Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Wild Robot” & “Disclaimer”

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THE WILD ROBOT (DreamWorks Animation/Universal – Sept. 27):  Chris Sanders’s movie is a fairly captivating if unsurprising family entertainment.  In the future, when a plane with a cargo of robots crashes off the coast of an island, the survivor is Rozim 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o)–you can call her Roz.  She’s programmed to aid humans, but the island doesn’t have any.  Rather, it’s populated by all manner of wildlife, from bears to foxes to crabs and raccoons.  And most particularly, geese.  Roz officiously attempts to provide services to the animals as though they were people, but they’re nonplussed if not hostile.  Luckily, Roz is equipped with AI, and before long she can communicate with every creature on the island.  She also finds herself learning compassion and even love.  When she inadvertantly saves a gosling she names Brightbill, she’s informed by the fox Fink ( a funny and touching Pedro Pascal) that she’s become his surrogate mother, and she needs to teach him the survival skills he’ll need to take part in a migration a few months away.  The story of The Wild Robot (based on a novel by Peter Brown) is Roz forming a found family with the inhabitants of the island, as all of them learn to help each other.  It’s very sweet, with first-rate vocals (the cast also includes Bill Nighy, Matt Berry, Mark Hamill, and Catherine O’Hara).  The film uses a new technology that allows artists to apply their own painting to CG-generated animation, and the visuals are quite beautiful.  The only thing The Wild Robot lacks is that extra degree of inspiration and surprise that marks the best of Pixar (one can’t help but compare it to WALL-E).  Once the story is set into motion, the character arcs and plot turns are all more or less as expected.  That won’t be a problem for the film’s target audience, of course, but it keeps The Wild Robot from the highest echelons of animated entertainment.

DISCLAIMER (Apple – Oct 11):  As TV has become more serialized and increasingly high-concept, reviewing shows (and for film festivals, screening them) has become more difficult.  The guiding principle of a series used to be that a pilot was the template for the entire run, and although there might be shifts over time, watching that initial episode would give anyone a fair idea of what the story, tone and characters were going to be.  These days, many ambitious series don’t tip their hands about their fundamental content until several episodes in.  That appears to be the case with Disclaimer, which screened its first 3 (of 7) episodes at Toronto.  Disclaimer has a remarkable level of pedigree, directed and written (from a novel by Renee Knight) by the great Alfonso Cuaron, with a cast headed by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen and Lesley Manville, and with photography by the world-class Emmanuel Lubezki and Bruno Delbonnel and music by Finneas O’Connell.  The initial episodes provide us with a fragmented version of an absorbing story:  famous journalist Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett), happily married to Robert (Kline), receives a book in the mail that purports to be a novel, but which tells a story based on her deepest secret, her brief decades-ago affair with the teen Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee), which culminated in his death.  We learn that the book was written by Nicholas’s mother (Manville), now also dead, and published by his vengeful father Stephen (Kline).  As Catherine tries to fend off the destruction of her marriage and professional life, there’s plenty in Disclaimer to enjoy.  But it also begins to become clear that there’s something else going on, as the flashbacks to the relationship between Catherine (played as a younger woman by Leila George) and Nicholas don’t correspond to the facts we’re told in the present.  Disclaimer seems to be playing with concepts about truth and fiction, both as art and morality, and unreliable narrators.  All of this may work out brilliantly or it may fall apart (for Apple’s recent ambitious Sugar, it was the latter) , but less than halfway through, it’s too early to tell.  What can be said at this point is that the degree of craft on display here is about as good as it gets, and one certainly wants to stay with Disclaimer to see how it develops.