Ani-May-Tion: The Wild Robot (Dir Chris Sanders, 1h47m, 2024)
To May, and our annual look at the world of animation, in which we will consider two Oscar winners, and two nominees, and discuss films that range between the work of a single filmmaker and a tiny team in Latvia in the form of Flow (2024) and the world-famous Studio Ghibli, as Hayao Miyazaki returns for another anime spectacular with the deeply personal The Boy and the Heron (2024). We begin though, with another animation titan, Chris Sanders, director of Lilo and Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon , and Dreamwork's latest feature, The Wild Robot , a sumpteously animated ecofable based on the childrens' book by Peter Brown (2016), in which a robot ( Lupita Nyong'o) crashlands on an island inhabited only by animals and must adapt to her surrounding whilst raising an orphaned gosling. It's fair to say that the last few years hae seen something of a renaissance for Dreamworks, in much the same way that their long-time rivals Disney enjoyed in the late...
