DreamWorks’ new movie The Wild Robot blends Star Wars, The Iron Giant, and more

polygon.com:

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.

Here’s DreamWorks’ rundown on