Based on the best-selling novel by Peter Brown, Chris Sanders’s The Wild Robot is an absolute delight of a film—an animated wonder that merges the spectacle of scientific possibility with a deep reverence for the natural world into which it often comes into conflict. Sanders began as a writer and animator with Disney before breaking out along with his Lilo & Stitch co-director Dean DeBlois with How to Train Your Dragon (2010), a genuinely heartfelt and rapturous fantasy about a boy and his dragon. The Wild Robot has a lot in common with that great film, namely its heart and conviction that good can prevail in even the worst of circumstances, much of which derives primarily from misunderstanding, willful or otherwise.

It is not surprising that Sanders, who is making his solo animation directing debut here, would be drawn to Brown’s novel, which begins with the unexpected arrival of a humanoid robot on the shores of a remote island that is populated with birds and animals. The robot, a ROZZUM Unit 7134 (nicknamed “Roz” and voiced with gentle sincerity by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o), is the only survivor of a cargo ship crash, and she emerges from her box ready to follow through on her programming. She is clearly designed to serve human needs and wants, but with no humans in sight, she sets about trying to “help” the various wildlife, all of which is terrified by her gangly, bulbous, mechanical appearance. She draws the attention of Fink (Pedro Pascal), a wily fox who is largely derided by the rest of the island animals because of his manipulative, foxy nature, but her primary goal becomes raising Brightbill (Kit Connor), a gosling whose family she accidentally kills, leaving him to imprint on her as his “mother.” Being a robot who must follow her programming, Roz becomes determined to help Brightbill mature and survive, which involves teaching him to how to fly so that he can migrate the following season with the rest of the geese, most of whom mock and ignore him.

Cruelty and violence hover all around The Wild Robot; it is not a film that shies away from the inherent violence of nature, and there are a few moments that turn death into stabs of pitch-black humor. Sanders uses the various animals, which include a child-laden possum named Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), an obsessive beaver named Paddler (Matt Berry), and a virtuous goose named Longneck (Bill Nighy) to reflect on different facets of the human condition and how so much of our conflict emerges from our refusal to recognize and work with others. When Roz arrives on the island the various animals are mistrustful and focused only on themselves and their own survival; by the end of the film, she has shown them how to work together for their mutual survival, something she does simply through her own actions that are driven more and more by a growing sensibility that can only be described as “love,” rather than her programming.

Like Steven Spielberg’s masterful A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), The Wild Robot posits the conundrum of what to make of a robot—an artificial human creation of metal and wires—that develops genuine human emotions. In Spielberg’s film, those emotions were forced on the mecha-child protagonist without any care for how he would be affected by unrequited love; in The Wild Robot, the love grows organically from Roz’s experiences, and it is very much reciprocated. The relationship between Roz and Brightbill is wonderful in its clarity and mutual affection, which spread out to the rest of the wildlife. Thus, when Roz is eventually discovered by the people who made her, who then send in other mechanical entities to retrieve her, the resulting action has a deep, resounding emotional conviction that transcends the typical formula.

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