DreamWorks revealed the first trailer for its upcoming animated movie The Wild Robot on March 5, and it teases a pretty gorgeous movie, full of vibrantly colorful wildlife and vivid, stylized takes on natural settings. And smack in the middle of it is a robot that seems mighty familiar — but familiar in different ways in practically every shot.
Initially, the robot, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), looks like a head atop a rolling ball — a dead ringer for the Star Wars sequel series’ BB-8. But then it pops out limbs and starts looking a lot more like the attenuated, abandoned robot from Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky. It has big, goggly, sad eyes that evoke Wall-E from WALL-E; a mostly featureless yet evocative face reminiscent of Baymax from Disney’s Big Hero 6, and color-shifting eyes and soulful behavior reminiscent of the title character in The Iron Giant. The trailer’s only spoken words — a voiceover proclaiming, “Sometimes, to survive, you must become more than you were programmed to be” — evoke the central message of The Iron Giant as well. There’s scarcely an animated or CG movie robot from the past 25 years that doesn’t get a cheery little nod somewhere in Roz’s design or behavior.
The various animal characters in the trailer are more uniquely designed, but this initial teaser downplays them and doesn’t even reveal that they talk — a little odd, since many of them are voiced by very familiar actors, from Mark Hamill to Pedro Pascal to Matt Berry. It’s likely that later trailers will focus less on the movie’s mood and image, and more on those animal characters and the film’s plot. But for the moment, this trailer feels simultaneously like a showreel of very handsome animation, a nostalgia-courting love fest for decades of popular animated mechanical protagonists, and a weird dodge around the movie’s actual story, the way trailers for Wonka and the 2024 Mean Girls both dodged around revealing that those movies are musicals.
Image: DreamWorks Animation
Here’s DreamWorks’ rundown on the film’s storyline and cast:
The epic adventure follows the journey of a robot — ROZZUM unit 7134, “Roz” for short — that is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and must learn to adapt to the harsh surroundings, gradually building relationships with the animals on the island and becoming the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.
The Wild Robot stars Academy Award® winner Lupita Nyong’o (Us, The Black Panther franchise) as robot Roz; Emmy and Golden Globe nominee Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us, The Mandalorian) as fox Fink; Emmy winner Catherine O’Hara (Schitt’s Creek, Best in Show) as opossum Pinktail; Oscar® nominee Bill Nighy (Living, Love Actually) as goose Longneck; Kit Connor (Heartstopper, Rocketman) as gosling Brightbill and Oscar® nominee Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once, this summer’s The Fall Guy) as Vontra, a robot that will intersect with Roz’s life on the island.
The film also features the voice talents of Emmy winning pop-culture icon Mark Hamill (Star Wars franchise, The Boy and the Heron), Matt Berry (What We Do in the Shadows, the SpongeBob movie franchise) and Golden Globe winner and Emmy nominee Ving Rhames (Mission: Impossible films, Pulp Fiction).
A powerful story about the discovery of self, a thrilling examination of the bridge between technology and nature and a moving exploration of what it means to be alive and connected to all living things, The Wild Robot is written and directed by three-time Oscar® nominee Chris Sanders — the writer-director of DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon, The Croods, and Disney’s Lilo & Stitch — and is produced by Jeff Hermann (DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby 2: Family Business; co-producer, Kung Fu Panda franchise).
Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot, an illustrated middle-grade novel first published in 2016, became a phenomenon, rocketing to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The book has since inspired a trilogy that now includes The Wild Robot Escapes and The Wild Robot Protects. Brown’s work on the Wild Robot series and his other bestselling books have earned him a Caldecott Honor, a Horn Book Award, two E.B. White Awards, two E.B. White Honors, a Children’s Choice Award for Illustrator of the Year, two Irma Black Honors, a Golden Kite Award and a New York Times Best Illustrated Book Award.
The Wild Robot debuts in theaters on Sept. 20. More information is available at the movie’s website.