The DreamWorks animation “house style” has been quite well-defined over time, exemplified for better or worse by the Shrek movies. Pop culture references, glib wisecracks, and snarky asides are typically the order of the day, and while this isn’t a criticism as such, it can often have the effect of keeping the audience at an ironic distance from the story. This is very much not the case for The Wild Robot, a profoundly earnest, sincere movie that wears its heart on its sleeve and, in no small part because of it, ranks among the studio’s best work.

The titular robot is “Rozzum 7134”, aka “Roz”, (Lupita Nyong’o) a domestic service robot who’s been stranded on an island inhabited solely by animals. Looking for tasks to complete, Roz discovers an orphaned gosling who imprints on her and promptly decides that she’s his mum. They and a fox called Fink (Pedro Pascal) form a surrogate family, trying to teach the gosling to fly before it’s time for the geese’s winter migration.

Movies focusing on the idea of the found family are a dime a dozen these days, but few of them explore those themes as deftly and as potently as The Wild Robot manages to. Roz is this gosling’s adoptive mother, and the movie doesn’t bother making it subtext, doing a really commendable job articulating the unique challenges that families with adopted children face. Ideas of belonging, ostracism, and finding your place in the world all come up, handled with a light touch but never glossed over in favour of easy answers. The sincerity of the film’s tone, and its refusal to wink at the audience at any point, is a big part of what enables it to tackle these topics without seeming pat and simplistic. It’s seriously touching stuff.

Director Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, and like that movie, will probably age very well.

It’s such a small, simple story, a lovely bucolic tale of a robot and two animals gradually becoming a family, and it’s a shame that it isn’t willing to stay that way. There’s an obvious point that would have worked perfectly as an ending… that’s just over halfway through the film. Then Act 3 comes around and it’s a big, bombastic action-packed finale that is, to be fair, enormously exciting and tugs at the heartstrings extremely effectively on its own merits, but it does nonetheless feel quite at odds with what’s gone before.

Luckily, it isn’t enough to put much of a dampener on things, and you’ll need to be made of pretty stern stuff not to be tearing up at the end. This is a fabulous movie, without a doubt one of the best DreamWorks pictures, and after Robot Dreams, the second-best film about an animal and a robot becoming friends in 2024.