A New Frontier

DreamWorks brings CG animation full circle with The Wild Robot

- CLARISSE LOUGHREY

DURING ONE OF PEDRO PASCAL’S final recording sessions for his role in DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, he turned to its writer-director Chris Sanders and confessed: “You know, I’m more me in this role than a lot I’ve done in the past.”

Pascal voices a fox called Fink, one of the many critter residents of an uninhabited isle. When he encounters a crash-landed robot named ROZZUM unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o) – “Roz” for short – he reluctantly volunteers to help her raise an orphaned gosling she comes to name Brightbill (Kit Connor).

Fink is as charming as can be, a disarming collision of world-weariness and childish mischief. And for anyone who’s followed the actor’s nitro-fuelled career of late, as he descends from a galaxy far, far away to battle Paul Mescal in the arena for Gladiator II and slip on the spandex for Marvel’s Fantastic Four, all while winning over the internet’s hearts and minds – well, Fink sounds like Pascal to a tee.

“He showed us the way character-wise,” Sanders tells Red Alert. “There’s a line – not in the film – that we recorded: ‘Ooh, can we get that?’ But the way he read it, he said it like a little kid at a grocery store pointing at something and everything just lit up for me at that point. We really found a lot of Pedro in there.”