Review of “The Wild Robot”: A powerful, visually stunning triumph

In the opening scenes of The Wild Robot, a chirpy metal android with a cutting-edge computing unit wanders through a forest, asking confused animals if he can help them and offering discount codes and stickers for future customers. “Did anyone order me?” he asks.

As it turns out, we did. This adaptation of Peter Brown’s award-winning middle-grade novel is an absolute cinematic triumph, a soulful, sweet-sad animated journey that will have your kids wondering why you have so many tears in your eyes. It’s destined to be ordered again and again.

Chris Sanders, the screenwriter and director of “How to Train Your Dragon”, “The Croods” and “Lilo & Stitch” is the author and director here. The task is enormous: to turn a popular book with a few illustrations into a feature-length film without losing its lively core. Sanders has not only managed it, but mastered it with a laser.

The Wild Robot is the story of a futuristic robot helper who is stranded on an island when his container ship is sunk by a storm. He learns to adapt and bond with creatures he wasn’t programmed to deal with, and even adopts the cutest gosling you’ll ever see. (sorry, Ryan).

The voice of the robot – ROZZUM unit 7134, or “Roz” for short – comes from Lupita Nyong’o in a spectacularly nuanced performance that initially seems cheerfully robotic and finally natural and ironic. The other voice actors – Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames — are not just assassins like those used in other animated films to lure in the audience. Each of them is wonderfully coordinated.

The film keeps the basic structure of the book, but expands on some characters – like the importance of Pascal’s red fox – and has a tendency to be a little Hollywood, such as sending a robot army after Roz and setting everything on fire. But it never gets out of hand, the visual effects are astounding, and its soul is intact.

“The Wild Robot” is often a story about programming – natural and artificial – and how it can help and hinder. “I’m not programmed to be a mother,” Roz tells a mother opossum (a great O’Hara). She replies, “None of us are.”

Roz has landed on an island where survival of the fittest and instinct rule, where animals don’t sing and dance but fight and hunt each other. “Kindness is not a survival technique,” the fox tells our robot.

“The Wild Robot” is also a tribute to adoption and starting a family. The ups and downs of parenthood are just as present as the tribute to friendship. And there is death, an honest reminder of the fight for survival.

Visually it is stunning, a textured world that is almost painterly. You can see snowflakes on spotted fur, moss on rocks and individual leaves in a cave. The images of a tree covered in butterflies are so spectacular we should all frame a poster of them. Nothing against Roz, but normal computer-generated efforts – “Transformers One”, we look at you – you look lackluster in comparison.

Roz accidentally causes the death of a family of geese, except for one intact egg. This orphan is now Roz’s responsibility – she must teach it to eat, swim and fly, culminating in the winter migration. And she must face difficult questions – how a robot came to raise a little goose. “He found where he belongs,” Roz says with cheerful sadness as her gosling swims toward a group of geese.

What home is is another theme: Roz feels drawn to return to her factory, but only because she feels it is her duty. Her heart is attached to this island and the friends she has made there, especially after she creates a safe place for all living things during a freezing winter. Her kindness changes the way the animals see each other, even if she cannot change their appetites.

Roz also changes through motherhood, she becomes detached from her ones and zeros, has to improvise and is even willing to break some rules, like learning to lie to make up a creative bedtime story. A broken robot from the shipwreck is stunned by what Roz has become when she comes by to consult her: “You shouldn’t feel anything at all.”

And you? You’ll have all the feels. Surrender. Is this the best animated film of the year? Absolutely, so far. It might even be the best film of the year. See you at the Oscars, Roz.

“The Wild Robot,” a film that opens Friday at Universal, is rated PG for action/peril and thematic elements. Running time: 101 minutes. Four out of four stars.