3 out of 5

“The Wild Robot” was emotionally touching enough to earn my tears: that alone is worth a minimum star rating. But I thought I would be getting a wholesome, feel-good family film for general audiences, without any intercalated adult ‘baggage’ – would you believe producers found a way to sexualize one of the villains here, too? But I don’t have the word count to go over everything.

I cannot stress this enough: Wild Robot contains a vast amount of dialogue about death & dying, played mostly for laughs. Characters commiserate whether or not they’re about to croak on a minute-to-minute basis. A family of possums ask if they’ll be “murdered” before one of them is killed off-screen. For my 36-year-old self, it was extremely noticeable.

Sidebar: back in grade school, I wrote a play for a class Christmas concert. My first draft was rejected because the teacher didn’t like the bad guy telling the good guys he was going to “kill” them. But one of my favourite Xmas movies is “Home Alone”, and they spoke similarly in that movie, didn’t they? Worse, even: Joe Pesci says he’s going to bite Macaulay Culkin’s fingers off, and it was rated PG.

Obviously Home Alone isn’t germane to that teacher’s holiday movie marathon, but the real takeaway was that every parent has a different idea of what’s appropriate for their child and what isn’t – in their experience/opinion. I understand that Wild Robot’s story transpires in the untamed outdoors, and that finding your place in the circle of life – how & while you can – is a theme of the film, but there’s a difference between an effective implication of danger versus the definitiveness of death.

The only reason to keep regurgitating something in scripted lines is to underline to the audience how important it is. Today’s prepubescents can’t be so uneducated that a nice family movie already containing potent scenes of peril should have to push nonexistence to the front of their consciousness, too. Certainly the film’s trailers didn’t foreshadow it.

Wild Robot has one shot where the heroes are looking for survivors of a snowstorm, and silently, it conveys that what they found isn’t good. It’s less than ten whole seconds, but does a better job of communicating grief to an impressionable group, without forcing anything, than the other 90 minutes do. A shame, that.