Movie Review: Visually stunning, emotionally powerful, 'The Wild Robot' is everything

ENT

Movie Review: Visually stunning, emotionally powerful, 'The Wild Robot' is everything

2024-09-25 23:59 Last Updated At：09-26 00:00

In the opening scenes of “The Wild Robot,” a chirpy metal android with a state-of-the-art processing unit wanders around a forest asking confused animals if it can help them, offering discount codes and stickers for future customers. “Did anyone order me?” it asks.

We did, it turned out. This adaptation of Peter Brown's winning middle grade novel is an absolute movie triumph, a soulful sweet-sad animated journey that may have your kids asking why you're tearing up so much. It is destined to be ordered and reordered.

Chris Sanders, the writer-director of “How to Train Your Dragon,” “The Croods” and “Lilo & Stitch,” is the writer and director here. The assignment is daunting: Turn a beloved book with a few illustrations into a full-length movie without losing its tangy heart. Sanders didn't just nail it; he lasered it.

“The Wild Robot” is the fish-out-of-water tale of a futuristic helper robot who ends up marooned on an island when a storm sinks its container ship. It learns to adapt and connect with critters it has no programming for, even adopting the cutest gosling you'll ever see (sorry, Ryan).

The robot — ROZZUM unit 7134, or “Roz” for short — is voiced by Lupita Nyong’o in a spectacularly nuanced performance, sprightly robotic at first and eventually natural and wry. The other voice actors — Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames — aren't just hired guns that other animated movies use to entice an audience. Each is wonderfully calibrated.

The movie keeps the basic structure of the book but ups some characters — like elevating the importance of Pascal's red fox — and has a tendency to go a little Hollywood, like sending a robot army after Roz and setting everything on fire. But it never lags, the visual effects are startling, and its soul is intact.

“The Wild Robot” is often a story about programing — natural and artificial — and how that can help and hinder. “I do not have the programing to be a mother," Roz tells a mother possum (a superb O'Hara). She replies: “None of us does.”

Roz has ended up on an island where survival of the fittest and instinct are the rule, where animals don't sing and dance but struggle and hunt each other. “Kindness is not a survival skill,” our robot is told by the fox.

“The Wild Robot” is also a celebration of adoption and found families. The push-and-pull of being a parent is there, as is the celebration of friendship. And there is death, an honest reminder of the struggle to stay alive.

Visually, it is stunning, a textured world that is almost painterly. You can see snowflakes settle on mottled fur, moss on rocks, individual leaves in a den. The images of a tree covered in butterflies is so spectacular it should be a poster we all can frame. No offense to Roz, but regular computer-generated efforts — “Transformers One,” we're looking at you — look lackluster in comparison.

Roz accidentally causes the death of a goose family, save for an unbroken egg. That orphan is now Roz's obligation — she must teach it to eat, swim and fly, culminating in winter migration. And she must face tough questions — about how a robot came to raise a little goose. “He found where he belongs,” Roz says with cheerful sadness when her gosling swims to a group of geese.

What is home is another theme: Roz feels the pull to return to her factory but only out of obligation. Her heart is on this island and the friends she has made, especially after making a safe place for all creatures during a freezing winter. Her kindness changes the way the animals see each other, even if it cannot change their appetites.

Being a mother changes Roz, too, unmooring her from her ones and zeroes, making her improvise and even willing to break some rules, like learning to lie to create a creative bedtime story. A busted-up robot from the shipwreck is stunned by what Roz has become when she stops by to consult: “You should not feel anything at all.”

As for you? You're going to have all the feels. Surrender. Is this the best animated movie of the year? Totally, so far. It might even be the best movie of the year. See you at the Oscars, Roz.

“The Wild Robot,” a Universal release in theaters Friday, is rated PG for action/peril and thematic elements. Running time: 101 minutes. Four stars out of four.

Thousands flee as wildfires burn out of control in and around Los Angeles and homes are destroyed

2025-01-08 19:17 Last Updated At：19:21

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California firefighters battled wind-whipped wildfires that tore across the Los Angeles area, destroying homes, clogging roadways as tens of thousands fled and straining resources as the fires burned uncontained early Wednesday.

The flames from a fire that broke out Tuesday evening near a nature preserve in the inland foothills northeast of LA spread so rapidly that staff at a senior living center had to push dozens of residents in wheelchairs and hospital beds down the street to a parking lot. The residents waited there in their bedclothes as embers fell around them until ambulances, buses and even construction vans arrived to take them to safety.

Another blaze that started hours earlier ripped through the city’s Pacific Palisades neighborhood, a hillside area along the coast dotted with celebrity residences and memorialized by the Beach Boys in their 1960s hit “Surfin' USA.” In the frantic haste to get to safety, roadways became impassable when scores of people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot, some toting suitcases.

The traffic jam on Palisades Drive prevented emergency vehicles from getting through and a bulldozer was brought in to push the abandoned cars to the side and create a path. Video along the Pacific Coast Highway showed widespread destruction of homes and businesses along the famed roadway.

Pacific Palisades resident Kelsey Trainor said the only road in and out of her neighborhood was blocked. Ash fell all around them while fires burned on both sides of the road.

“We looked across and the fire had jumped from one side of the road to the other side of the road,” Trainor said. “People were getting out of the cars with their dogs and babies and bags, they were crying and screaming."

A third wildfire started around 10:30 p.m. and quickly prompted evacuations in Sylmar, a San Fernando Valley community that is the northernmost neighborhood in Los Angeles. The causes of all three fires were under investigation.

Flames were being pushed by Santa Ana winds topping 60 mph (97 kph) in some places. The winds were expected to increase overnight, producing isolated gusts that could top 100 mph (160 kph) in mountains and foothills — including in areas that haven’t seen substantial rain in months.

The situation prompted the Los Angeles Fire Department to take the rare step of putting out a plea for off-duty firefighters to help. It was too windy for firefighting aircraft to fly, further hampering the fight.

Gov. Gavin Newsom posted on X early Wednesday that California had deployed more than 1,400 firefighting personnel to combat the blazes. “Emergency officials, firefighters, and first responders are all hands on deck through the night to do everything possible to protect lives,” Newsom said.

The erratic weather caused President Joe Biden to cancel plans to travel to inland Riverside County, where he was to announce the establishment of two new national monuments in the state. He remained in Los Angeles, where smoke was visible from his hotel, and was briefed on the wildfires. The Federal Emergency Management Agency approved a grant to help reimburse California for the firefighting cost.

Officials didn't give an estimate of structures damaged or destroyed in the Pacific Palisades wildfire, but they said about 30,000 residents were under evacuation orders and more than 13,000 structures were under threat. Gov. Gavin Newsom visited the scene and said many homes had burned.

By evening the flames had spread into neighboring Malibu and several people there were being treated for burn injuries and a firefighter had a serious head injury and was taken to a hospital, according to Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott.

By early Wednesday, the Eaton fire, which started around 6:30 p.m. the day before, had quickly burned 1.6 square miles (4 square kilometers), according to fire officials. The Hurst fire jumped to 500 acres (202 hectares) and the Palisades fire, which started around around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday and sent up a dramatic plume of smoke visible across Los Angeles, had destroyed 4.5 square miles (11.6 square kilometers) according to Angeles National Forest. The fires were at 0% containment as of early Wednesday.

“By no stretch of the imagination are we out of the woods,” Newsom warned residents, saying the worst of the winds were expected between 10 p.m. Tuesday and 5 a.m. Wednesday. He declared a state of emergency.

As of Tuesday evening, nearly 167,000 people were without power in Los Angeles county, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us, due to the strong winds.

Recent dry winds, including the notorious Santa Anas, have contributed to warmer-than-average temperatures in Southern California, where there’s been very little rain so far this season. Southern California hasn’t seen more than 0.1 inches (0.25 centimeters) of rain since early May.

The neighborhood, which borders Malibu about 20 miles (32 kilometers) west of downtown LA, includes hillside streets of tightly packed homes along winding roads nestled against the Santa Monica Mountains and stretches down to beaches along the Pacific Ocean.

Long-time Palisades resident Will Adams said he immediately went to pick his two kids up from St. Matthews Parish School when he heard the fire was nearby. Meanwhile, he said embers flew into his wife's car as she tried to evacuate.

“She vacated her car and left it running,” Adams said. She and many other residents walked down toward the ocean until it was safe.

Adams said he had never witnessed anything like this in the 56 years he’s lived there. He watched as the sky turned brown and then black as homes started burning. He could hear loud popping and bangs “like small explosions,” which he said he believes were the transformers exploding.

“It is crazy, it’s everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the Palisades. One home’s safe, the other one’s up in flames,” Adams said.

Actor James Woods posted footage of flames burning through bushes and past palm trees on a hill near his home. The towering orange flames billowed among the landscaped yards between the homes.

“Standing in my driveway, getting ready to evacuate,” Woods said in the short video on X.

Some trees and vegetation on the grounds of the Getty Villa were burned by late Tuesday, but staff and the museum collection remain safe, Getty President Katherine Fleming said in a statement. The museum located on the eastern end of the Pacific Palisades is a separate campus of the world-famous Getty Museum that focuses on the art and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The fire also burned Palisades Charter High School.

Film studios canceled two movie premieres due to the fire and windy weather, and the Los Angeles Unified School District said it temporarily relocated students from three campuses in the Pacific Palisades area.

Watson reported from San Diego. Associated Press writers Janie Har in San Francisco, Hallie Golden in Seattle and video journalist Eugene Garcia in Los Angeles contributed to this report.