BB-8? The Iron Giant? Wall-E? Baymax? Name a favorite bot, it's probably here

DreamWorks revealed the first trailer for its upcoming animated film The Wild Robot on March 5, and it teases a pretty gorgeous film, full of vibrantly colorful wildlife and vibrant, stylized images of natural environments. And in the middle of it is a robot that seems familiar—but familiar in different ways in practically every shot.

At first, the robot, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o), looks like a head on top of a rolling ball – a dead ringer for the Star Wars sequel's BB-8. But then it sprouts limbs and starts to look a lot more like the weakened, 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 suggestive face reminiscent of Baymax from Disney's Big Hero 6, and color-shifting eyes and soulful demeanor reminiscent of the title character in The Iron Giant. The trailer's only spoken words — a voiceover proclaiming, "Sometimes, to survive, you have to become more than you were programmed to be" — also evoke the central message of The Iron Giant. There's hardly an animated or CG movie robot from the last 25 years that doesn't get a happy little nod somewhere in Roz's design or behavior.

The various animal characters in the trailer are more uniquely designed, but this opening teaser plays them down and doesn't even reveal that they're talking – a bit odd, since many of them are voiced by very familiar actors, from Mark Hamill to Pedro Pascal to Matt Berry. It is likely that later trailers will focus less on the film's mood and visuals, and more on these animal characters and the film's plot. But for now, this trailer feels simultaneously like a showreel of very stylish animation, a nostalgia-inducing love fest for decades of popular animated mechanical protagonists, and a weird escapism around the actual story of the movie, how the trailers for Wonka and the 2024 Mean Both Girls folded around and revealed that these films are musicals.