Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B
Animation: A

If you are partial to unusually beautiful animated features, then look no further than The Wild Robot. It has a subtly unique and warm animation style, and every frame is gorgeous.

I also find myself interested, for the first time, in the 2016 middle grade novel of the same name by Peter Brown. Brown both wrote and illustrated a series of books about this character, and if you look them up, you’ll see that the illustrations are much different from the film adaptation—far simpler, less detail, harder lines, black and white. The visual palate gets quite a transformation via DreamWorks Animation, which makes sense when shifting from the more imaginative medium of novels to the visual medium of film. It works incredibly well.

How closely is the story adapted, I wonder? I might just have to check out these books. The film, directed and co-written by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), whose historic penchant for visual style over narrative consistency continues here. To be fair, all of his films are easily compelling to kids, with a delightful undercurrent of slightly bent humor. The Wild Robot, for instance, acknowledges death consistently and in a variety of ways—sometimes sad, sometimes with deliciously dark humor. A wonderful group of supporting characters is a mother possum (Catherine O’Hara) and her rotating litter, who practice playing dead. One of the kids, when taken to task by a sibling for not becoming “dead” fast enough, counters that he’s dying of meningitis. “It takes a while!”

The Wild Robot’s frankness about death is surely a big part of the reason it is rated PG: parents with small children may want to wait to show them this one, which veers a bit into Bambi territory. The story begins with a very clever introduction to Roz the robot (Lupita Nyong’o), who has crashed on an island in transport during a storm. She is clearly programmed to serve humans, but here only encounters animals, and struggles to communicate with them—starting with an adorable family of otters. After a series of harrowing experiences in the forest, Roz crushes a goose’s nest after a fall, leaving the one unharmed egg orphaned. Sanders does have a sensitively artistic eye for how to convey such things: Roz lifts a limp feathery wing from the ground for a brief moment, and we understand what has happened. Within minutes, the egg hatches, and the gosling imprints on the first thing it sees: Roz the robot.

The Wild Robot is a little bit scattered in its depiction of a robot adapting to an unfamiliar environment based on programming. Not that any kids will care: this is where I, the geezer, get pointlessly nitpicky about a cartoon. This, however, is where I would be particularly interested in how similarly the source material treats these ideas. The broader message of this film is personal growth, and becoming something “better than what you are programmed to be.” This makes sense for human characters, of which there are none in this movie (save for a few brief shots of programmers in the place from which the robots come). Using an AI robot as well as wild animals who grow beyond their instincts as metaphors is, by contrast, a little messy. How are all the animals of an island wilderness really going to survive if predator and prey have chosen instead to become friends? What happens to the food chain?

I know, I know: no nine-year-old is going to be asking these questions. Just me! I should stress that I really enjoyed The Wild Robot; it just doesn’t quite match the success of early Pixar films, as some of suggested. Those are movies that work equally well for both child and adult viewers, finding ways to speak to them simultaneously at their separate levels. This is something The Wild Robot, which is incredibly successful as a kids’ movie, does not quite manage. I wouldn’t nitpick about it, except that it does feel a bit like it’s trying to speak to adult viewers as well.

A particularly fascinating element of the story here is its setting, in a future where robots this advanced are possible. It might have made more sense to leave more of Roz’s backstory out of it, keep her origins more of a mystery, and focus on a robot character adapting to the wilderness. But the story briefly takes us off the island, both when the geese leave for migration and when Roz is finally located for retrieval. There are very brief shots that offer some surprisingly global context to the story: twice we see the Golden Gate Bridge from the clouds, amongst the countless migrating geese, the road portion of the bridge submerged in water, whales swimming by above it. In another we see the tops of buildings poking out of the water.

I suppose more light could be shed on this in potential sequels, and admittedly I will be very interested in it. For now, there’s a lot hinted at in The Wild Robot that does not get fully explained, and over time, what starts as a pointed focus on Roz as a robot who can only understand things based on programming evolves into a story of self-actualization. Perhaps this movie is Trojan-horsing a story about the singularity.

In the meantime, we are treated to many delightful details, and wonderful voice work by many great actors (Pedro Pascal as a Fink the fox; Bill Nighy as Longneck the grizzled old goose; Mark Hamill as Thorn the bear; Heartstopper’s Kit Connor as Brightbill the young goose; and more). When Roz wakes up with the rest of the animals who hybernated through the winter, spring now upon them, she is half covered in moss. When the migrating geese stop for rest in a kind of biome city, we see giant machines engaged in automated agriculture. There’s also a bunch of robots of the same model as Roz, though it’s not clear what purpose they serve milling about in fields of corn.

All that matters, really, is that this is a story of both robot and animals who learn how to be friends and support each other. To a degree, the relationship between Roz and Brightbill serves as an allegory for the way parenting never comes with a training manual—something the script could have leaned a bit more into. If nothing else, The Wild Robot elicits a lot of questions, but of the sort that aren’t frustrating so much as creating a desire for learning more: about the characters, about the world. This feels like something that can be expanded on in ways that will engender much interest, with the hope that DreamWorks will eventually do just that. Or I suppose I could just read the books.

*Logic is beside the point when a benevolent robot goes wild.*

Overall: B+