Best of 2024, #8: The Wild Robot

The primary reason this movie is here is that it made me laugh and cry, which, as I get older, is more and more what I look for in a movie (though it’s not true of several of the movies I have coming up.)

Another thing I loved about this movie was its mastery of dialogue-less storytelling. Of course, that brings up the fact that the main problem with this movie was that it was superficially similar to WALL-E, but not as great, so I kept unfairly comparing them the whole time, but, judged on its own merits, this is a really well-made movie about parenthood and other existential dilemmas.

(My mother-in-law’s main problem with this movie was that she didn’t believe that the predators wouldn’t eat each other when cooped up for the winter. For some problem, that was more of a problem I had with Zootopia, where they had built a whole society where the predators seemingly had no ability to eat. In this movie they just had to get through a shorter amount of time.)

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of an Ironic Title

I talk in my first book about how the best way to convey that you have an ironic concept is to have an ironic title. When this book came out, I heard the title and immediately knew I had found one of the great ironic titles. How can a robot be wild? They’re the opposite of wild. Put a robot in the wild and a great story writes itself.

This is a high concept movie. As I say in my book, high concept can refer to wild sci-fi stories like this, or dead simple stories like Wedding Crashers. What they have in common is that the title writes the movie for you.