Another kids film I got dragged to by virtue of having kids in my family, but it sits comfortably enough outside the Pixar/Disney triumvirate of influence to have some interesting points.

First, it makes you curious about the world you're watching. The setting is an island populated by various animals who find themselves in the company of a robot who finds it way to their shores by mistake, and it makes you wonder about the wider world. Is it the far future? How advanced is a society when helper robots are delivered by the boatload like set top boxes?

It answers that question in the last act satisfactorily, paying off a neat enough parable about family and child-rearing.

The other thing is the visual aesthetic. Unlike the shiny, plasticky surfaces the Pixar style has established as the default for CGI animation, director Chris Sanders and his team of art directors and software engineers have created a world made to look like it's been hand painted using watercolours.

When a ship wrecks near an uninhabited island and a domestic server robot who washes ashore activates, she immediately begins looking for her master and the tasks they'll set her.

The curious wildlife wonder what's landed in their midst and the robot, which takes to calling itself Roz (Lupita Nyong'o), causes chaos and destruction in her failed attempts to get them to tell her how to help them. When a baby goose hatches from an egg she's become convinced she has to care for and imprints on her, Roz becomes the parent instead of the bumbling child learning about her new home.

In a clever storytelling turn, she listens to and processes the vocalisations the animals make and after a few hours can speak all their languages, giving both us a bit more life in the characters and Roz more interaction in the story.

She comes to understand she has to teach the gosling, who she calls Brightbill (Kit Connor) to fly so he can migrate with the rest of the flock come winter, and she's aided in her quest by Fink (Pedro Pascal), a wily fox not used to help from other creatures and who becomes her confidante and friend.

Trying to fulfil the self-appointed duty her programming dictates, Roz spends the rest of the year along with Fink and Brightbill, all getting on with their lives while they cross paths with the various other creatures who live on the island.

But the company that builds and sells robots like Roz isn't going to let an expensive product stay lost, and the retrieval beacon that will summon them has been Chekov's gun throughout the story. When the company comes to collect, it starts an all-out war between autonomous technology and the animals Roz has inspired to work together to save their home.

You've seen the 'family is where you find it' trope a million times and nothing much in the movie will surprise you, but there are plenty of kid-friendly action set pieces and it's far from the worst time you can have if forced to watch a family film.