“The Wild Life”

Rated PG (1:30)

**

Opens today

The tale of Robinson Crusoe, loosely based on the real-life experiences of castaway Alexander Selkirk, has been told for hundreds of years, since Daniel Defoe’s 1719 epistolary novel. But what if Crusoe’s story had been seen from the perspective of the animals and local wildlife he encountered during his shipwrecked stay on a tropical island? That’s what the animated feature “The Wild Life,” directed by Vincent Kesteloot, imagines.

“The Wild Life” is produced by Nwave Pictures, a Belgian animation studio, and the film has a different feel than most of the heavily joke-driven animated features produced stateside. There’s much more of a historical action-adventure storyline in the telling of Crusoe’s story, as related by parrot Mak, or Tuesday (David Howard), as Crusoe calls him.

Intrepid English cartographer Crusoe (Yuri Lowenthal) is aboard a ship with his dog, Aynsley (Doug Stone), when a storm wrecks his boat on a tiny speck of an island, and the crew abandons him below deck. Struggling to survive, he soon befriends the curious Tuesday and his skeptical group of exotic island animal pals, including a chameleon, hedgehog, tapir, goat, pangolin and a very suspicious seabird. After uneasily forging an alliance with the outsider, the animals soon embrace Crusoe as one of their own, and the group bands together to fight off a nasty crew of stray ship cats.

There are some very impressive elements of the animation — the roiling waves during a storm and whipping jungle leaves are rendered with near photorealism. The animals are also excellently designed, particularly Pango the pangolin and Epi the hedgehog. The camera plunges through the chambers of Crusoe’s treehouse and throughout caves and along their water slide during chase scenes that are incredibly well-staged and crafted, if a bit unengaging.

That’s a bit of a problem with the whole film. Without much humor, and with a very straightforward story, there isn’t a lot to hook you into the tale, leaving one a bit cold toward the characters. There’s a message about accepting outsiders without judgment and working together as a team, and some strange subtext about a primitive island life versus a civilized one (which involves guns, weapons and economic exploitation — a pirate’s life!).

While the animal characters are fun to watch for their various abilities, the humans are a bit stiffer. Crusoe is the most fluid and well-characterized, a gangly ginger who soon turns into a sunburned wildman with a bushy mop of hair and beard. The pirates he encounters are a bit stilted. They are a ruthless, bloodthirsty and swashbuckling bunch, but they’re far less intriguing and engaging than the animals aboard the ship, possibly because the artifice is more obvious.

“The Wild Life” is a family-friendly take on the story of Crusoe with a twist, and kids will be drawn to the colorful animal characters, but without enough characterization in the writing, there’s a lack of emotional connection in the story that makes the film just another cartoon flick, not a special favorite or animated classic.