OPINION: Telling a story you know nothing about

The state of animated movies this year is a story of franchise dependency, mostly coming from how sequels appeared to give the box office resuscitation through “Inside Out 2″ and “Despicable Me 4″ this summer. While the money is good for a box office which was due for a caffeine boost, the courtship of original titles to the number two feels like the only way to be a success these days.

It’s perhaps why I walked away from “Transformers One” disappointed. The eighth movie in 17 years of the “Transformers” franchise found its way back to animation with celebrity voice casts and an appeal to young audiences, which felt better than the live-action movies’ wearied CGI robot fights, but it can’t shake a feeling of juvenile complacency in its target audience.

Chris Hemsworth’s gravely-voiced, highly-marketable toy Optimus Prime butchering Martin Luther King speeches clashes with an obnoxiously high-pitched Keegan-Michael Key. As Bumblebee, he rambles endlessly about knife hands or being labeled as “Badass-atron,” no matter how many times the audience doesn’t laugh.

The script can’t weld an emotional engine after an apocalypse of exposition and sci-fi nonsense, with talks of Cogs, a Matrix of Leadership and Sparks. What annoys me is how there’s a fascinating story of institutional corruption and conspiracy which could give a more serious film credibility, but tonal clashes doom the movie to rust.

It’s with this mindset of weary, misguided animated movies which I sat down for “The Wild Robot,” an original animated movie from Dreamworks with a voice cast of Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal. I had every expectation to dislike another short-sighted animated movie, but I love being proven wrong.

“The Wild Robot,” follows a robot assistant who had accidentally been delivered to an island comprised of wild animals, I found myself mesmerized by gorgeous visuals which have a hand-painted appearance and a frequently funny, frequently emotional story.

Nature is harsh, it’s the law of life. Kill or be killed, fight all who challenge, don’t die. The irony of a fish-out-of-water robot in this environment is almost akin to a royal stepping into horn-honking New York, completely hostile, hopelessly alone.

For a robot whose goal is to be of service to those who ask, Roz is incapable of working. To adapt to this environment, she has to change to fit with it. Attempts start with physical comedy, such as when she transforms her bipedal form to a crab-like scuttle to ascend a rock cliff, but her true adaptation comes when she accidentally stumbles upon a nest with a single egg. The egg hatches into a baby gosling, described by a conniving fox named Fink as a runt.

Roz has found a task, she will mother the gosling, and return home when the gosling has leaves the nest for migration in winter.

But mothering is a draining task. The gosling imitates Roz right down to robotic movements and pretending to scan its environment. There’s hints of real anxiety for Roz as his development isn’t shaping up to the other geese on the island. Childcare, or in this case goslingcare, isn’t a perfect science, so how can a robot, built for perfection, care for this runt?

In one scene, Roz asks a simple question to Fink while trying to tell the gosling a bedtime story, “How do you tell a story about something you know nothing about?” It’s played humorously, as Roz’s robotic, emotionless speech is clashing with very intimate themes of parenting, but it’s vital to something inherent about relationships: there’s no guide, no way to know before diving in.

What starts as a scene drenched in downtime becomes the central thesis to an existential story about purpose and parenthood, and even broader the way we view storytelling as guidance. Inherently, children we raise follow our lead, and become reflections of ourselves. In the stories we tell, we hope we pass off guidance to the point where they can function on their own, but the unknown can lead to a need to be overprotective and, in the harshest view, selfish.

The literal metaphor in “The Wild Robot” of a bird leaving the nest is the trust in those we raise to change and grow one day without us, just as we change and grow ourselves. It’s messy, terrifying but, most of all, beautiful to witness, such a profoundly human and emotional moment in our lives.

I don’t tell my mom enough how much I love her.