The Wild Robot

THE WILD ROBOT   ***

Chris Sanders

2024

IDEA:  Stranded in the wilderness after a storm, a service robot comes to care for an orphaned gosling.

BLURB:  The Wild Robot contains a thematic density and complexity that feels uncommon to contemporary American mainstream children’s media. Starting from a simple but fertile premise based on the collision of artificial intelligence with the animal kingdom, the story touches on such rangy ideas as social conditioning, adaptation, otherness, parenthood, the relationship between technology and nature, and the necessity of empathy as a survival mechanism. With its factious woodland critters and the robot interloper who manages to civilize their community, the film operates as a kind of allegorical Western that grafts (somewhat problematically) the social dynamics and psychology of human society onto a diverse species of wild animals. Yet if we take anthropomorphism as a given in the landscape of Disney-fied kids’ films, The Wild Robot proves to be a rather more mature example, tempering its sentimentality with a recognition of mortality and, arguably, an anti-essentialist and transhumanist view of evolution. All this within a gorgeous, texturally- and chromatically-rich animation style that combines painterly strokes with the weight of 3D rendering, further enlivened by a strong voice-acting cast. The Wild Robot distinguishes itself frequently enough from the pack that it’s disappointing when it doesn’t, especially in the frenetic pacing and overbearing soundtrack that have become endemic to modern-day Hollywood filmmaking (for kids or adults). Maybe that’s a quibble for a movie that is also so wise and big-hearted you can’t help but admire it.

Anora

ANORA   ***

Sean Baker

2024

IDEA:  A Brooklyn escort thinks she's got it made when she marries the son of a Russian oligarch, but her situation takes a turn for the worse when his irate family orchestrates plans to annul the marriage.

BLURB:  Anora is a raucous, often stomach-churning rollercoaster of moods and emotions, a film that throws the trappings of a screwball comedy over a nightmare about class inequality, capitalist corruption, and the social constraints on female agency. The discombobulating trajectory of the film largely stems from the structure of Baker’s screenplay. After a curiously aloof, montage-heavy first third, which alluringly but somewhat tritely sketches the quixotic Cinderella story of Mikey Madison’s titular sex worker, Baker stages a post-honeymoon crash that hits the viewer like a ton of bricks. Whatever naïve romantic euphoria he had generated totally evaporates in the cold light of the mansion where Ani is assaulted, coerced, and kidnapped by a trio of pugilistic male goons. There is humor to said goons’ flailing incompetency, but the overall affect of this excruciatingly protracted sequence is one of suffocation, a feeling Anora will sustain through an ensuing, increasingly grim comedy of errors in which Ani is strong-armed by a man whose social power affords him a mobility and imperviousness she will likely never see. Baker and Madison prevent Ani from ever being a simple victim of circumstance - her sharp tongue, stubbornness, and tenacity ensure that - but the script is disappointingly uninterested with her inner-life, even as it builds to an emotional conclusion. Perhaps that’s part of the point of Baker’s twisted tale, where people are treated as commodities and relationships follow the logic of financial transactions, and where one’s soul can only be bared when there seems to be nothing left to lose.