Zach Marsh’s review published on Letterboxd:
I've been hard on DreamWorks many times in the past, because I always saw the potential for something like The Wild Robot within most of their catalogue.
Unlike Illumination - who actively, deliberately infantilize children in a way that I feel is detrimental - I've always felt that DreamWorks know that they will never be Pixar, and thus have never really tried to be, the occasional "follow the leader" movie excepted. But, there are tropes and a formula and some regrettably off-colour humour that they so frequently cycle through - they're not a studio above the likes of a fart joke - that kind of put a ceiling up most of the time when you see that logo at the front of a film.
The Wild Robot is such a wild formula break, in fact it feels like a film that is reaching to be "Pixaresque" in that it's taking a "lifeless" subject - a robot - and making it an allegory for us, for parenthood, for love, for environmentalism, for feeling. I'm not going to pretend that this is something revolutionary - this concept goes at least all the way back to H. G. Wells - but it's ambitious, and when accomplished, it's pretty much infalliable whether it's Toy Story or it's Data's decades-long journey to live in Star Trek.
Obviously, WALL-E is the easy comparison point, but this works so much better because it holds almost no interest in the corporations and the humans and "the future". We get a force for nature and Roz to unite against and not much more than that. This movie establishes a setting and stays there, it doesn't whisk its protagonist off to space and turn into a completely different movie at the halfway point.
And for all of its "themes" - and there are a lot being juggled here to an improbably balanced and layered effect - ultimately what makes this not only DreamWorks' runaway best film, but one of the landmarks of animated cinema this century, is the way it centers on the all-encompassing and heartwarming story of love between an unwitting mother and her devoted if misguided child. This is what we're here for. Human, toy, robot, fox, goose...this is what it's about.
More of this, DreamWorks.
10/10
(New) #3 of 2024 (so far...)
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