With no home Net connection last night, I could think of no better way to pass time than by going to a movie theater. And no other showings at that time tempted me. The premises of this one didn't sound particularly creative, but the reception has been magnificent, even if I happened to have the theater to myself.
An accident in transit leaves a commercial robot, ROZZUM Unit 7134 (Lupita Nyong'o), stranded on a forested, seemingly North American island with no human residents. She studies and masters the language of the animals but still gets no takers on her offer of assistance. She prepares to signal her manufacturer, Universal Dynamics, for pickup, but then an orphaned gosling runt (Boone Storme, later Kit Connor) imprints on her, effectively assigning her to raise him until he can migrate. The gosling, eventually called Brightbill, becomes almost as much of a misfit as his widely feared "mom." But as the task requires protocol overrides, "Roz" learns to care about him as much more than an obligation, and Brightbill can't resent her for long.
The next major character is Fink (Pedro Pascal), a red fox who says he's never known love or friendship. Initially antagonistic with his appetite for goose eggs, he then occupies a more complicated role, claiming expertise in gosling rearing so that he can enjoy fringe benefits of Roz's trust. But he too learns to care. He reminds me of Nick Wilde, another vulpine scoundrel who introduces cynicism to a protagonist while gradually moving away from it and befriending her.
Fink's not wrong about the way things have normally worked on the island. Almost everyone is quite flippant about predator-prey relations; a baby animal's apparent death is even played for laughs. (Hey, DreamWorks also gave us that bird scene in Shrek.) Nevertheless, there is a lesson about overcoming differences for mutual survival in times of adversity.
Speaking of adversity, since a trailer gave away part of the third act, I might as well do the same: UD comes for Roz when she's no longer inclined to leave. I won't call the company's robots or rarely seen humans villainous; they just have priorities that conflict with those of Roz and the animals. And while the ROZZUM units are programmed as pacifists, not all models are.
Nyong'o has done voice acting before, but never in a starring capacity. I would not have thought to cast her as a formal-talking robot. She's more versatile than I thought.
So is Roz herself, for that matter -- almost protean in abilities. This makes up for her not being as visually cute as WALL-E or as sensitive by default as Baymax. In RL, I might be annoyed by her obtrusive solicitousness at first, but I'd surely find a use for her. Plus, her nerdy dialog, which rubs off on Brightbill, veers into adorkability.
The graphics are a bit different from other animations I can think of. The CG has a paintlike quality, except for the machines, perhaps to drive home the point of how out of place they are. But again, why is the fire pink? At least Frozen II had the excuse of wanting contrast with autumn leaves.
In the end, TWR may be even sweeter than any of the How to Train Your Dragon movies. As much as I like Inside Out 2, I won't mind if this becomes the second year that DreamWorks beats Pixar for Best Animated Feature.
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