The Wild Robot (2024)

The Wild Robot (2024)

 

9/10

Starring the voices of     

Lupita Nyong'o

Pedro Pascal

Kit Connor

 

Directed by Chris Sanders

 

It’s not hard to say that this is going down as one of the best animated movies of the decade, because the story is that good. Based on a book by Peter Brown, Chris Sanders wrote the screenplay and directed this masterpiece. Having worked on animations like How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods at Dreamworks, Sanders’s involvement raised my expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The animation doesn’t try to compete with Disney’s CGI, instead, it uses hand-painting techniques on characters, which is why the budget is below $100 million.

The voice acting is masterful, and the flow of the movie immerses you in a new world. Sanders did well by not allowing Roz to become a lost puppy, aimlessly running around the screen. Instead, Roz is confident and determined to find her purpose, and once she does, there’s no stopping her.

Roz is a robot, full name Rozzum unit 7134. She washes up on an uninhabited island when an animal accidentally activates her. From that moment on, she follows her basic programming, searching for someone to claim her as their own and give her tasks.

The running around wasn’t without its costs, though. She wasn’t designed to be on this island, and didn’t understand how to interact with animals or navigate the surroundings. By the time Roz slows down to understand the environment, she’s sustained significant damage.

Despite this, her wandering leads her to crash into a tree, killing a goose mother and smashing all but one of her eggs. Roz takes the egg but loses it again and must chase down a fox to get it back. Her curiosity leads her to keep the egg until it hatches, but the gosling turns out to be a runt, smaller than a typical goose and unlikely to survive in the wild. Roz meets a possum mother, who tells her she must care for the gosling. Roz adopts it, modifying her programming, but since she doesn’t understand how to care for it, the fox, who originally tried to eat the egg, offers to help. The fox, driven by self-interest, feels sympathy for the gosling, believing that Roz’s attempts to raise it were more like torture than care.

The movie follows their efforts to raise the gosling and prepare it for migration during winter.

The journey for Roz and the fox to foster this gosling wasn’t easy, but the animation delivers enough comedic moments to make the experience enjoyable, with touching scenes of failure and robot fights in the climax.

This is a must see.