From the very first scene of The wild robotthe new animated film from director Chris Sanders (How to train your dragon), an adaptation of the first in a trilogy of children’s novels by Peter Brown, the viewer is immersed in a new and alien world together with the main character. A robot washes up on the shore of a lushly forested island, surrounded by the wreckage of some sort of wrecked vehicle: an airplane? a spacecraft? – and immediately begins scanning the area for anyone who can help them. Rozzum Unit 7134, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o and soon to be known as “Roz,” is designed to provide, as she puts it, “integrated, versatile task performance” to any human who asks it of her. The problem is that the island where she washed up has no human inhabitants, and the animals that witness the arrival of this hulking metal biped view Roz as nothing more than a menacing predator that must be fought or fled.

A funny time-lapse montage shows the robot shutting down for a while so her software can learn to decode the animal sounds around her, allowing her to communicate with all the island’s residents. Unfortunately, once she wakes up from this semi-hibernation and starts talking to them, the animals are more afraid of her than ever. Except for one: a newly hatched gosling who imprints on her as its mother after Roz, racing to escape an angry bear, accidentally crushes the nest of the chick’s mother and siblings. At first, the robot sees these adorable chirping pests as an obstacle to her goal of sending a signal to the company that created her, Universal Dynamics, so that she can be located and shipped to her original destination. But the built-in programming that drives Roz to meet this little being’s needs before she can move on to her next task gradually begins to give way to another set of internal commands: the exhausted sense of obligation and the ambivalent, but yet unwavering devotion, also known as motherhood.

Aided by her few allies in the animal world, including a cunning but lonely fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and a troubled opossum mother, Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara), Roz begins raising the gosling, which she calls Brightbill (Kit O ‘Hara) mentions. ‘Connor), to adulthood. An older goose, voiced by Bill Nighy, tells Roz that she has until fall to teach the youngster to eat, swim, and fly on its own so he can be part of the mass migration that allows his species to survive. But Roz discovers that even the most sophisticated aerodynamic diagrams of geese in flight are insufficient teaching tools for a parent who can’t flap her own pair of wings. Still, she and Fink – who has become a kind of wise uncle to the now teenage goose – try to prepare Brightbill for the journey, combining the powers of instinctive nature and technologically enhanced upbringing.

While Roz remains focused on her “directive”—to borrow a term from another surprisingly moving animated film about an environmentalist robot—other questions begin to creep in. Who actually designed her to fulfill that destiny? And why should she leave the island she has become a part of, down to the moss and tiny flowers growing from the cracks in her metal frame? The second half of the film gives the robot a whole new set of problems to solve, using not her factory-built super intelligence, but the emotional skills she has come to develop through her relationship with her adopted son ( a word like Lovethat’s not obvious when you’re designed to offer little more than polite customer service).

The wild robot is a wonderful family film, but not for very young children. Consulting my own parental databases, I’d say my child would have loved it from the age of nine or ten, but found it too scary for that. Like the classic book by Felix Salten Bambi, a life in the forest– a forest fable that is much darker than its Disney adaptation –The wild robot is set in a nature that is unapologetically red in teeth and claws. There are no graphic deaths on screen, but the fact of interspecies predation is casually and even comically referenced throughout. In particular, the offspring of Pinktail, the opossum, serve as a kind of vague Greek chorus, reminding us that for small mammals like themselves, death is an ever-looming possibility. But in the cozy ecological world this film depicts, being eaten is as normal a part of life as eating. The slow integration of the robot into the animal community is itself a kind of organic process; Anyone expecting an anti-technology parable will be surprised to find an almost utopian story about the coexistence of machines and the natural world, as Roz explores ways to use both her built-in software and her newfound heartware to save her fellow creatures to help survive.

Unlike most contemporary animated films, The wild robot has a visual style closer to traditional 2D animation than the modeled three-dimensional look of the average film from, say, DreamWorks, the studio that released it. The soft, painterly appearance of the island and its creatures is initially contrasted with the shiny metallic texture of the robot’s spherical body. But as Roz begins to go ‘wild’, even replacing a damaged part of a metal leg with a tree stump gnawed by the beaver, the animation style subtly shifts in the differentiation of her surface from that of the foliage and fur that surround her . With the same subtlety, Nyong’o’s vocal performance shifts from suggesting one of those annoyingly polite, synthesized voice assistants – think Siri and Alexa – to sounding like a being first amazed by and then open to the uncertainty and wonder of to live. From a robot consisting of little more than two metal spheres and a rattling set of limbs, she creates a character of enormous complexity and ultimately sympathy. It seems strange to classify a performance in which the actor is never considered one of her best, but Rozzum 7134 is among the most memorable people (or metal facsimiles thereof) Nyong’o has ever put to screen.

There were a few developments in the third act that kept me from finding the end of The wild robot as satisfying as it could have been. One major plot point felt oddly rushed through, and the final scene, while moving, left a lingering question unresolved. These omissions may be deliberate choices to leave room for a sequel (although a post-credits sting seemed to exist more to generate a parting joke than to set up the next chapter). I wouldn’t say no to a complete one Wild robot film trilogy, especially if Nyong’o, Pascal and the rest of the stellar voice cast return. But as those death-obsessed baby possums like to point out, you never know how long what you love will last. So if this unusually thoughtful exploration of parenthood, emotional connection, and the coexistence of nature and technology is all we get, then load your kids on your back and lug them to the cinema while you can.