The great animated family films don’t just tell great stories; they find ways to visually embody those stories and ignite the imagination. The medium allows for maximum freedom, so to abandon formal creativity in service of mere narrative demands seems like an unspeakable waste, maybe even a crime. Chris Sanders’s The Wild Robot , based on the children’s book by Peter Brown, has a somewhat familiar set-up, and a comforting, warm-hearted tale.
But then you look at the movie — really look at it, as you might a painting — and a whole new world opens up. The robot in question is the ROZZUM unit 7134, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, a relentlessly task-oriented android that’s wound up on the edge of a dense forest in a remote island in the middle of nowhere. Roz, as she’s eventually known, is all hard angles and smooth surfaces, stuck in a natural environment that’s been rendered with animation that looks like rough, hand-drawn brushstrokes.
Sanders first made his name as one of the creators of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch back in the day. That classic — another fish-out-of-water tale — employed water-color backgrounds to bring a soft, dreamy texture to the world inhabited by its characters. With The Wild Robot , Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film.
And it’s hypnotic. Lost in this natural world, Roz latches on to different animals and asks them.