‘How do you know you love something? Or… someone?’

‘I think, you should probably tell them.’

‘But, what if it’s too late?’

Animation is so great this year, you almost forget “Despicable Me 4” is a part of it! Almost…

Even as just a voice, Luipta Nyong’o brings so much emotional warmth to her characters, and in a film rife with emotions, she gives “The Wild Robot” an even bigger heart than was programmed, and Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor and Bill Nighy, along with many others, truly know how to get the waterworks going!

And the animation is such a bittersweetly beautiful swan song from the in-house animators at Dreamworks; this is the company’s final release before the animation is outsourced to other companies, and while it appears with “Dog Man” that they’ll continue to play with different visual styles as opposed to most Disney and ALL Illumination films looking the same, time will only tell if the ion and marriage of art and artistry will continue and FEEL as wonderful as it does in “The Wild Robot”!

I will say that while the climax is very exciting and continues to bring the feels, it’s primarily due to characters and all their preexisting relationships established over the runtime, which is great, because the finale feels a tad rushed compared to the rest of the story which felt so natural in how it progressed; there’s even a villain brought in, and while the performer does a good job with what they’re given, it’s just not a whole lot.

It almost feels as though the film had the perfect note to end on, and the makers wanted to do a sequel, but due to the internal changing of the guard and not knowing how well the film would perform, the last 15-minutes feel almost like an abridged version of that supposed sequel. It’s still good, but it’s almost like the inversion of “Up”, where the first 87-minutes are so life-affirmingly great, and the remainder of it is just perfectly fine. It’s enough to keep it from ‘masterpiece’ material, but a film can still be phenomenal without being perfect, just look at my other 4.5’s this year.

A wonderful surprise, one of the best films of the year, a classic that kids and their parents will constantly be revisiting, and yet another notch in the belt for animation being a universal tool for great storytelling, not simply a punchline at next year’s Oscars where some smug idiot will joke about the format is for babies and babies only; babies have more heart than some of those people…