Next Gen (2018)

A Canadian-Chinese-American co-production adapted from a rage-comic manhua, Next Gen arrives with the unearned confidence of a film that believes it invented the lonely-child-and-robot friendship. Mai Su is an angry thirteen-year-old in a city where sentient machines handle everything, including her mother's emotional needs. When she stumbles onto a top-secret weaponized unit called 7723, the two form a bond that requires him to delete his own weapons to keep his memories, a premise the film treats as genuinely tragic. It is a tidy piece of storytelling, rendered almost entirely in Blender, and it moves with the efficiency of something built to be streamed and forgotten by dinner.

The film's cultural positioning is modest and mostly structural. Mai is a young Asian girl, the voice cast is unusually varied, and the whole enterprise flows from Chinese source material, which is representation by way of production logistics instead of thesis. A rebellious girl anchors the story, backed by a divorced single mother and a bully who eventually softens, though nobody stops to announce a gender politics. Race never surfaces as a subject. Neither does the climate, the body, or the brain. The villain, a tech CEO whose consumer robots are secretly wired to detonate, offers the faintest gesture toward corporate malice, a shrug at our dependence on gadgets rather than a real indictment of the people selling them.

The moral arrives without a pulpit: let go of the anger, keep the memories, forgive the bullies. Commendable restraint, given the material's instincts. The result is a competent, soft-spoken science fiction fable that preaches only when it forgets itself, which is more often than it should but less often than it could. We have classified worse. We have also classified better, and we suspect the robot will not remember either way. The dog, at least, swears with a filter, which is the most honest thing in the film.