Every other scene in this kinda loses me but overall it's pretty well defined, incredibly beautiful, and technically/artistically impressive. On a functional level, this breaths a good amount of life into what, at it's barest bones, is not a novel concept. Yet it still finds a lot of room to cleanly explore its themes of nature vs nurture, motherhood, and how mimickery/machine-learning play into it's prescient ideas of the loss of the human(?) soul. I should probably say this now but over the years I have been ever so slowly becoming averse to anthropomorphizing animals in animation. Where it used to really just open the door for a lot more heightened emotionality and to inject novelty into general narrative frameworks—now its always attempting something smarter, and I always feels it falls short. Not so much in this film as the anthropomorphized fauna really just talk too much but in films like Zootopia and Elemental they always have to wilfully ignore big components of their concepts in order for their allegories to work, lest they simply come off as racist themselves (they always do). And here it's coexistence and found family stuff starts to lose it's meaning when it extends to the whole island and every animal in the food chain. Do they just not eat anymore? I'm just using this as an outlet to complain really, here the nature of dialogue I find just takes away from the core experience of this film. With it's incredibly sweeping setpieces and visual renderings that always do tenfold for its emotional development and overall investment. Where I watch the trailer for Flow (seeing soon hopefully) and it engenders in me a similar feeling to Life of Pi, I feel they went the weaker route for this film in of cinematic capability. That and it's out-of-time, knockoff Disney Channel original movie soundtrack training montage really just put me off. Also it has like 3 different third acts but they're all pretty fun and cool. The kids will rock with this though I'm sure. My favorite part of The Wild Robot was when The Wild Robot looked at the camera and said, "I am 'The Wild Robot'" (real)