation couldn't help but distort and sensationalize the community it aimed to champion. And I now want to find this guy again and see what he has to say about Tony Goldwyn's new movie, Ezra . The movie sees standup comedian and divorced dad, Max (Bobby Cannavale), at a crossroads with how to raise his autistic son, the titular Ezra (William Fitzgerald), with his ex-wife, Jenna (Rose Byrne). As Jenna pushes to give Ezra more specialized attention, like pulling him out of publ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog