“Sometimes, to survive, we must become more than we were programmed to be,” Nyongo’s robot intones in The Wild Robot trailer.
Can a robot survive in the wilderness? That’s the question in the just-released trailer for The Wild Robot, the animated adaptation of author Peter Brown’s best-selling books of the same name. The new movie from DreamWorks Animation (the Shrek and Kung Fu Panda franchises) features the voices of Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o (12 Years a Slave, Marvel’s Black Panther) as robot Roz and Pedro Pascal (The Mandalorian, The Last of Us) as a fox named Fink, one of the animal inhabitants of a remote, wild island where Roz has a single directive: survive. Watch The Wild Robot trailer below.
The Wild Robot 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.
DreamWorks describes the heartfelt film as “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 voice cast includes 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, The Fall Guy) as Vontra, a robot that will intersect with Roz’s life on the island. Mark Hamill (Star Wars, Batman: The Animated Series), Matt Berry (What We Do in the Shadows, the SpongeBob Movie franchise), and Golden Globe winner and Emmy nominee Ving Rhames (Mission: Impossible, Pulp Fiction) round out the cast.
Chris Sanders, the co-creator of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and the co-director of DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods, wrote and directed The Wild Robot. Jeff Hermann (DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby 2: Family Business, Kung Fu Panda 3) serves as producer on the beloved book that became #1 on the New York Times bestseller list in 2020. The Wild Robot has since inspired a trilogy that now includes The Wild Robot Escapes and The Wild Robot Protects, telling stories where nature and technology collide.
DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot opens only in theaters September 20.