The Wild Robot: The most moving animation in decades

The extraordinary new film from DreamWorks Animation takes place almost entirely on a thickly forested isle, where an obliging droid, Lupita Nyong’o’s Roz, washes ashore one stormy night. The beach on which she awakes the next morning is gravelly and grey, while a wall of basalt columns stretches up behind it, like the flank of a fort.Re those columns, though: just how columnar are they? As the camera moves around, we’re aware they occupy 3D space on screen, but their forms are suggested by swishes of silvery gouache, with stipples of moss that look as if they were flicked there from the bristles of a toothbrush.Thanks to similar technological advances that led to the eye-popping living-comic-book style of the two recent Spider-Verse films, The Wild Robot is computer-built, but also hand-painted. It’s tempting to describe the technique as groundbreaking – except within the handful of minutes it takes Roz to scale that cliff, it stops…