On the basis of the leader for Dana Stevens's review. Slick animation directed by Chris Sanders from raw material by Peter Brown. Lupita Nyong'o voices the main robot, Pedro Pascal the friendless fox.
For reasons withheld a humanoid-ish robot awakens on a remote island with an all-consuming need for purpose, dressed up here as being assigned a task. (Later we see an army of these droids doing plantation work; if they weren't white the director may've left himself open to charges of political commentary.) Shebot "Roz" somehow "breaks her programming" and engages learning mode, which I guess means she's an advance on Arnie's T800 of Terminator 2 who could consent to the same change but needed human assistance to effect it. This enables her to communicate with the anthropomorphic animals. Antics ensue after a task is assigned with the customary sidekicks and now finely-tuned emotional manipulation. There's some great subtle physical humour. The island is a Noah's Ark, an Eden with no sign of ecological collapse where the animals apparently reproduce asexually. The final movement is generic and quietly ignores the problem of who's for lunch after making fun of it earlier. As always the trees suffer the most.
The animation moves amongst styles to serve the narrative. The wholesale thievery from other movies puts everyone at ease: Roz has a Tron aesthetic while the unsighted humans (there are always humans) live in WALL-E-style compounds. This is as far as the movie goes in acknowledging our current predicament. The island has a Bambi, some context is provided by a Star Wars (original movie) hologram, hearts are apparently TARDISes, the evil robot is a bit too much like GLaDOS. And so on.
Stevens found the island "a new and alien world." Wow. "The slow integration of the robot into the animal community is itself a kind of organic process; anyone expecting an antitechnology parable will be surprised to find an almost utopian tale about the coexistence of machines and the natural world." — but what about the conflict between man (who at least encoded the intentions of the robots) and machine? A Critic's Pick by Natalia Winkelman at the New York Times. "Leans into its derivative elements" — The Iron Giant, of course, and therefore E.T.
