In ‘The Electric State,’ Jolting a Robot to Life

Kid Cosmo’s head is enormous, as robot heads go. The primary nonhuman hero of the film “The Electric State” (on Netflix March 14), Cosmo has a bright yellow globe of a head the size and shape of an exercise ball, propped atop an incongruously spindly frame.

Cute? Yes. Mechanically feasible? Not really.

Cosmo’s character was inspired by Skip, the similarly bigheaded hero of Simon Stalenhag’s graphic novel. A cult hit when it was first published in 2018, the book “The Electric State” is set in an alternate 1990s universe after a mysterious war has ravaged the California landscape, leaving the husks of enormous drones and robots in its wake.

“Simon Stalenhag’s work is what attracted me to this movie to begin with,” said Matthew E. Butler, the film’s visual effects supervisor. “But his designs are often aesthetically cool and engineeringly impossible.”

In the film, Cosmo and his young companion, Michelle, played by Millie Bobby Brown, embark on a journey across the American West to find Michelle’s brother. Along the way, they meet up with scores of other robots, many just as improbably designed as Cosmo.

Of course, Cosmo doesn’t really need to make mechanical sense in either the graphic novel or the feature film, given the flights of physics fancy regularly found in both mediums. But Anthony and Joe Russo, the film’s directors, wanted to ground their movie in reality, even more so given the story’s 1990s setting (think Orange Julius and MTV News with sci-fi enhancements), and the film’s fanciful robots, which include a midcentury postal carrier (voiced by Jenny Slate) and an urbane Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson).