Hot Take McGee here… and trust me when I say I wish I wasn’t. I wish I could lie and say I loved The Wild Robot. It’d oil the gears, smooth the framework, make me one of the agreeable. But I loathed the experience of watching it.

The flick is about a household robot accidentally lost on an isolated wilderness island full of critters. She has to find a purpose which turns out to be raising a gosling and teaching it how to fly.

What could possibly be so wrong with a cute little cartoon movie that earns it such a low score? It. was. uncontrolled. It. was. chaos. it. was. irritating. It was at about a 15 when I needed it to be at a 5. Every choice they made in pacing, editing, and direction aggravated me. Everything had to be exaggerated and psychotically fast to the point where I had to shut my eyes sometimes to keep the flashing hyper-excited movement out of my eyeholes. It genuinely made me wonder if there was something wrong with my brain.

Plus the Wild Robot’s design and movement styles were off-putting too. I’m supposed to think she’s cute… that she’s a more mobile Baymax but I just didn’t. The way her arms and legs and torso and head spin opposite of each other and seemingly of their own accord felt unnatural and unsettling. The tentacles that burst from her back? Ugh. She was weird and creepy when they were going for adorable and cute.

One thing I kind of liked about the wilderness was that it was red in both tooth and claw. The animals and the film’s sensibilities towards death and carnage were both amusing and believable. And pretty frickin’ dark too. It was fun seeing a movie for kids be so cavalier about death… even using the word kill a bunch.

But it’s still a movie for kids so they magic up a scenario where predator and prey live together in unity. Which is all heart-warming and stuff until you realize they still have to eat… right?

I also thought the side characters were unappealing. There’s a fox that just reminded me of a better one from Zootopia. And a goose that they were hopping up and down insisting it was adorable but I wasn’t. There’s just something about the furry and feathered animals that failed on a primordial level. I didn’t want to spend time with them.

No, I will have to bare this shame forever. I hated. hated. hated this animated film. The best thing I can say about it is that it’s better than a handful of other, worse animated films this year (ones we can all agree are terrible). Oh well.

Score: 58