The best animated film of the year is here.

From the first scene The wild robotthe new animated film by director Chris Sanders (How to train your dragon), adapted from the first part of a trilogy of children’s novels by Peter Brown, the viewer is immersed together with the protagonist in a new and strange world. A robot washes up on the shore of a lushly forested island, surrounded by the flotsam and jetsam of a wrecked vehicle – an airplane? a spaceship? – and immediately begins searching the area for someone she can help. Rozzum Unit 7134, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o and soon known as “Roz”, was designed to provide, as she puts it, “integrated, diverse task performance” for any human it requires of her. The problem is that the island she washed up on has no human inhabitants, and the animals that witnessed the arrival of this giant metal biped only see Roz as a menacing predator that must either be fought or fled.

A fun time-lapse montage shows the robot shutting down for a while so its software can learn to decipher the animal sounds around it so it can communicate with all of the island’s residents. Unfortunately, as soon as she wakes up from this half-sleep and starts talking to them, the animals are more afraid of her than ever before. Except for one thing: a newly hatched gosling who imprints herself as his mother after Roz accidentally destroys the nest of the chick’s mother and siblings while fleeing an angry bear. At first, the robot sees this adorable chirping pest as an obstacle to its goal of sending a signal to the company that created it, Universal Dynamics, so that it can be located and transported to its original destination. But the built-in programming that compels Roz to meet this little creature’s needs before she can move on to her next task gradually gives way to a different set of internal commands: the exhausted sense of obligation and the ambivalent yet unwavering attitude of commitment, also known as motherhood.

With the help of her few allies in the animal world, including a clever but lonely fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and a harried mother possum Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), Roz sets out to raise the gosling she named Brightbill (Kit O .) calls ‘Connor), until maturity. An older goose, voiced by Bill Nighy, tells Roz that she has until fall to teach the young one to feed, swim, and fly on his own so that he can be part of the mass migration that will allow his species to survive. But Roz finds that even the most sophisticated aerodynamic diagrams of geese in flight are not a sufficient teaching tool for parents who don’t have their own pair of wings to flap. Nevertheless, she and Fink try to prepare Brightbill – who has become a kind of clever uncle to the now teenage goose – for the journey by combining the forces of instinctive nature and technologically improved education.

Although Roz remains focused on her “instruction” – to borrow a term from another surprisingly moving animated film about an environmental robot – other questions arise. Who created them to fulfill this destiny anyway? And why should she leave the island of which she has become a part, right down to the moss and tiny flowers sprouting from the cracks in her metal frame? The second half of the film presents the robot with a whole new set of problems that it has to solve. He doesn’t use his factory-made super intelligence, but rather the emotional abilities he developed through his relationship with his adopted son (a word like…). Love(that’s not a given when you’re designed to provide little more than polite customer service).

The wild robot is a great family film, although not for very young children. Looking at my own parent databases, I would say that my child would have loved him from around age 9 or 10, but found him too scary before that. Like Felix Salten’s classic book Bambi, a life in the forest– a forest fable that is much darker than its Disney adaptation –The wild robot takes place in a nature full of red tooth and claw. There are no graphic deaths on screen, but the fact of interspecies predation is casually and even comically referenced throughout. The descendants of the pinktail possum, in particular, serve as a kind of fuzzy Greek chorus, reminding us that for small mammals like them, death is an ever-looming possibility. But in the cozy ecological world this film establishes, eating is as everyday a part of life as eating. The slow integration of the robot into the animal community is itself a kind of organic process; Anyone expecting an anti-technology parable will be surprised to find an almost utopian story about the coexistence of machines and the natural world, in which Roz explores ways to use both her built-in software and her newfound heartware, to help their fellow creatures survive.

Unlike most contemporary animated films The wild robot has a visual style that more closely resembles traditional 2D animation than the modeled three-dimensional look of the average film, such as from DreamWorks, the studio that released this film. The soft, painterly look of the island and its creatures initially contrasts with the shiny metallic texture of the robot’s spherical body. But as Roz begins to go “wild,” even replacing a damaged portion of a metal leg with a beaver-gnawed tree stump, the animation style subtly shifts in delineating her surface from that of the foliage and fur that surrounds her. With the same subtlety, Nyong’o’s vocal performance shifts from suggesting one of those intrusively polite synthetic voice assistants – think Siri and Alexa – to sounding like a creature at first confused and then opening up to the uncertainty and wonder of life. From a robot that consists of little more than two metal balls and clanging limbs, she creates a figure of enormous complexity and ultimately lovability. It seems strange to classify a performance in which the actress will never be considered one of her best, but Rozzum 7134 is among the most memorable characters – or metal facsimiles thereof – that Nyong’o has created on screen to date.

There were a few developments in the third act that kept me from finding the ending The wild robot as satisfying as it could have been. A key point in the story felt strangely rushed, and the final scene, although moving, left an unanswered question. These omissions could be deliberate decisions made to make room for a sequel (although a post-credits stinger appears to have been there more to create a farewell gag than to set up the next chapter). I wouldn’t say no to a complete one Wild robot film trilogy, especially when Nyong’o, Pascal and the rest of the outstanding voice actors return. But as these death-obsessed baby opossums like to point out, you never know how long what you love will last. So if this unusually thoughtful exploration of parenthood, emotional connection, and the coexistence of nature and technology is the only episode we get, load your offspring on your back and carry them to the movies while you watch may.