The Wild Robot Review

Chris Sanders, who co-directed Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, wanted the finished film to look like its concept paintings, and DreamWorks extended the tools it had built for Puss in Boots: The Last Wish to get there. He called the result a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest, and for once the boast holds: fur, water and sky all carry visible brushwork, and the migration and the winter storm are the loveliest images the studio has made.

Lupita Nyong'o starts Roz as a relentlessly helpful machine and lets warmth leak into the voice by degrees, Kit Connor's Brightbill is a runt with a grudge, and Pedro Pascal's fox Fink supplies both the jokes and the con man's loneliness. The story is simple and seasonal, close to Bambi in shape, and Kris Bowers's score pushes hard at the big moments.

The last act, with a corporate retrieval robot and a siege of the island, is the most generic stretch, and Adam Graham of the Detroit News found it heartwarming the way a latter-era Coldplay track is, by design. Most critics were less guarded: it scored 85 on Metacritic, took 334.5 million dollars worldwide and received three Oscar nominations, losing Best Animated Feature to Flow.