After a shipwreck, an intelligent robot called Roz is stranded on an uninhabited island. To survive the harsh environment, Roz bonds with the island's animals and cares for an orphaned baby goose.
15 Sep The Wild Robot (2024)
Programmed
At the front I have to say that both the adults were affected, cried, emoted. This is a Mommy story in a sea of Daddy stories, especially animated ‘family’ fare. It pulled on some formulaic strings, enough for me to say that this knows the formula and effectively followed it. In other words, it accessed our programming. It built particularly on ‘Storm Boy’ and ‘Fly Away Home’ (Anna Paquin!). There’s a Disney spirit to the animal dynamics — a far cry from the anti-Disney references in the DreamWorks launch project, ‘Shrek’.
What I noticed could be imagined. I know that the rendering engine DreamWorks uses allows fractional rendering, so that as they go they can move the camera relatively late in the process. That’s different than the earlier generation still used by others. The effect is in better cinematic quality and continuity. It means you literally can ‘reshoot’ from a different angle as you do your progressive editing. And it also means you can adjust the colour balance as you go. There’s a real mature management of colour here.
It is also the case that they can mix two and three dimensional rendering. In some cases, I assume it actually adds to the quality of the thing, but usually it is to save money. There were only a few cases where it bothered me. While the clouds and water at the beginning were expensively three D, the fire and explosion toward the end were cheap. You may not notice on a TV screen, but on a big one you will feel cheated.
I am guessing that the original story was for kids and made a bigger deal of the contrast between a modern future and wilderness, but that’s absent here. The story is instead rather clear, about overcoming ‘programming’. The fold is that the robot’s overcoming of ‘her’ programming to learn love and achieve motherhood subsumes and inspires a similar overcoming of natural programming of selfishness among the island’s creatures. The first, the motherhood thread, is so effectively delivered, we are distracted from the fairly sloppy rendering of how the animals graduate to a cartoon utopia.
The strange discontinuity is between the presumed safety of the equilibrium of the humans at unacceptable cost, and the new ‘safety’ of the creatures as they become less wild. I couldn’t shake the feeling that this is superficially like ‘Wall-E’ while settling on an opposite side.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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