Say less — how a wordy Wild Robot missed a shot at animation greatness

The Wild Robot, the latest film from DreamWorks Animation, arrives with an impressive pedigree. Director and writer Chris Sanders has given us Lilo & Stich, the exuberant and moving How to Train Your Dragon and the wild and wooly family of The Croods. 

The source material is the beloved children's novel of the same name by Peter Brown. Turning the book, made of short chapters and simple illustrations, into an animated epic is no easy feat.

When The Wild Robot stays true to the understated source material it soars, but when Sanders' instinct for spectacle and sentiment get the better of him, it stumbles. 

The story opens with a robot and a predicament. Rozzum unit 7134, a people-pleasing robot from Universal Dynamics, washes up on the shores of a forest.

Eager to find customers to serve, Roz goes about investigating her environment. What she finds is the chaos of nature, an entire ecosystem of animals chasing, hunting and devouring each other.

Watching Roz trying to find a customer as various critters chirp and bark makes for a promising start. "How would you rate this service on a scale of 1 to 10?" asks the robot while plastering every animal with a Universal Dynamics sticker.

To complement the natural environment, director Sanders decided to approach the world of The Wild Robot with a more expressive animation style, inspired in part by the hand-painted cell animation of 1942's Bambi and the flowing forest life found in the work of Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki.

There's a beautiful painterly quality to the plant life and landscapes that prioritizes expression over realism. 

Then there's the face of the robot Roz — a metal sphere with two piercing eyes. What Roz shares with other great robot designs is a sense of simplicity. 

Rather than slipping into the uncanny valley where excessive details and realism can be off-putting, some of the most powerful robotic faces are the plainest. One eye or two. A simple line for a mouth. Or perhaps none at all all.

The magic of cartooning is how our minds fill in the blanks, imprinting emotion onto these empty canvases. 

After the pleasant chaos of Roz's arrival, The Wild Robot finds its real purpose as she becomes an accidental mother to a gosling named Brightbill.

Pinktail, a mama possum with a brood of her own breaks the news: Roz needs to teach the little goose to eat, swim and fly in time for the coming migration. Finally given a task, Roz is soon laser-focused on getting Brightbill ready for fall. 

As with the art, the casting of the various actors is another highlight.