The Wild Robot (2024)

The Wild Robot (2024)

 

image from Universal Pictures

9/10

Starring the voices of     

Lupita Nyong'o

Pedro Pascal

Kit Connor

 

Directed by Chris Sanders

 

It is not hard to say that this is going to go down as one of the best animated movies of this decade, because the story is that good. Based off a book by Peter Brown, Chris Sanders wrote this amazing screenplay and directed this masterpiece. He has not dropped the ball since he left Disney for Dreamworks, animations like How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods are part of his resume, so when I saw his name attached to this, I knew I had to see it.

The animation is not trying to compete with Disney when it comes to the graphics, the movie does not have a complete CGI look, you can see a form of hand painting used on the characters, which is why the budget is below $100 million.

The masterful voice acting in the movie and the flow of the movie steals you away from what you are doing, and you become lost in this new world. Sanders did a wonderful thing of not allowing Roz to become a lost puppy on screen, running around looking for something to do. Roz seemed confident and pushed to finding a reason to carry on, and once found, there was no stopping her until she was able to see it through to completion.

Roz is a robot, full name is Rozzum unit 7134. Her container was washed up on the shore of an island not inhabited by humans. She comes on, when an animal mistakenly hit her on button, then from that moment, she was following her basic programming running around the island, looking for someone to claim her as her owner and give her tasks.

The running around was not without its price, since she was not meant to be on this island and does not understand how to relate with the animals or navigate such surroundings. By the time Roz decided to slow down to understand the language and the surrounding she is in, she had sustained some considerable damages.

Nonetheless, the stumbling about led her to crash into a tree, which caused the death of a goose mum and smashed all her eggs except one. She took that egg, then lost it again and had to chase down a fox to be able to get it back. Her curiosity got the best of her, and she kept the egg until it hatched. The gosling was a runt. A runt meaning it was smaller than what a normal goose should be and in the wild, runts do not naturally survive. Roz met a possum mother with her babies, and she told Roz that she is now the gosling’s mother and must care for it. Roz took that as her new directive, modifying her programming and adopted the gosling. But since she did not understand what it means to care for a gosling, the fox, which initially tried to eat the gosling as an egg, decided to work with Roz to raise the child. The selfish process the fox thought will be beneficial to his survival, and the fox felt sorry for the gosling because Roz’s way of trying to care for this child was almost like she was torture.

So, we get to watch this two raise the gosling and prepare it for winter when it must migrate.

The whole process was not easy, and the animation made sure that we get to have enough comedic fun watching, and there are touching moments seeing them fail and some action in the ending with robot fights.

This is a must see.