From its very opening frames, the artistry of “The Wild Robot” bursts through every image. We’ve become so worn down by American CGI animation that barely considers the visuals in a form that once shaped imaginations for entire generations. The great Chris Sanders and his team have made a film with literally hundreds of shots that could be printed and framed on a wall. Their approach isn’t the cold, sterile feel that you get from so many modern cartoons. It’s more like moving art; it feels like you can almost see the brushstrokes on a moving painting. In that sense, it owes more to films like “Wolfwalkers” or the work of Studio Ghibli than a traditional major studio cartoon. One could watch “The Wild Robot” with the sound off entirely and still have a rewarding experience—turn it on and you have one of the best animated films of the decade.

Lupita Nyong’o proves yet again that she can do anything, perfectly voicing a robot named ROZZUM 7314 (or “Roz”) that crashes onto an uninhabited island. Roz is programmed to be an assistant for whoever purchases her, so she first scours her new home for a master, seeking to complete any sort of mission before she activates a signal to return home. These opening scenes of a robot trying desperately to be helpful to any creature that needs it are surprisingly hysterical, rich with heart and humor.

The journey leads her to cross paths with some of the more rambunctious animals on this remote locale, including a fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal), an opossum named Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), a grizzly bear named Thorn (Mark Hamill), and a beaver named Paddler (Matt Berry). She also quickly learns that nature is a terrifying place. One of many wonderful things about Sanders’ adaptation of the book by Peter Brown is how unafraid this film is of death, which used to be a subject that children’s fiction helped little ones understand but now seems forbidden in animation. Nature can kill you.

Roz comes face to face with death when she accidentally falls on a nest, killing a mother bird and almost all of her eggs, except for one. When that egg cracks, it reveals a runt that Roz names Brightbill (Kit Connor), who imprints on the robot as his mom. If nature had its way, Brightbill wouldn’t survive—runts don’t make it in the wild. But most runts don’t have a robot as a mother.

“The Wild Robot” shares DNA with films like Sanders’ masterful “How to Train Your Dragon” and another timeless tale of a robot who defies its programming in “The Iron Giant,” one of my personal favorites of all time. However, it’s not a film that’s content to merely mimic its inspirations, finding a unique voice in its blend of tension, humor, and grace.

This is a movie that’s bursts with unexpected humor—often in jokes about how easy it is for animals to die in the wild—but also just so deeply heartfelt in every frame, and only rarely in a manner that feels at all manipulative. The visual artistry in the painter-like compositions comes through in other elements too from the all-around stellar voice work (especially Nyong’o, who finds nuance in what could have been a cold vocal turn) to a great score by Kris Bowers. The truth is that one can tell when a project like this is made for profit vs. when it’s made for artistic passion, and everyone involved in “The Wild Robot” poured their hearts into it. You can see it. You can hear it. You can feel it. And that truly matters, especially in an era when so much children’s entertainment feels like nothing more than a cynical cash grab. This is made from the heart in every way. And that’s what allows it connect with yours.

Chris Sanders once described his approach to “The Wild Robot” as “a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest.” As insane as that may sound, he pulled it off. It’s a film about robots and wild creatures, but it’s also a movie about parents and children. Roz learns the great difficulty of being a mother, discovering that sometimes the best way to take care of a child is to discard the programming that we thought would teach us how to do so. Sometimes you just have to trust your heart. Sometimes you need to be wild.

This review was filed from the premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens on September 27^th.

4/5 stars

Chris Sanders may not be as famous as some of his Pixar counterparts, but he is surely one of the finest animation directors in Hollywood right now.

He created the now iconic blue alien character Stitch in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch for his 2002 directorial debut, later following it with the equally popular How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods.

The film follows a robot – ROZZUM 7134, or “Roz” for short – washed up in its box on an island. Voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, Roz is a highly capable artificially intelligent being that initially mimics the gait of a crab to help survive this inhospitable environment.

Programmed to always complete its missions, Roz gets a new one when it encounters an egg, out of which hatches a baby goose – a runt named Brightbill (Kit Connor). To help her new charge, Roz is told to help Brightbill “Eat. Swim. Fly by Fall.”

A still from ‘Strange Darling’
| Photo Credit: X/ @strangedarlingx

In Strange Darling, writer-director JT Mollner seems determined to take viewers down a twisted rabbit hole of subversion, tapping into both the psychosexual intensity of Hitchcock and the fever-dream aesthetics of David Lynch, all while standing firmly in the tradition of grindhouse horror. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill slasher, though — far from it. Mollner crafts a fragmented tale of bloodlust and manipulation, flagrantly tossing the presupposed conventions of genre and gender on their heads.

The film kicks off not with a quiet buildup but with a full-throttle chase through a mid-western field. Willa Fitzgerald’s mysterious protagonist, dubbed “The Lady”, flees in slow-motion, her bloodied body bathed in the melancholic strains of Nazareth’s ‘Love Hurts’. These continued cinematic flourishes scream Texas Chainsaw Massacre, yet undercut themself with the unsettling dreaminess of its contemporaries, like Mandy. Mollner doesn’t allow for breathers, immediately thrusting us into Chapter 3 of 6 in his nonlinear puzzle. Chronology is established as irrelevant, and tension simmers through the film’s fractured structure, teasing out reveals just as quickly as it veers off into new directions.

From the outset, Strange Darling pulses with anxiety. The film’s core duo, the Lady and her pursuer, “The Demon” (Kyle Gallner), are locked in a disconcerting bit of debauchery that quickly shifts between moments of pure terror and sparing bits of relief. The Lady may seem like a victim, fleeing for her life, but Mollner’s direction refuses to settle into such clear binaries. Both Fitzgerald and Gallner deliver powerhouse performances that toy with our sympathies. Fitzgerald balances her character’s vulnerability with a looming edge, while Gallner carries a disarming mix of small-town charm and brooding menace.

A still from ‘Strange Darling’
| Photo Credit:
X/ @strangedarlingx

Much of the film’s tension is heightened through its visual and auditory design. Shot entirely on 35mm film (a choice that Mollner feels the need to announce via an opening slate) by actor-turned-cinematographer Giovanni Ribisi, the grainy texture gives the film an eerie retro sheen. The camera lingers on wide landscapes and tight close-ups alike, transforming both into spaces of threat. Colours take on symbolic weight, with a recurring emphasis on red that suggests both passion and violence in equal measure. 

The sound design, however, isn’t as well-executed, and the film’s crucial early conversations are muddied by an imbalance that left me squinting for meaning. Though its intentions were presumably to disorient and heighten the mystery, it felt more like a technical oversight than an artistic choice.

What makes the film really stand apart is how it toys with expectations. Mollner knows exactly how we’ve been conditioned to make snap judgments about gender roles in crime and horror — and he weaponizes that instinct at every turn. The film teases you with questions you think you’ve answered (I won’t spoil the fun), only to yank the rug out from under you just as you’re settling in

.But as the layers of misdirection pile on, the intrigue begins to wear thin. The entire game hinges on one central twist and while it’s deliciously disorienting at first, once the rug is fully pulled, the narrative starts to lose a bit of its bite.

A still from ‘Strange Darling’
| Photo Credit:
X/ @strangedarlingx

Mollner’s taste for shock value also teeters uncomfortably close to gratuitousness. The Lady spends much of the film in various states of physical and emotional torment, and while the genre often thrives on discomfort, the relentless brutality begins to feel less commentary and more an indulgence in suffering. A late plot development involving a woman police officer also feels particularly misjudged, with a disturbing comedy of errors that risks pushing the film into dangerously misogynistic territory.

Still, despite its edginess, the film is undeniably stylish, and for fans of genre films that revel in artifice and unease, it offers plenty to admire. The film’s aesthetic choices, from its lush lighting to its serpentine editing, put Mollner’s confidence on full display. The film succeeds in creating a mood — one of oppressive dread and sickly seduction — that lingers long after the final frame.

In the end, Strange Darling stands as one of the boldest cinematic offerings of the year. Sure, it’s not perfect — beneath all the blood-splattered bravado, you might wonder if the plot’s substance fully keeps pace with its ambition. But in an ocean of cookie-cutter horror, Strange Darling is audacious enough to leave a lasting impression, even if it occasionally trips over its own self-indulgent shoes.

Strange Darling is currently running in theatres