Netflix’s Best New Movie Has Near-Perfect Critic And Audience Scores

It can be tough to know what to watch on Netflix in a given day or night, but the service has licensed one of the best movies I’ve seen in recent years, kid-focused or otherwise. While children may have been its target audience, it’s a movie that all ages can enjoy.

That would be The Wild Robot, the 2024 Dreamworks film about a lost robot that bonds with forest animals and ultimately becomes their guardian against encroaching technology. Here’s the synopsis:

“The epic adventure follows the journey of a robot–ROZZUM unit 7134, “Roz” for short — that is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and must learn to adapt to the harsh surroundings, gradually building relationships with the animals on the island and becoming the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.”

The Wild Robot has stunning scores from both critics and audiences. With 253 reviews in, The Wild Robot has a 96% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes and with 5,000+ audience reviews, an even higher 98%. On IMDB it has an 8.2/10, which in the context of that site, is extremely high, and a full quarter of its reviews are 10/10. Having seen the film myself, I think it very much lives up to these high scores.

It’s a kids movie, but it isn’t. It’s one of those situations where a movie aimed at children can be so good that parents and kids alike will enjoy watching it together as opposed to the adults just sitting around flipping through their phones while it’s on.

For me, the best part of The Wild Robot is its absolutely gorgeous animation, where I’ve really never seen anything quite like it. The story is good, sure, perhaps a tiny bit cliché, but there is no frame of this film that isn’t fantastic to look at.

It’s an easy recommendation for all ages, and family statuses. If you don’t have kids or aren’t watching it with any, it doesn’t matter, as it’s worth checking out for anyone. There are likely going to be two more films in the series adapting two more books that the first one was based on, but we do not have much information about those as of yet.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.