ANI-MOVIES, *The Wild Robot

Based on the first of Peter Brown's trilogy of books, The Wild Robot is the latest wannabe franchise from DreamWorks Animation as there are plans to do movies of the next two books. Borrowing elements from classic Disney animation as well as some Ghibli films, How To Train Your Dragon creator Chris Sanders directed and wrote the screenplay for this adaptation. Nominated for several awards including the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the fully-CGI film is basically a sci-fi fairy tale with talking animal shenanigans. Universal Pictures didn't give this the normal kind of buzz they regularly do for an animated movie like Kung Fu Panda or Shrek, even though it did get overall praise from audiences and critics.

Set in not so far off future, a shipment of robots is stranded on an island filled with animals mostly indigenous to North America with only one activating. The robot is just in beginner mode, so it doesn't know its alone in a forest with no human customers, so it goes into stasis and deciphers the language of all the animals it observes. It awakens and asks the animals for tasks for it to do, but the robot ends up getting chased by a bear and accidently kills a family of geese leaving only one egg, so the robot now calling itself Roz hears from a helpful possum that she needs to raise the gosling to be able to fly off the island before winter. Roz raises the young goose and names him Brightbill along with a lonely fox named Fink whose usually sad that he doesn't have many friends as he's a predator. Roz eventually gets Brightbill to fly and take off with the other migrating geese who treat him like an outsider for being a runt, and Roz decides to stay on the island through winter until Brightbill come back. Roz had already made a huge shelter which she uses to protect all the nearby animals as the winter was very harsh which causes the predators and their would-be prey to have to get along until the weather lets up. Brightbill and his flock have a quick adventure in the factory where the robots are created while the same company dispatches a retrieval team to collect Roz. The animals all unite to stop Roz from being taken and end up driving them other robots off, but Roz realizes they will eventually return so she decides to go back to their factory when a second team of robots is sent to the island. Brightbill eventually returns to the company where they took Roz too and finds out that she still has all her original memories even while fitting in as a model product.

The Wild Robot is rich in talent with vibrant animation as it manages to split the differences between the natural background beauty and the cartoonish talking animals along with the somewhat typical robot designs that greatly reminds me of 80s comic book designs. Rox is a dead ringer for Fugitoid from the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, but the animators didn't hold back on giving her Inspector Gadget-like add-ones similar to R2-D2 as it pulls out a new bonus feature whenever the plot calls for it. The cast is equally amazing with Lupita Nyong as Roz, Pedro Pascal as the wily Fink, and other amazing voice actors like Mark Hamill, Catherine O'Hara, Bill Nighy, and Ving Rhames. The movie was widely received especially upon older audiences as this is a hard-PG rated movie harkening back to dark fantasies from the 80s. There is room for progress if the sequels get greenlit which DreamWorks is probably going to jump on as they've wrung out most of their Madagascar creativity. Hopefully they won't ruin this by making a crappy live-action version of it.