Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Next Gen’ On Netflix, About A Lonely Girl And The Robot Who Becomes Her Best Friend

Netflix has been at the forefront of presenting animated features that are produced and distributed by Chinese studios but have Canadians writing, directing and casting. It’s led to mixed results, but the latest family feature, Next Gen, might just break through. Does it prove that the collaboration can work?

NEXT GEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Mai (Charlyne Yi) hates robots, and she has ever since her father left their family when she was little and her mother Molly (Constance Wu), a massive fan of the IQ Robotics company and its co-founder Justin Pin (Jason Sudeikis) has been buying the company’s Q-Bot companion robots for years.

Now Mai is an angry teenager, and she wants to be anywhere but where Molly has taken her: the flashy introduction to the new model, Q-Bot 6, which Pin wants in every home. After wriggling from her mom’s side to see the soccer stadium next door, the sentry robots covering the building send her running to an underground lab.

That’s where she sees Dr. Tanner Rice (David Cross, who also voices the Q-Bots), IQ co-founder and Q-Bot creator, tinkering with a side project. After he leaves, she accidentally activates the robot, which we find out later is called Project 77 or 7723 (John Krasinski), who immediately bonds with Mai and destroys half the city trying to return her backpack.

At first, Mai doesn’t want him around, but then realizes that his weapons can destroy all the robots she hates, including the ones that her nemesis Greenwood (Kiana Ledé) uses to hold Mai down while she beats her. At a certain point, though, 7723 doesn’t want to just be an extension of Mai’s anger, and because he has limited memory, he eventually disables his potent weapons in order to keep the memories he’s built with his new friend.

But Dr. Rice is forced by his old partner to find 7723, because Pin has a plan for all those Q-Bots he wants in every house, and it’s not good.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This feels like a modernized version of The Iron Giant crossed with Big Hero 6, but with all the robots having human voices.

Performance Worth Watching: The voice casting for Next Gen was so good that it’s hard to recommend one celebrity voice over the other. So this is a good place to mention Michael Peña as Momo, Mai’s tiny but yappy dog. To Mai, he just barks a lot, but to 7723, he not only speaks, but swears a lot (all of which is bleeped by the robot’s profanity filter)..

Memorable Dialogue: “Look at us… What a team we make,” says Mai. “A broken robot and a broken little girl.”

Single Best Shot: All the visuals in this film are fantastic, but the intimate moments, where 7723 sits with his memories of Mai, trying to figure out which ones he needs to delete to conserve memory, not only look great but have the most visual impact.

What Age Group Is This For?: Because of the intensity of the action, and the fact that a few characters die cartoony deaths, we’re thinking kids 10 and up would appreciate Next Gen the most. For the record, though, it is rated TV-PG.

Our Take: This is the second Netflix animated feature we’ve seen that is a Chinese-Canadian collaboration, where the film is produced and distributed by Chinese studios (one of which is Alibaba Films) but the story and casting are left to Americans. While the sensibility, location, character names and more are most definitely Chinese, the story and writing play to more Western tastes. They’re the kinds of films that can be easily adapted to different languages for a worldwide audience. And while Next Gen is leagues better than the streamer’s first swing at such a collaboration, Duck Duck Goose, there’s still some issues.

The length of the film, about 20 minutes longer than the average animated feature, wasn’t an issue, as there was plenty of story to keep the movie from dragging. But the pace was choppy at times, giving us longing shots of the futuristic city imagined by co-director and writer Kevin R. Adams but not giving us enough time to develop key aspects of the story, like Mai and 7723’s relationship and Justin Pin’s evil turn. Some of that makes more sense as we get to the movie’s climactic scenes, but if some of that was placed earlier in the movie, they wouldn’t have had to cram so much exposition into the end. One other thing: Like Duck the pop soundtrack is loud and distracting, and does little to propel the story forward.

Still, Next Gen is an enjoyable watch for kids and adults, mainly because it has an unexpected level of warmth to it. Krasinski brings a humanity to 7723 that’s established right away, and Yi’s performance as the lonely, abandoned Mai is heart-wrenching in the more emotional scenes. When 7723 has to make a critical choice during the movie’s climactic scene, we actually rooted for him to come out with some of that humanity intact. The fact that we were rooting for that robot tells you all you need to know about how involving the movie is.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Great voice performances, some funny moments, and a central relationship that will immediately suck you in makes Next Gen a fun watch for the entire family.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Watch Next Gen on Netflix