The wild robot is story featuring a robotic woman who aims to fulfill a task as per her design. This robot is named Roz she’s soon finds herself in a odd position as after a accident she’s left to raise a gosling. This gosling Brightbill is the main focus for half the movie he and Roz relationship demonstrates themes of hardship and motherhood. In the end we’re left on a cliffhanger which I personally liked.

With little to no real expectations of the movie I had, on Saturday, Nov. 9 in Lodi 12 cinema, I watched the film “The Wild Robot”. A children’s animated movie released on Sept. 27, 2024, it recently made a comeback to movie theaters after being out of cycle because of various Halloween movies. The director Chris Sanders, a very notable director, directed several popular animated kids movies, such as the “Lilo & Stitch” franchise, “The Croods” Franchise, and the first “How to Train Your Dragon” movie. This film is distributed by Universal Studios which if I were to name all its movies distributed would be endless. Though I was left happy after watching the film said film received a score of 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and received a 8.4/10 on the IMBD.

The movie introduces themes such as motherhood, fostering a child, how to overcome a tough situation, the loss of someone close, and even addresses the topic of changing for the better.

I was left surprised by them adding Pedro Pascal in a children’s animated movie was a nice touch, as I have previously watched his other works, such as The “Mandalorian”, “The Last of Us”, and even “Wonder Woman.” So having such a renowned actor as a very important role, I could get behind that. 

I really enjoyed the evolution of the main character Roz being an inanimate object. She takes on more and more human qualities, not just because it is an animated film, but as if a robot is learning to become human.

I felt that although the story started off slow, it made good use of proper time skips not random bursts of time would pass, and characters would randomly discover a skill.

I also enjoyed the fact that the music was properly used, no overbearing noise which can seemingly cancel out the character’s dialogue instead the creators utilized quiet in select scenes, which emphasizes the message that the scenes want to deliver. 

I also appreciate them addressing obvious things such as how is a robot going to teach a goose to fly, utilizing dramatic irony, where we knew several times what was going to happen before the character. Such as jokes based on how hard could it be to raise a child, and it not being obvious Roz the robot wasn’t Brightbill the gosling’s mom.

I also appreciate the utilization of effects because in DreamWorks in recent years, seems to have taken the approach of an artistic style of rendering computer animation with hand-drawn elements. This captures intense situations perfectly with facial expressions and the danger present in situations where a fire is displayed to be a force of destruction no longer a source of warmth.

Though if there was anything negative I would say the one issue is that unthe movie seemingly had no main villain until the last 30 minutes, where they introduced a corporation whose motives were never fully revealed other than that they manufactured robots and seemingly just wanted the main character, the robot Ross, back though it did curb itself out by utilizing just help malicious this villain was. Displayed by her ruthless methods and cruel demeanor.

 Though overall the movie gets a solid 9 out of 10 free, my only real issue was as previously stated the villain there was no understanding of who the villain was for a while. I believed it seemed the animators forgot that they had to have an antagonist and seemingly through together some things or the message of foreshadowing is lost upon me. But I look forward to a potential sequel.