THE CONFUSION OF NATURE: The Wild Robot (2024, wri & dir by Chris Sanders, Dreamworks Animation, USA, 102mns)

2024's adventurous feature animation THE WILD ROBOT is almost as hard to write about as explaining the beauty and brutality of nature to your seven year old child.

There are tremendous moments of deep emotion. There are also strange tonal shifts that feel like concessions to the "movie by committee" process almost every filmmaker has to submit to in today's studio system.

Hey kid! You want to make a layered, subtle movie about the future, climate change, the mercilessness of nature, and the soulfulness of familial love? Okay, play ball and give us some sassy anthropomorphic gophers and possums, give us a robot battle scene, give us lines that spell out the subtext of the movie. Cause, you know, the audience needs it plain.

To be clear, the strengths of this movie outweigh the weaknesses by a forest mile. But this writer did feel a creative-commercial tug of war the entire runtime.

THE WILD ROBOT tells the story of Roz, a helper robot, who accidentally finds herself on an island filled with woodland creatures. When Roz destroys a nest of goose eggs, she manages to save one. This goose whom she later names Bright Bill turns out to be the runt of his litter. But with the help of Fink, a clever if impulsive fox, Roz is able to raise Bright Bill until the goose is able to migrate.

The movie has a wild ambition, most successfully realized in its very look. Though computer animated, the movie has an impressive painterly neo-classical 2D cell animation feel that makes every scene feel like a page out of a children's book from the future.

Its heart is also in the right place. As a parent, this writer teared up (and maybe even cried) multiple times as Roz develops a maternal love for Bright Bill (and he, a son's love for her) that overwrites her programming.

This still strangely captures the competing tensions of the creative and the commercial that course throughout the entire picture.

The movie also does an admirable job of addressing difficult topics like death, the struggle of survival in the wild, and the ravages climate change will continue to play on both nature and cities alike. One subtle image of whales swimming OVER a half submerged Golden Gate Bridge as a flock of geese fly above is a key example of the movie's ability to marry the complex with the aesthetically pleasing.

At the same time, almost like staccato bursts of machine gun fire during a Bach concert, rote dialogue, scenes that feel appended because some executive felt "we need an action scene right here" occasionally cause the fragile experiment to threaten tearing apart.

But the motion sickness always passes as Sanders and his team find another emotional beat to emphasize the living breathing hearts and souls at the center of the story.

THE WILD ROBOT is a commendable movie coming from studios more and more dependent on sequels and safe bets. It feels like a sci-fi BAMBI for the troubled modern world.

If it also feels paradoxically like it's trying to please all interested parties, it fights the good fight either to a draw or a slight win.

Roz is a wild robot. Bright Bill is a persistent intelligent runt. And this movie achieves an emotional epic quality one can feel was had fought for. Just like surviving in nature to adulthood to start one's own family.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club