You need to read adult books.
Maybe I’m not talking to you specifically, but there is this growing trend of adults loudly proclaiming their love of children’s books, and so many grown adults–with and without children–freely admitting that they do not read anything other than Young Adult. On the one hand, do what makes you happy! Order chicken wings and fries at the fancy cloth napkin restaurant! Stop showering in the summer because you swam in the pool and you feel that’s enough! Read books that are meant for 4th graders! If that’s what makes you happy, so be it, but actions have consequences.
Your friends are going to stop asking you to go to dinner if the only places y’all can go together have vinyl covering the booths. People are going to stop asking you to go anywhere at all if you stink. And people are going to stop asking your opinion on anything but the most basic of topics if you lack critical thinking and reasoning enhanced by widening your worldview and tackling adult themes in the media you’re ingesting.
And all that up there is why you should not pay me any attention whatsoever when I start talking about movies because baby listen: I love an animated kid flick that makes me cry!! It’s my number one genre of film.
Best Genres of Movies According to Me:
5. Ensemble Women’s Cast Doing Very Serious Acting
4. Bang Bang Shoot Em Up Action Adventure Where The Lead Actor Is Juicing
3. Foreign Family Drama With Subtitles
2. Period Piece. Any Period. But Period Enough Where It Will Be Nominated For Best Costumes Awards.
1. Animated Tearjerker
Your horror movie as a treatise on feminism? Cute! Not top 5. Your deeply moving and painstakingly researched war epic about the triumph of the human spirit? Great cinematography — took me four days to finish watching it probably. Your biopic of a troubled (white) person with a Blockbuster Actor trying to break into serious roles? I liked it! The book was better though.
Your children’s movie based on a children’s book with animation for children and simple themes you should talk about with your children???? That was made for me. I’ll see it three times, thank you.
The Wild Robot is based on a book of the same name which is the first in a trilogy of books for older elementary / younger middle school children. The premise is so simple that I saw the trailer multiple times and had zero inspiration to buy a ticket: a package, containing a robot, ends up in the woods somewhere and the robot “lives” in the forest with all the little critters. I had no knowledge of the book (or how well-reviewed the whole trilogy was) so I had no idea this was going to be my Big Cry movie of 2024. If trailers are meant to drum up interest, the makers behind those trailers did the movie a great disservice by not letting the audience know off rip that the animals talk in the movie. I thought it would be a film devoid of dialogue, but the animals are all suitably anthropomorphic to push human themes of love, loss, otherness, survival, and despair.
What I find most impressive about simplistic plots is the deft hand it takes to create tension, drama, and interest within the confines of a story where your audience understands how it will end as soon as the movie starts. You know what the beats of this movie will be as soon as Roz the Robot (exquisitely voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) adopts a baby duckling, and everything you think will happen absolutely does. She becomes attached, the duckling rejects her during Duck Puberty, and the selflessness of Motherhood still pushes her to make decisions in her son’s best interest.
And that was the sobbing, on my part. Any person who has had a difficult relationship with their parents will probably look at Roz and recognize deficiencies in their own upbringing. To say that a robot “loves” unconditionally is a stretch that I can’t even make for a children’s movie, but the parallel there between a robot with a primary objective and a human parent who should have a primary objective would lead both of those disparate beings down the same path of intense focus on the little one they are sworn to protect and raise into the grown-up they are supposed to be. Whether you are a robot raising a duck or an Evangelical Christian raising a queer child, your job is to look at your child, see them for who they are, and parent the person they are supposed to be, not the person you want them to be.
I could have watched multiple hours of the different kinds of relationships Roz had with her kid, her partner, and her neighbors. There’s so much about human nature to mine there about collective responsibility as a community, doing right by those who have wronged you, allowing otherness to enhance your life as opposed to violently shunning anyone who makes you uncomfortable, but with time constraints and the necessity of a beginning/middle/end for a family film, the last act does veer off into standard movie territory with a Big Bad and a battle for ultimate survival. Even here we find Roz showing us how to be good people and de-center ourselves for the good of those around us.
So like I said, take my movie opinions with a grain of salt, because I’m gonna choose Finding Nemo over Oppenheimer any day of the week. But in defense of children’s movies, there is a child inside all of us who sometimes needs to be reminded that we are all living on this planet together, and we’re much better adults when we’re recognizing our similarities and working together instead of tearing each other apart over our differences.
Score: 9.5/10
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