The Wild Robot

Animation director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, The Croods) adapts children's book author and illustrator Peter Brown's award-winning picture book into an original work of family entertainment. A Dreamworks feature that feels like a Pixar short, The Wild Robot manages to overcome my inherent dislike of full-length movies with a robot as the central protagonist—WALL·E, Big Hero 6, A.I. Prometheus. The Wild Robot tells the story of an intelligent service unit named Roz, who gets stranded on an unpopulated island after a shipwreck. At first, her attempts to perform tasks for the animal inhabitants are met with scorn and fear, as they all think she's a monster, but gradually, she bonds with the various creatures and adopts an orphaned baby goose. Lupita Nyong'o heads up a terrific voice cast of actors who are not instantly identifiable by their distinctive voices, which, as far as I'm concerned, is almost always the way to go in an animated film. The picture is full of inventive humor, mostly involving animal behavior and the inherently vicious nature of an organic food chain, features gorgeous animation, and has a well-structured story—though the editing is still way too rapidly paced for my taste. Though filled with positive family messages, the central theme is unmistakably how difficult and often unfulfilling parenthood is. I've not seen an animated film with this central thesis before, but it certainly feels appropriate in our contemporary era of obsessive parental involvement, extended adolescence, and growing issues of adult-child estrangement. It's a great counterpoint to the recent wave of animated Millennial apology porn, like Turning Red, Encanto, and The Mitchells vs. the Machines.