The Wild Robot

The hype that surrounded this film upon release does it a disservice. While it does look good from a visual standpoint, it’s nothing so great that audiences can be truly wowed by it. Seemingly, we have reached the limit of animation's state-of-the-art, at least as far as realism or naturalism in motion or appearance goes. You can’t get more real than reality. So the visual side of this flick only takes the viewer so far. Then the story has to do the rest of the work, and here that story is surprisingly mundane and reliant upon familiar tropes, if not outright cliches. It’s cute and occasionally funny, but, again, it is hardly groundbreaking, and in some instances—particularly the ending—it is mildly disappointing and even somewhat baffling. Indeed, much of the story’s setup had me asking questions—Is this supposed to be the far future? A different planet?—that only served to distract me during the early scenes. I wouldn’t call this movie bad by any stretch, but as noted, it isn’t exactly paradigm-shattering either. Like most animation that comes out of the major studios today—at least in this country—this will satisfy children, but leave the rest of us wishing for more. That seems to be the plan most of the time. Task partly, but by no means totally, completed.