Those in search of wholesome half-term fare will do no better than "The Wild Robot", "which is the best animated feature since 'Inside Out 2', and is good enough to be called an 'instant classic'", said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday.
"One of those films that just gets better and better", it's the story of a robot named Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o) who is washed off a cargo ship during a storm and lands up on an island populated only by animals. Roz is "sweetly determined" to find the customer she imagines must have bought her, but is distracted from her mission when she adopts a gosling (Kit Connor).
Adapted by director Chris Sanders ("How to Train Your Dragon") from a book by the American writer Peter Brown, the film features "stunning" hand-painted animation, and a screenplay that is "charming, perfectly paced and wickedly funny at times".
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This "sharply written and richly detailed" film picks up "a recurring theme in animation", said Wendy Ide in The Observer: "the robot lost in hostile territory who finds that its best tool for survival is a soul". But while it does recall films such as "WALL-E" and "The Iron Giant", it "holds its own against such illustrious company". And though it's rather sentimental, its "dark humour outweighs any maudlin tendencies", and Nyong'o "fully inhabits her character's arc from synthetic, Siri-style AI perkiness to the world-weary wounded quality that bleeds from every word at the end".
This is a "joyous film – warm, wise and funny", said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. "Anybody who has found themselves thrust into parenthood without a user's manual, which is to say, just about everybody, will feel understood. Knockouts don't come much cleaner than this."
