This robot didn’t talk. That’s what I first noticed in the Dreamworks teaser for The Wild Robot. And that meant there was no call for celebrity voice stunt-casting or “Well, THAT happened!”–style “jokes” that subvert and step on any earnest drama.

Instead this looked like the story of a likeable artificial lifeform, closely resembling the Laputa guardians from Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky, lost in the wilderness.

Chris Sanders (Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon) was director. So I was in.

Later we learned that Rozzum 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o) does speak. Just like her animal friends and enemies that populate the island where her Universal Dynamics crate washed up. But she needs time to learn their language. She needs even more time—sped by montages—to learn the laws of nature. In this wild world, she struggles to find her new task. After all, that’s a robot’s job. To fulfill her purpose.

In those first few seconds of the film, Roz must quickly adapt to survive. Soon afterward, Roz wanders the forest, asking plaintively, “Didn’t anyone order me?”

Well, you’ll believe an android can make you cry.

The hype is real for The Wild Robot. This hit may be a sleeper. But thanks to new fan energy, she’s waking up, spinning her limbs, and flashing green LEDs in the sunlight.

This isn’t just a story about technology versus nature, but of man’s good creation versus nature’s law. Unlike the curious forest creatures from classics like Snow White or Bambi, these woodland clans aren’t just cuddly and cute. They’ll eat stuff. Mostly each other. Parents, be assured: there’s no blood, but there is fast onscreen animal death. The requisitely wisecracking fox (Pedro Pascal) clarifies his job in this natural world before he casually sweeps up a nearby crab and tosses this into boiling water.

In response, our idealistic robot friend Roz may be shocked. But true to her own design, she adapts. What isn’t her job? Deciding to stomp into nature and redefine this place into the techno-utopia favored by her corporate planners back home.

And what else is Roz’s job? Becoming the adoptive mother to a little gosling whose nest and other family members she accidentally destroyed earlier in the storm.

Roz, her gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor), and Fink the fox become the red-pulsing heart of The Wild Robot. Sanders and his talented crew weave in stories of their anthropomorphic yet still natural-feeling cast of creatures. All of them share very human characteristics, like bullying the outcast, or comically lamenting the trials of raising seven (and very nearly six) wriggling little smart-aleck opossum babies.

Ultimately that’s the theme of this story—motherhood. Here it’s a great gift. Roz, our dauntless and task-oriented heroine, soon comes to embrace this calling. She even rewrites her own program, not to fulfill her distant corporate masters, but to seek her place in a natural world that recoils from her as a monster. But as she raises her child, enlisting others to help, the other creatures embrace her as one of their own. What do you know. ‘Tis a story about the goodness of “nuclear” families and of an entire village of diverse creatures, with their own gifts and contributions.

A lesser story might have gone over the top with the moralizing. An even lesser story would have followed a female robot who rejects the programming of “patriarchy” in order to find her “true” purpose as a cog in corporate machines.

The Wild Robot simply isn’t interested in all that. Animators barely even show us the planned cities of Earth run by domestic androids. Those are but waypoints on the true journey toward a truth that nature reflects and nature’s unseen God directly teaches—that man was not meant to be alone. We’re instead meant to find suitable helpers and steward the Earth, making good stuff using God’s better creation.

And what a subcreation these animators have made. Roz’s fun little robot functions, from manual extendible arms to presumably nanotech-generated compartments and fuel channels, contrast beautifully with the natural world. Her beams reach into stormy night skies. Daytime clouds wash in all the spectrum of sunlight. Fink’s fuzzy orange fur glides against a bed of leaves. Water pours from the skies and pools into lakes and shorelines, getting into every lavishly rendered metal and other material.

As of this date, Sanders’ wondrous epic has high ratings from almost everyone. Given some viewer expectations about creature-on-creature violence, plus earnest drama about the struggles of adoption, Christian families with older children and teenagers should see this ASAP. And anyone out there still lamenting the supposed lack of “conservative art” needs to see, share, and show love to The Wild Robot.