While there has been no shortage of high-profile animated movies so far in 2024, with stuff like Kung Fu Panda 4, Despicable Me 4, and, especially, Inside Out 2 making some absolutely ridiculous money, there hasn’t been much to offer families something really exciting and *new*. What a magical breath of fresh air The Wild Robot is, then. Adapted the book by Peter Brown, this half-futuristic, half-primal adventure is gorgeous and moving and unafraid to be weird, all while offering one of the year’s simplest yet warmest messages for any children’s movie; be nice to your mum, she’s not around forever.
Set some time in the future (tech has advanced, a lot of cities are underwater), The Wild Robot follows Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a helper bot for families living in floating cities who has been washed ashore on a human-free island by a massive storm. A bit damaged and disoriented, Roz wanders around in a daze, trying to ‘assist’ the various animals on the island, but initially only sparking panic and rage from the creatures. After figuring out the animals’ ‘language’, though, she starts to really communicate with them, her programming demanding that she obtain some form of task, which arrives in the form of an adorable gosling, dubbed Brightbill (Kit Connor).
Having accidentally crushed this little bird’s nest after a fall, Roz is told by a friendly mother possum she meets (voiced by Catherine O’Hara) that, as the first thing Brightbill imprinted upon, she is now his mother, and must feed it, keep it alive, and teach it to fly and swim before the winter migration. It’s a story of reluctant parenthood in the wild, all about how being a mother is something impossible to truly plan or program for – a series of sometimes terrifying, sometimes joyful improvisations.
Roz is helped in this mission by a wily but ultimately just lonely local fox called Fink (Pedro Pascal) who starts by initially trying to eat Brightbill, before being enlisted as an assistant parent due to his knowledge of the island’s wilds. This central trio is absurdly loveable, bringing warmth to even the script’s most cliched lines and really elevating its best stuff. Though most of the laughs are front-loaded (writer-director Chris Sanders is unafraid to let kids know about the unsentimental cruelty of nature with some surprisingly dark comic beats), The Wild Robot is fantastically entertaining throughout and when it goes for the heartstrings, it’s got some real pull.
Helping this immensely are the excellent voice performances, with special praise due to Nyong’o, who really manages to somehow capture the notion of a robot becoming more ‘human’ without ever actually meeting a real person, her perky and upbeat programming mixing with the more melancholy and confused notes introduced by her time as a ‘mum’. It’s rare to see an animated film drill down this deep into parenthood at the expense of its kid characters, introducing its younger audience members to the idea that while their parents do exist to keep them safe, that there’s more to them and their feelings than that.
On the visual side, The Wild Robot is a real treat, the clean CGI of Roz and her advanced technology mixing with the more painterly fur and feathers of all the island’s creatures – some particular highlights for me were an adorable otter family and, of course, the pretentious beaver voiced by Matt Berry. Roz’s design is great, wobbly extendable limbs and big, simple spheres for her head and torso giving her an instantly iconic halfway-human look and also allowing for a lot of imaginative movement as she rolls, bends, and climbs around, imitating all her favourite island animals.
Plenty of awards pundits already have The Wild Robot tipped as the runaway favourite to win Best Animated Feature at next year’s Oscars, and it’s not hard to see why. This is easily the best family movie of 2024 so far, balancing a cute and fun talking animals adventure for its youngest audience members with some urgent drama for older kids and a wonderfully touching makeshift family dynamic for the parents.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 
Great review. I personally loved this movie. The previews alone definitely got me interested in seeing this, but I wasn’t prepared how much I would love this film. The story was incredibly heartwarming and deep and definitely emotional. I teared two or three times in the movie, and I really connected with it….and when a film can do that….it truly is something magical. Plus, the animation was gorgeous and almost like a painted style-esque illustration and the voice talents were solid across the board. All in all, I loved The Wild Robot, and it deserves all the praise that moviegoers and critics have given it.