THE WILD ROBOT is this year’s feature from DreamWorks Animation, and I’m not sure I would’ve guessed that without the logo. It’s a funny movie but not a smart alecky one, not a child of SHREK. Based on a 2016 young readers book by Peter Brown (first in a trilogy), it’s a simple, sweet tale with an elegant premise: a shipment of mass-manufactured helper robots crashes in the wilderness, one of them survives, accidentally imprints on an orphaned gosling runt and, since her programming requires her to complete all tasks, she becomes convinced that she must teach the goose to swim and fly before migration time in the winter. So there’s a goal to work toward and an inevitable sadness if it’s ever achieved. Good drama.

Admittedly, in the tradition of great computer animated features about robots, the best part is the first part. We meet ROZZUM Unit 7134 fresh out of the box, newly activated, in some kind of setup/tutorial mode, stomping around asking squirrels if they need assistance, mimicking the gait of a running moose, taking photos and printing customized promotional stickers with QR codes and everything. Have you ever, even one time, used a QR code you weren’t forced to to look at a menu or drink list? I have not, and I’m a human. Now imagine if I was a hedgehog. There is something nightmarishly true about this type of stupid asshole technology getting dumped on confused forest creatures without interest or purpose.

The great Lupita Nyong’o (NON-STOP) voices the robot, later nicknamed Roz, and she achieves just the right tone of artificial friendliness for spewing corporate copy. It’s kinda poetic, this extremely sophisticated technological consumer product being tossed into nature and finding all her meticulously crafted interactivity completely useless because there are only animals here and they don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. This is the real world, lady. Stop talking to us like that.

The simplicity of the story is really nice too. We mostly stay on an island with no humans or human dwellings, have little idea how far into the future this is, how much nature is left on the rest of the earth, what civilization is like. We pretty much only see humans in promotional films she shows with her built in projector. So we can forget about them and concentrate on the matter at hand.

Early on they do a HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER move – a time lapse as she goes into Learning Mode and observes all the animals around her until she can communicate with them (which we now hear as English). For the most part the animals all think she’s a monster and fear her. But when the whole goose thing happens she talks to a fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal, THE GREAT WALL) who wants to eat the egg/goose, and they end up an unlikely team trying to train this kid. They name the goose Brightbill, and when he gets to talking age (voiced by Kit Connor, “Young Reginald Dwight” in ROCKETMAN) the other geese laugh at him because he grew up strange and simulates robot whirring noises as he moves. When they hit him he yells “That causes a pain reaction!” instead of “That hurts!” or “Ow!”

There’s obviously lots of the-beauty-of-parenting stuff to get the moms and dads choked up, but I think there are other things to latch onto here too: Roz having to move past her pre-programmed ideas to get by in the woods, the plight of her and her adopted son as weirdos who don’t fit in, the love or friendship between fox and robot, having to decide whether it’s really her purpose to return to the manufacturer after she’s accidentally found this life that makes her happy, the way her learning, injuries and adaptations make her an individual. It’s not just one simple metaphor, there are many to enjoy.

As is the trend post-SPIDER-VERSE, it’s animated with some amount of painterly stylization, aiming more to match the concept paintings than to create any type of photographic realism. I wish the animals had more of a distinct design style, but they’re not bad. Roz is not the coolest robot you’ve ever seen but she makes sense as a product and I liked the design the more I looked at it, and I got more attached to her the more we got to know her.

The writer/director is Chris Sanders, best known for creating/co-directing/voicing LILO & STITCH for Disney and co-directing HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON for DreamWorks. I either didn’t know or completely forgot that he directed the 2020 live action version of THE CALL OF THE WILD with Harrison Ford. Maybe I should be less skeptical of the animated dog, then. Animators like to animate.

I don’t want to overhype up THE WILD ROBOT – just in the animated robot genre I wouldn’t choose it over THE IRON GIANT or WALL-E. (ROBOTS is the only one that comes to mind that it’s way, way, way better than.) But it’s a nice movie that’s kinda doing its own thing and that I think most people would enjoy. Including you, maybe. So you have been notified.