If motherhood is the cornerstone of Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography, one might wonder how to approach it from a more abstract point of view. Thus, The Room Next Door (2024), based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, deals with a woman’s terminal illness as an environmental metaphor for a decaying world. 

Curiously enough, in this film, there is a mention to a Deep Web mathematician who is never seen and acts like Charon in a story about waiting in the face of the inexorable. Mathematics might symbolise death in this film, but it is also the universal language that gives life to Artificial Intelligence and the foundation which all computational architecture is built and based on, the brainchild of Geoffrey Hinton: the father of Neural Networks. 

This is where the key to understanding one of the most important animated films of the year lies: Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot (2024), based on the children’s novel by Peter Brown. The premise is based on the arrival of Roz, a robot assistant, on an island where she must learn to adapt. With a design that is a mixture of C-3P0 and Robby from Forbidden Planet (1965), and a point of view inherited from Hal 9000, Bumblebee and Wall-E, she has a logical and efficient character.

Her movements are determined and accurate, but she must learn to reprogramme herself to find animal behaviour patterns in an environment that is, at first, strange and hostile for her. In a sense, something similar happened to the canine protagonist in the director’s previous film, The Call of the Wild (2020), which already hinted at a discourse on the harshness of the integration process. 

Roz’s intelligence lies in the emotional ability to show compassion and merge with nature. The development of her motherly character comes with a tender animation work that highlights its more expressive character in the use of colours which illuminates the love between the robot and the gosling she adopts as her son. Although the characters are CGI-designed, both their surfaces and the elaboration of the backgrounds that recreate nature are worked on by hand with a style that conceptually draws on the kinetic care that Disney imprinted on Bambi (1942), the synthetic delicacy in the animation of the primordial that Miyazaki projected in My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and Monet’s sensitive impressionism.   

In its final part, the endeavour to learn to fly becomes the symbol of freedom, maturity and independence necessary to find the true strength of identity.