Lupita Nyong'o Teams Up With How To Train Your Dragon Director For The Wild Robot Trailer

Man, humans are the worst. There's probably a good reason why we keep gravitating towards stories and myths that explore what life would be like with minimal involvement by us pesky people — or even go so far as to remove us from the equation altogether. Animated classics like "The Iron Giant" and "Wall-E" took the basic ideas of robots attempting to understand the natural world and spun those respective concerns into two of the very best movies of the last 25 years. Now, "The Wild Robot" looks set to tackle very similar concerns in what sure looks like another win for the medium of animation.

Listed among /Film's most anticipated movies of 2024, the Dreamworks and Universal movie comes from Chris Sanders, the writer/director behind "How To Train Your Dragon," "The Croods," and "Lilo & Stitch." It doesn't seem like much of a coincidence that all of these lean heavily on the idea of oddball pairings discovering certain truths about the world, humanity, and this confounding thing we're all mucking our way through called "life." "The Wild Robot" has all the makings of yet another emotional and charming experience in the same vein as those previous movies, though with an interesting wrinkle or two. But don't just take it from me. Take a look at the new trailer above and see for yourself!

I'm not crying, you are! Look, maybe it's just the power of "What a Wonderful World" or the crushing emotional weight of seeing a robot getting along with nature in a way our self-destructive species never will, but if a mere trailer is threatening to start the waterworks already, "The Wild Robot" could end up being something special, indeed. The mostly dialogue-free footage focuses on a robot named Roz (short for ROZZUM unit 7134, of course) that crash-lands on an island teeming with wildlife and slowly finds its place among the animals. And if that somehow wasn't enough to appeal to the softies among us, the story also appears to involve Roz adopting a cute little gosling named Brightbill. If that doesn't pull directly at the heartstrings, nothing will!

Based on the 2016 book by author Peter Brown, "The Wild Robot" stars the great Lupita Nyong'o as the voice of Roz and includes an absurdly talented cast of supporting actors. There's Pedro Pascal as a fox named Fink, Catherine O'Hara as the opossum Pinktail, Bill Nighy as the goose Longneck, Kit Connor as the baby goose Brightbill, and Stephanie Hsu as a mysterious character named Vontra. Oh, and then there's the trio of Mark freaking Hamill, Matt Berry, and "Mission: Impossible" veteran Ving Rhames in undisclosed roles, as well. Literally the only drawback here is that we'll have to wait a little while longer to see it, as the animated film arrives in theaters September 20, 2024.

The epic adventure 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.