The Wild Robot
My first new review in months!
Watching Chris Sanders’s The Wild Robot, I felt things I haven’t felt in a very long time watching a Hollywood animated movie outside the Spider-Verse: wonder, discovery, joy. If it’s not a perfect movie, it’s the best kind of mostly perfect movie: the kind where the missteps, if they are missteps, don’t diminish the delight of the perfect parts.
The perfect parts are the first two-thirds, which play a bit like a lost masterpiece from the era of Pixar greatness, interwoven with threads from non-Pixar masterpieces—especially Sanders’s own Lilo & Stitch, along with Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant and Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky. There’s a poetic “What if?” premise, powerful in its imaginative simplicity, suffused with heart-wringing parental themes; a parable of social anxiety, differentness, and found family that manages to transcend the clichés of those done-to-death motifs.
The last third stumbles, I think, in reaching for even larger themes while settling for a standard Hollywood heroes-vs.-villains action finale—but, thankfully, none of this detracts from what the film has already achieved. If the movie creaks a bit as it transitions from a winsome tale of an awkward mother of an awkward child learning to give everything she has to see her child succeed and find acceptance to some kind of cautionary parable about solidarity in the face of, like, predatory Big Tech capitalism or whatever, at least what Sanders does in the first two-thirds doesn’t need anything else.
Thanks for the review. Much appreciated. I wish you would do more film reviews on a regular basis. Even capsule reviews would be fine with me. It's nice to have a Catholic perspective, especially from a reputable Catholic film reviewer like you.
I miss these reviews, man. I really do. As a former movie buff, Decent Films was how I first got into your writing. You're still my favorite film critic ever. Since you mentioned Spider-Verse twice in this review, I feel justified in asking if you're going to finish your Marvel multiverse articles or are they officially an abandoned project? I'm hoping for at least one more.