MANILA, Philippines — Today’s world with a 50-50 love and loathe relationship with Artificial Intelligence (AI) is mirrored 100% in DreamWorks Animation’s latest offering, “The Wild Robot.”
Distributed by Universal Pictures, “The Wild Robot” might be based on its namesake children’s picture book series by Peter Brown, but it is definitely not only for children.
While usual movie plots introduce conflicts at the middle or near the end, in “The Wild Robot,” the conflict commences as soon as the animated flick starts rolling. First, there is the highly-advanced robot Roz that gets stranded on a virginal island – the main character and the setting themselves are at odds and are like oil and water that do not belong together.
As Roz navigates through her new environment, she meets many more conflicts along the way – in the form of forest animals with natural instincts to destroy new threats like Roz – a rare case of nature being the threat to machine than the usual other way around.
As Roz navigates her way through the forest, she meets new friends and enemies along the way and as such, there is a constant push and pull that can be felt throughout the movie between nature and nurture, the artificial and the natural, the technological and the raw, and programming versus sense of duty.
Roz’s cat and mouse or dog and cat relationship with her new environment and its inhabitants becomes serious but also funny at times – just like how Filipinos would find a foreigner speaking Tagalog as either funny or endearing.
Coming from her iconic role as a mother in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” Lupita Nyong’o is the perfect caring and comforting voice for Roz. The compassion and innocence in her tone is mostly a humorous contrast with the sly, playboy and heartbreaker voice of “Star Wars” star Pedro Pascal for the fox Fink. Together, they make an unlikely duo – faithful to the tradition of other odd pairings like Woody and Buzz Lightyear or Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart.
Apart from being a consistent visual treat especially when laser-laden battle scenes are juxtaposed against National Geographic-like nature surroundings, the movie is a must-see when it opens in Philippine theaters on October 9 as it teaches or reminds everyone of golden values such as resistance to go beyond one’s limit, nature or “programming” to do the right thing. Roz and her friends present new ways to retell the universal messages of love, parenthood, responsibility, compassion, and even the Biblical parable, “The Good Samaritan.”
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