It’s undeniably true that recency bias is a thing. Sometimes, the movie you see right now feels like the best simply because it’s the one you just saw. (Just think of this “Boss Baby”-adjacent meme, and you’ll get it.) But it’s also true that “The Wild Robot” is an unexpectedly moving and powerful piece of animation. Watch this movie, and you can be once again assured that if Disney Animation made any genuine mistakes in the 2000s, it was letting go of the creative talents of Chris Sanders, the mastermind behind “Lilo & Stitch” as well as the aforementioned “How to Train Your Dragon” films. Sanders wrote and directed this adaptation of the Peter Brown book, taking place at an indeterminate point in Earth’s future as the eponymous Rozzum, known as Roz, is accidentally stranded in a deep forest and, in lieu of completing tasks assigned by humans, takes up the task of raising a gosling it names Brightbill, along with the initially unwilling aid of a sly fox named Fink. It helps to have the Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Roz in the kind of voice performance that ought to make Disney envious (especially since she’s done voice work for a few of its films before), as well as Pedro Pascal as Fink. Each of them threads the needle between being recognizable but not simply hired for being famous. (DreamWorks has been guilty of that latter notion a lot. A. Lot.) But this movie also winds up packing an emotional gut punch that places it alongside Pixar’s own “WALL-E” as one of the best modern science-fiction films with a heart. This is the kind of movie Disney should be making. It shouldn’t have let Sanders go.
