Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Mark Hamill, Ving Rhames, Matt Berry

Written & Directed by Chris Sanders

Dreamworks/Universal, in cinemas now.

When a robot becomes stranded on an uninhabited island, she is forced to bond with the island’s animals to survive, and finds herself becoming mother to an orphaned gosling.

The first forty minutes of The Wild Robot is a hugely enjoyable ride. Yes, we’ve been here before with Wall-E and Big Hero 6 – a literalistic robot interfacing with the idiosyncrasies of reality – but the setting, a wild island brimming with nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, feels fresh.

The Rozzum 7134 – or ‘Roz’ (Lupita Nyong’o) – is programmed not to harm anything, unlike the many wild animals she encounters, whose main function in life is to consume each other. Death is an ever present reality for the island’s inhabitants – brilliantly illustrated by opossum Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara) and her infant brood, trained to see their own doom lurking around every tree root. This makes for great comedy, and is refreshingly unsentimental.

Roz starts to find her feet – even if one of them has to be replaced by a helpful beaver (Matt Berry) – but her programming is challenged when an orphaned gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor from Netflix’s Heartstopper) imprints on her, assuming the metallic bot to be its mother. Moving into the second act there’s an honest, and still unsentimental exploration of how parenting requires something far beyond programming.

Unfortunately, at the halfway point, the movie reaches a kind of premature conclusion and has to start again, veering off in a variety of directions, not quite knowing whose story it’s trying to tell any more. This is a real shame, as not only does the film lose focus, but it abandons the edginess of its opening acts, resorting to caricatured villains, gloopy anthropomorphized sentimentality and the morally simplistic clichés that afflict so much Hollywood feature animation.

Verdict: Having said that, The Wild Robot is often a cut above other animation features, even if it slips away in its concluding movements, and it’s good to see it lingering on our theatre screens many weeks after its original release. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com