The Wild Robot

The Wild Robot is a 2024 American animated science fiction film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Universal Pictures. Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Peter Brown, it was written for the screen and directed by Chris Sanders and features the voices of Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames, Mark Hamill, and Catherine O'Hara. The film follows Roz (Nyong'o), a service robot shipwrecked on an uninhabited island who must adapt to its surroundings, build relationships with the local wildlife, and become the adoptive mother of an orphaned goose, Brightbill (Connor).
DreamWorks Animation bought the screenplay before the first novel's release in 2016. Sanders first encountered the original book through his daughter and was offered an opportunity to direct a film adaptation at DreamWorks. The film's visuals use a watercolor aesthetic, inspired by classic Disney animated films and the works of Hayao Miyazaki. Kris Bowers composed the score, marking his first score for a fully animated film. Development took four years on a budget of $80 million.
The Wild Robot premiered at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2024, and was released in the United States on September 27. The film was praised for its story, themes, animation, score, emotional depth, and voice acting. It was also a commercial success, grossing $333.8 million worldwide. Among its accolades, the film received nine Annie Awards (including Best Animated Feature), won Best Animated Feature at the Critics' Choice Awards and Producers Guild of America Awards, and was nominated for three Academy Awards (becoming DreamWorks' most-nominated film at the ceremony).
A storm causes a Universal Dynamics cargo ship to lose ROZZUM robots, which wash up on an uninhabited island. Only ROZZUM Unit 7134, "Roz", survives and is accidentally activated by wildlife. Roz frightens the animals and injures herself while trying to help them, even after learning their language. Unable to find anyone needing her services, she signals for retrieval, but is struck by lightning and attacked by animals. While fleeing Thorn, an aggressive grizzly bear, Roz accidentally crushes a goose nest, resulting in the deaths of all the birds and eggs except for one egg.
Roz protects the egg from a hungry fox, Fink. A gosling hatches and imprints on Roz; it breaks her long-range transponder. Following advice from Pinktail, an opossum with many youngsters, Roz cares for the gosling to ensure he can fly before the winter migration. Fink discovers he can benefit from Roz, who builds a shelter. Roz names the gosling Brightbill, and the three cohabit. As Brightbill grows, he learns to swim but is rejected by other geese. When Brightbill discovers Roz killed his family, he feels betrayed and angrily disowns her.
Roz reconstructs another ROZZUM unit, who advises her to return to the Universal Dynamics factory. Roz decides instead to finish helping Brightbill learn to fly, enlisting the help of a falcon, Thunderbolt, and receiving advice from Longneck, the goose flock's leader, allowing Brightbill to master flying just in time to join the geese's migration. Roz, missing Brightbill and unsure of her continued purpose, reactivates her transponder but shuts it off immediately after Universal Dynamics detects her signal.
During the migration, a thunderstorm forces the geese to shelter inside a Universal Dynamics greenhouse, triggering a contamination alert that sets reconnaissance (RECO) robots after them. Longneck sacrifices himself so Brightbill can lead the flock to safety. Meanwhile, Roz and Fink save the island's animals during a severe snowstorm, urging them to a truce before Roz powers down. Spring arrives, and Roz reawakens to find the animals still following the peace and Brightbill returning, hailed now as a hero.
Shortly after, a Universal Dynamics retrieval robot, Virtual Observational Neutralizing Troublesome Retrieval Authority ("Vontra"), arrives to recover Roz. Roz flees with Fink, pursued by robots dispatched by Vontra. The animals band together to fight off the RECO robots, but Vontra captures Roz and then starts a forest fire by detonating the damaged RECOs. Brightbill attacks the Universal Dynamics dropship to save Roz as Fink and the others extinguish the fire. Despite Roz appearing to have been shut down by Vontra, her love for Brightbill restores her systems. Roz and Brightbill eventually destroy Vontra and escape as the dropship explodes.
Roz decides to return to Universal Dynamics to protect the island from future attacks, but promises the animals to return. Months later, the animals continue to live together on the island while Roz works at another Universal Dynamics greenhouse, maintaining her memories. Brightbill visits her, and the two embrace.
Before the release of The Wild Robot—a novel created by Peter Brown—in 2016, DreamWorks Animation bought the screenplay, setting the budget at $78 million. Chris Sanders first encountered Brown's book through his daughter, though he never read it himself. Years later, while looking for his next project at DreamWorks, Sanders was offered an opportunity to direct an adaptation of the book for the studio. Upon reading it, Sanders immediately fell in love with the story and felt he was the right person to adapt it to film. He described the book as "deceptively simple" and "emotionally complex". Sanders had previously considered the idea of a creature bonding with animals in a forest for his directorial debut Lilo & Stitch (2002). Sanders contacted Brown and would later describe the phone call as critical to the film's development. Brown told the production team that his intended theme for the book was that kindness could be a survival skill. Sanders sought to weave that theme through the film and felt he achieved that goal. Another theme in the story that Sanders was drawn to was that of motherhood. He felt he had never done a story of this nature before. The film's development process took four years.
Changes were made to the book's story for the film. In the book, Roz is in constant search of a task but also in the wrong place and with no one to give her tasks. Sanders felt that she risked becoming monotonous at points in the story, so he strived to make Roz constantly interesting and compelling throughout. Some character roles from the book were reduced in order to give others more substantial screen time and impact. The changes to the characters and their roles were also made to prevent the film from overcrowding.
Cast members Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, Catherine O'Hara, Bill Nighy, Kit Connor, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames were revealed on March 5, 2024, with the release of the film's first trailer.
Sanders wanted Roz to be a compelling character and felt an extraordinary voice performance was necessary to achieve this. He wanted to avoid a two-dimensional fictional take on a robot, where they go straight from being emotionless to emotional. Nyong'o was tasked with finding a voice for the character and evolving it as the story progressed. The actress's role was particularly important as Roz did not possess facial articulation. This meant Nyong'o's voice was the main way of signifying Roz's emotions.
According to Hamill, who voiced Thorn, he learned about the film after reading the book The Wild Robot. Hamill says that The Wild Robot reminded him of his first feelings about Star Wars (1977), in which he originated the role of Luke Skywalker.
The Wild Robot would be the final film to be animated entirely in-house at DreamWorks, as Cartoon Brew reported on October 6, 2023, that the studio would be shifting away from producing films in-house in their Glendale campus to relying more heavily on outside studios after 2024. Additional character rigging was done by French studio Stim Studio.
After reading the book, Sanders felt the story's innocent tone and natural setting required a look that strayed away from the standard CGI photorealism in many modern animated films. He and production designer Raymond Zibach wanted the film in its finished state to still resemble the concept paintings. To achieve this, the production team built upon the technologies used in two of DreamWorks' earlier films, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and The Bad Guys (both 2022). While the characters were made up of CGI geometrical shapes, their surfaces possess a hand-painted look. This painterly style philosophy was carried onto every visual element in the film, including the sky and environments.
Sanders took inspiration from classic Disney animated movies and the works of Hayao Miyazaki, resulting in a stylized CG visual style that he described as "a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest". He considered Bambi (1942) and My Neighbour Totoro (1988) as the biggest influences on the visuals. The works of Syd Mead served as inspiration for the futuristic parts of the film.
Sanders wanted Roz's design to be memorable, and one that would take its place among fiction's most famous robots. Taking inspiration from C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars and Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet (1956), he wanted Roz to have little facial articulation. Sanders and the rest of the design team made several prototype designs during production. One of the designers, Hyun Huh presented his Roz design to the crew, which became the basis for the one seen in the film. The crew immediately fell in love with Huh's design, with Sanders describing it as simple and appealing. Brown's original book described Roz with great detail, so Sanders and the team knew they had to leave some design elements out. Although on behalf of Brown's description of what a ROZZUM unit's purpose was to humans, they aimed for Roz's design to be humanoid.
In March 2024, Kris Bowers was revealed to be composing the score, his first score for a fully animated film. Additionally, two original songs were announced to be made for the film, performed and co-written by Maren Morris. The first, "Kiss the Sky", was released on August 28; the second, "Even When I'm Not", along with the full soundtrack album, was released on September 27. Morris and her team of co-writers were inspired to write a second song for the film, "Even When I'm Not", which is featured in the film's end credits, when they screened the finished film.
The Wild Robot had its world premiere as the opening front runner of the Toronto International Film Festival Grand Opening celebration on September 8, 2024. It was initially scheduled for release on September 20, but was postponed to September 27. This shift was reportedly made to avoid competition with Transformers One.
On December 29, 2024, it was announced that The Wild Robot would be re-released in theaters in the US on January 17, 2025.
The first trailer for the film, featuring a rendition of Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World", plus a poster, were released on March 5, 2024. The trailer debuted in theaters three days later in front of screenings of DreamWorks' other new film Kung Fu Panda 4. Writing for Polygon, Tasha Robinson compared the design of Roz to familiar film robots such as BB-8 (the Star Wars sequel trilogy), WALL-E (in his titular film), Baymax (from Big Hero 6), and The Iron Giant (in his titular film), and noted that the only words spoken in the trailer - "Sometimes, to survive, we must become more than we were programmed to be" - evoked the message of The Iron Giant (1999).
The Wild Robot was released to rent on digital streaming on October 15, 2024, and on Blu-ray and DVD on December 3.
The film was made available to stream on NBCUniversal's Peacock streaming service in the US on January 24, 2025. As part of Universal's long-term deal with Netflix, the film will stream on Peacock for the first four months of the pay-TV window, before moving to Netflix for the next ten, and returning to Peacock for the remaining four.
The Wild Robot has grossed $143.9 million in the United States and Canada, and $189.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $333.8 million.
In the United States and Canada, The Wild Robot was released alongside Megalopolis, and was projected to gross $24–30 million from 3,962 theaters in its opening weekend. The film made $11.2 million on its first day, including an estimated $1.9 million from Thursday previews. The film went on to debut to $35.8 million, slightly above predictions and topping the box office. In its second weekend, the film made $18.9 million (a drop of 47% from its first weekend), finishing in second behind newcomer Joker: Folie à Deux. In its third weekend the film made $14 million (dropping just 25.9%), finishing in second behind newcomer Terrifier 3. According to The Hollywood Reporter, theater chains treated the unrated Terrifier 3 as an R-rated film, turning down attendees 17 or younger if unaccompanied by a parent or guardian. Distribution sources speculated that more people saw the film than reported, theorizing that a "noticeable bump" in the earnings for The Wild Robot's third weekend was the result of teenagers buying tickets to the film and then sneaking into screenings of Terrifier 3. The film then made $10.1 million and $6.8 million in its fourth and fifth weekends, respectively.
The Wild Robot received critical acclaim. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 252 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's consensus reads: "A simple tale told with great sophistication, The Wild Robot is wondrous entertainment that dazzles the eye while filling your heart to the brim." It is DreamWorks Animation's third highest-rated film on the site, behind Chicken Run (2000) and Sanders' How to Train Your Dragon (2010).Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 85 out of 100, based on 46 critics. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak gave it a 96% overall positive score, with 62% saying they would definitely recommend it.
Natalia Winkelman of The New York Times called the film "a dazzling triumph of animation" and wrote "this is a work that cares most about two things: big feelings and great beauty". Pete Hammond of Deadline Hollywood said, "If Spielberg's E.T. had been an animated film instead, it might resemble what writer-director Chris Sanders has created here. However, Wild Robot weaves its own magic and for that we can all cry tears of joy." Adrian Horton, writing for The Guardian said: "Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one's throat." Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph gave the film a five out of five scoring, saying, "DreamWorks was founded 30 years ago this month, and this well-timed anniversary release is their richest, most moving film since 1998's reputation-making The Prince of Egypt." In his review for Vulture, Bilge Ebiri praised Nyong'o's performance and found that it "turn[ed] this heartwarming family film into an unforgettable one".
Collider thought it was one of Sanders's best films yet, while Screen Rant called it the best animated film of the year.
The Wild Robot incorporates environmental themes throughout its narrative, including a reference to climate change in a sequence depicting a futuristic San Francisco with a partially submerged Golden Gate Bridge. DreamWorks Animation developed the film in collaboration with both Universal's GreenerLight Program and the Natural Resources Defense Council's Rewrite the Future initiative, with environmental experts consulting on the ecological elements and a sustainability-focused PSA featuring Lupita Nyong'o. The film's environmental themes were showcased at Climate Week NYC 2024, where it received a special screening at the inaugural Climate Film Festival.
On September 7, 2024, when asked about a potential sequel, Sanders stated, "I would very much like to. This was a labor of love on the part of everybody at the studio, and yes, I think I'd love to go and stay here for a while." On October 12, 2024, he confirmed that a sequel is in development.