Movie Review: Visually stunning, emotionally powerful, 'The Wild Robot' is everything

In the opening scenes of “The Wild Robot,” a chirpy metal android with a state-of-the-art processing unit wanders around a forest asking confused animals if it can help them, offering discount codes and stickers for future customers. “Did anyone order me?” it asks.

We did, it turned out. This adaptation of Peter Brown's winning middle grade novel is an absolute movie triumph, a soulful sweet-sad animated journey that may have your kids asking why you're tearing up so much. It is destined to be ordered and reordered.

Chris Sanders, the writer-director of “How to Train Your Dragon,” “The Croods” and “Lilo & Stitch,” is the writer and director here. The assignment is daunting: Turn a beloved book with a few illustrations into a full-length movie without losing its tangy heart. Sanders didn't just nail it; he lasered it.

“The Wild Robot” is the fish-out-of-water tale of a futuristic helper robot who ends up marooned on an island when a storm sinks its container ship. It learns to adapt and connect with critters it has no programming for, even adopting the cutest gosling you'll ever see (sorry, Ryan).

The robot — ROZZUM unit 7134, or “Roz” for short — is voiced by Lupita Nyong’o in a spectacularly nuanced performance, sprightly robotic at first and eventually natural and wry. The other voice actors — Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames — aren't just hired guns that other animated movies use to entice an audience. Each is wonderfully calibrated.

The movie keeps the basic structure of the book but ups some characters — like elevating the importance of Pascal's red fox — and has a tendency to go a little Hollywood, like sending a robot army after Roz and setting everything on fire. But it never lags, the visual effects are startling, and its soul is intact.

“The Wild Robot” is often a story about programing — natural and artificial — and how that can help and hinder. “I do not have the programing to be a mother," Roz tells a mother possum (a superb O'Hara). She replies: “None of us does.”

Roz has ended up on an island where survival of the fittest and instinct are the rule, where animals don't sing and dance but struggle and hunt each other. “Kindness is not a survival skill,” our robot is told by the fox.

“The Wild Robot” is also a celebration of adoption and found families. The push-and-pull of being a parent is there, as is the celebration of friendship. And there is death, an honest reminder of the struggle to stay alive.

Visually, it is stunning, a textured world that is almost painterly. You can see snowflakes settle on mottled fur, moss on rocks, individual leaves in a den. The images of a tree covered in butterflies is so spectacular it should be a poster we all can frame. No offense to Roz, but regular computer-generated efforts — “Transformers One,” we're looking at you — look lackluster in comparison.

Roz accidentally causes the death of a goose family, save for an unbroken egg. That orphan is now Roz's obligation — she must teach it to eat, swim and fly, culminating in winter migration. And she must face tough questions — about how a robot came to raise a little goose. “He found where he belongs,” Roz says with cheerful sadness when her gosling swims to a group of geese.

What is home is another theme: Roz feels the pull to return to her factory but only out of obligation. Her heart is on this island and the friends she has made, especially after making a safe place for all creatures during a freezing winter. Her kindness changes the way the animals see each other, even if it cannot change their appetites.

Being a mother changes Roz, too, unmooring her from her ones and zeroes, making her improvise and even willing to break some rules, like learning to lie to create a creative bedtime story. A busted-up robot from the shipwreck is stunned by what Roz has become when she stops by to consult: “You should not feel anything at all.”

As for you? You're going to have all the feels. Surrender. Is this the best animated movie of the year? Totally, so far. It might even be the best movie of the year. See you at the Oscars, Roz.

“The Wild Robot,” a Universal release in theaters Friday, is rated PG for action/peril and thematic elements. Running time: 101 minutes. Four stars out of four.

This image released by Universal Pictures shows a scene from DreamWorks Animation's "Wild Robot." (DreamWorks Animation/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Roz, voiced by Lupita N'yongo, background, and Brightbill, voiced by Kit Connor, in a scene from DreamWorks Animation's "Wild Robot." (DreamWorks Animation/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Roz, voiced by Lupita N'yongo, left, and Brightbill, voiced by Kit Connor, in a scene from DreamWorks Animation's "Wild Robot." (DreamWorks Animation/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows a scene from DreamWorks Animation's "Wild Robot." (DreamWorks Animation/Universal Pictures via AP)

States will share $10 billion for rural health care next year in a program that aims to offset the Trump administration's massive budget cuts to rural hospitals, federal officials announced Monday.

But while every state applied for money from the Rural Health Transformation Program, it won't be distributed equally. And critics worry that the funding might be pulled back if a state's policies don't match up with the administration's.

Officials said the average award for 2026 is $200 million, and the fund puts a total of $50 billion into rural health programs over five years. States propose how to spend their awards, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services assigns project officers to support each state, said agency administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz.

“This fund was crafted as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed only six months ago now into law, in order to push states to be creative," Oz said in a call with reporters Monday.

Under the program, half of the money is equally distributed to each state. The other half is allocated based on a formula developed by CMS that considered rural population size, the financial health of a state’s medical facilities and health outcomes for a state’s population.

The formula also ties $12 billion of the five-year funding to whether states are implementing health policies prioritized by the Trump administration's “Make America Healthy Again” initiative. Examples include requiring nutrition education for health care providers, having schools participate in the Presidential Fitness Test or banning the use of SNAP benefits for so-called junk foods, Oz said.

Several Republican-led states — including Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — have already adopted rules banning the purchase of foods like candy and soda with SNAP benefits.

The money that the states get will be recalculated annually, Oz said, allowing the administration to “claw back” funds if, for example, state leaders don't pass promised policies. Oz said the clawbacks are not punishments, but leverage governors can use to push policies by pointing to the potential loss of millions.

“I've already heard governors express that sentiment that this is not a threat, that this is actually an empowering element of the One Big Beautiful Bill," he said.

Carrie Cochran-McClain, chief policy officer with the National Rural Health Association, said she’s heard from a number of Democratic-led states that refused to include such restrictions on SNAP benefits even though it could hurt their chance to get more money from the fund.

“It’s not where their state leadership is,” she said.

Oz and other federal officials have touted the program as a 50% increase in Medicaid investments in rural health care. Rep. Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska who has been critical of many of the administration’s policies but voted for the budget bill that slashed Medicaid, pointed to the fund when recently questioned about how the cuts would hurt rural hospitals.

“That’s why we added a $50 billion rural hospital fund, to help any hospital that’s struggling,” Bacon said. “This money is meant to keep hospitals afloat.”

But experts say it won't nearly offset the losses that struggling rural hospitals will face from the federal spending law's $1.2 trillion cut from the federal budget over the next decade, primarily from Medicaid. Millions of people are also expected to lose Medicaid benefits.

Estimates suggest rural hospitals could lose around $137 billion over the next decade because of the budget measure. As many as 300 rural hospitals were at risk for closure because of the GOP’s spending package, according to an analysis by The Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“When you put that up against the $50 billion for the Rural Health Transformation Fund, you know — that math does not add up,” Cochran-McClain said.

She also said there's no guarantee that the funding will go to rural hospitals in need. For example, she noted, one state’s application included a proposal for healthier, locally sourced school lunch options in rural areas.

And even though innovation is a goal of the program, Cochran-McClain said it's tough for rural hospitals to innovate when they were struggling to break even before Congress’ Medicaid cuts.

“We talk to rural providers every day that say, ‘I would really love to do x, y, z, but I’m concerned about, you know, meeting payroll at the end of the month,’” she said. “So when you’re in that kind of crisis mode, it is, I would argue, almost impossible to do true innovation.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

FILE - Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, speaks during an event about drug prices with President Donald Trump, Thursday, Nov. 6, 2025, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)