Critics reviews

The Wild Robot is a quality production throughout, but one of its key assets is Lupita Nyong’o’s superb voice work. As the robot Roz, who is stranded on a jungle island populated by wild animals, Nyong’o fully inhabits her character’s arc, from synthetic, Siri-style AI perkiness to the world-weary wounded quality that bleeds from every word at the end. It’s sentimental stuff, certainly, but the picture’s unexpectedly dark humour outweighs any maudlin tendencies.

Clever, heartfelt and frequently stunning, The Wild Robot offers the type of all-ages-welcome animated entertainment that will delight kids and leave a lump in one’s throat. And it delivers on the promise of a truly great animated feature: to express universal truths – love that defies logic, feelings that come from places we don’t understand, the bittersweet bargain of letting someone go so they can flourish – through the inorganic.

The edges of love may be messy, but as The Wild Robot understands and expresses beautifully, we’re all more than our programming.

“The Wild Robot” is a miracle of a motion picture, a big budget animated studio film that’s distinct and personal. Beautifully animated, lovingly told, thrilling and unexpected. It begins like a comedy, evolves into a heartwarming drama, and continues to transform into an exciting and transcendent exploration of deep ideas and powerful feelings.

With The Wild Robot, Sanders has found another way to create a visual dissonance that almost subconsciously insinuates its way into our brains and feeds the central idea of the film. And it’s hypnotic.

The Wild Robot is bound up with the concepts of parenting and more in ways that consistently feel fresh and pulsate with life. It’s not just a film about a parent whose role was hoisted upon them, nor just a film about a social outcast seeking belonging, nor just a film about the nature of self-awareness and negotiating nature and nurture. It’s a potent union of the three, cobbled together with a loving maverick spirit.

One could watch “The Wild Robot” with the sound off entirely and still have a rewarding experience—turn it on and you have one of the best animated films of the decade.

[I]t’s heartening and true and a little sad and incredibly inspiring with a big, ol’ message about the power of community and coming together in the face of major adversity. That it looks so gorgeous and homespun adds to its appeal, a warm little gem of a film that’s both a throwback and a push forward.

Like Pixar’s own robotic adventure Wall-E, The Wild Robot is also about the subtle consequences of unchecked consumerism... There’s a striking sentimental undercurrent that comes from this environmental message, in addition to Roz’s journey through motherhood. Even as The Wild Robot speeds through its conclusion in a more rushed third act, these threads offer helpful reminders about interdependence and hopeful lessons in community.

The accidental falls, crashes, and surprising encounters play out like a non-stop “Looney Tunes” animated episode. And, to be fair, the Looney Tunes aesthetic is an art form to and of itself, but many of Sanders’ choices go overboard. In this context, it frustratingly communicates to the audience that “The Wild Robot” is a juvenile endeavor for young kids first and foremost. Anyone hoping for anything broader or deeper is, in theory, watching the wrong movie.