Filmmaker Chris Sanders finished the week by watching The Wild Robot sweep every category in which it was nominated at the 52nd Annie Awards. Next up for The Wild Robot is the Oscars in March, where it is nominated for Best Animated Feature.
The film follows ROZZUM unit 7134, aka “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o), who is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Designed to help humans with their tasks, Roz gradually learns to understand the forest animals and finds a task in raising an orphaned gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor). It’s one of the more unique discoveries of self that has ever hit the screen, either big or small.
Sanders discovered the novel by chance, revealing that he dropped by the DreamWorks offices looking for a project to keep him busy. The very briefest description was enough for Sanders to take a peek at Peter Brown’s book. He read through it very quickly and was an immediate yes. The animation process didn’t start until during the pandemic, as Sanders remembered production meetings being virtual. Of all the film genres, animation is most suited for remote work.
“We’re unusually well-suited because it is a solitary thing that we do a lot of the time, even though we get together,” Sanders says. “Having this whole remote work didn’t slow us down. It was a very easy adaptation.”
Sanders spoke with Awards Focus about the film’s storytelling approach–its emotional depth and narrative, removing characters–including fan favorites–to better service the story, and opens up about AI and whether it will impact animation in the future.
The Wild Robot is currently available on home video and streaming on Peacock.
Awards Focus: The Wild Robot has received a lot of acclaim, including for the Oscars, Critics Choice, Annie Awards, Producers Guild, Saturn Awards, Solzy Awards, and more. How honored are you?
Chris Sanders: It’s really amazing. So many things about this film were a complete departure from business as usual, visually, narratively. There was not one single thing that was a risk. It was a lot of things so it’s just really affirming. It is important that it be received well, critically, because you’re anxious that the studio feels good about all these risks they took, frankly. I’ve learned a long time ago that this kind of acknowledgement, it does make a difference in a very tangible way to your future and what the studio might be willing to try next time. It’s really amazing. Plus, just to see everyone that I’ve worked with acknowledged for their artistry, their ingenuity. They rewrote software and reinvented the way they make films here in order to get this one done. It’s just really wonderful to see those artists acknowledged.
AF: It’s my understanding that you came upon Peter Brown’s novel by chance?
Sanders: Actually, yeah, indeed. I dropped into DreamWorks, looking to see if there was anything I could work on, frankly. I had just completed a project and I wanted to get busy. I dropped into development and they literally laid out some some projects on the table in front of me. Amongst them was this book, The Wild Robot. They described everything and when they got to The Wild Robot, just the very, very briefest description was telling me that that’s the one. I picked that one out and said, That’s the one I want to bring home and read. I did very quickly. I called back immediately and said, Okay, this is amazing. I would love to be connected with this.
AF: At what point did production begin?
Sanders: It begins so gradually that it’s almost impossible to put your finger on exactly when. I began writing the script very, very quickly. I tried to deliver it within a couple of months. The artists at DreamWorks were all engaged on other projects. It’s a matter of timing. I’d say my producers, Jeff Herman and Heather Lanza, did a brilliant job of coordinating this whole thing so that the script and the story reel, which we begin first—the story reel got to the point where we were getting sequences approved just as animators were clearing off of other movies and could drop onto ours, almost like jumping from one train onto another. One train is coming to a stop, the other one’s getting going and they leap onto our production and they begin animating. It was 2020, because I remember our first meetings being virtual.
AF: That segues into my next question. What are the challenges of directing an animated film during a pandemic?
Sanders: Animation is unusually well-suited to do this sort of thing. I remember way back at Walt Disney Studios, at Disney Animation—the fact is the software the computers in the building were sometimes not updated as quickly as people would update their own at home. Every once in a while, I remember Paul Felix, an amazing development artist, he would say, I’m going to go home and finish this (Laughs). Because his computer was a little better at home.
So, yeah, we’re unusually well-suited, I think, because it is a solitary thing that we do a lot of the time, even though we get together. A story artist is a great example. We get together and have story pitches, but most of the time, you’re by yourself in your room.
AF: I felt it was the best animated film of the year in part because it’s so different from most of the animated fare coming from the studios. Is that one of the reasons why you connected with the book so well?
Sanders: Absolutely. I think that Peter Brown’s book deserves, of course, all the credit. This wouldn’t exist if Peter Brown hadn’t quite literally drawn a robot in a tree one day. He told me that’s where the whole thing began. He just was captivated by the idea of this robot in the wild. It’s deceptively simple, the story. There are so many complex things that are going on within it and it’s very much the type of story that I like.
Lilo and Stitch is not about heroes and villains. It’s actually about a villain who becomes a hero. It’s about the redemption of a villain. Even though there are fanciful things and fanciful elements, the things that are going on are very relatable. They’re very human. That’s what’s going on in The Wild Robot. At the core is the story of a mother and her adopted son. The whole thing, of course, happens by accident. There’s a lot of power in that idea. The longer we worked with it, the more we found other things that were going on. It was very complex as far as the emotional things that were woven together. I think it’s one of the reasons that the story really resonated with people. It’s really fresh. I can’t think of any other stories that were like this with a mom at the hub of a wheel. She’s the hub of the wheel in the story.
AF: Were there any particular challenges in adapting the narrative for a screen that didn’t take away from what people love about the book?
Sanders: You really put your finger on it. That’s the whole trick. Anything we did was in service to that core story. A book is like a boat. It holds a lot. Visualize a container ship. You can load that book with all sorts of things because people digest that at their own pace. But a film is like an airplane. It has to be much lighter weight. It is going to have a schedule to keep. It has to be in the air for, in our case, an hour and a half and it has to get to its destination quickly. You have to clear space out.
One of the main tasks I had was being selective about what I removed from the book and what I threw my energy into. Fink the Fox’s role was greatly expanded from the book. There are three bears in the book. I honed that down to one. There’s a character named Chitchat, very popular character in the book, but this character would have short-circuited the relationship between Roz and Brightbill because we didn’t have a lot of time for that. I sidelined Chitchat and that is in a lot of ways, the most popular character in the book. Kids would mention that once in a while. They’re like, Where’s Chitchat? (Laughs) Literally, our presentation, I would get grilled about Chitchat.
It’s all about opening up space so that the core story had room and time to resonate because another concern I had was that we don’t feel we’re being pushed along, artificially. I wanted the story to feel like it was unspooling naturally because Roz is lost and she’s not on a schedule, right? She shouldn’t have to feel like she’s hurrying to do anything. That was another reason I wanted to open up space.
In American animation, you have a lot of dialogue. I’ll watch story reels from other films in production to give notes on. I can look away from the screen and I’m following the story just fine. It’s practically nonstop dialogue and that’s fine because that’s the style of those films. Ours is very, very different. It’s much more spare. We opened up space for music, for emotion.
We opened up time for things to really resonate. It was another reason that I think—I remember we sat down with the executives and we told them at one point, we will have a balanced film. It’ll have humor and emotion. But for months, all you’re going to see is the emotion. The humor is going to be—rather than dialogue based—physicality from the characters for the most part.
Everybody understood. I do think that it probably caused a bit of suspense as the months ticked by and the humor was not arriving. I’d always say it’ll be here, it’ll be here. The humor will arrive, it’s just going to be a little bit longer. Sure enough, when the first animation came in on the sequence where Roz is knocked offline and while she’s offline, the little raccoons come and they raid her for parts and that animation started coming in. I could feel the collective sigh of relief that yes, indeed we would have humor as well.
AF: What was it like to direct the voice cast and were they recording their lines solo or were actors paired with others to bounce energy off of them?
Sanders: Anytime I can get actors together, I will jump at the chance. We only had one instance where we had the actors together and that was Kit Conner (Brightbill) and Bill Nye (Longneck). We had one session in London where they were able to get together and that was an amazing session.
As you know, because of the length of the process and actors are inevitably going to be going to other films at the same time, their schedules will be very difficult to have aligned. Not only timing-wise, but also regionally. Will they be in the same place? We came really close one time with Lupita and Pedro. Most of it was done individually. That said, what each of our actors did for their characters was just phenomenal.
First and foremost, Lupita. Roz is a very, very different kind of character. She’s extremely complex and deciphering and understanding the architecture of Roz’s mind was what Lupita took the lead in. She had many, many questions. She kept me honest as a writer. We never did a recording session where we didn’t begin by just talking.
Our very first recording session in New York City, we talked for over an hour before we committed anything to the recording booth and that was an ongoing process. As we learned together who Roz was, where were the gaps in her knowledge? How did she begin defying her programming? What did that mean for the sound of her voice?
Roz has three distinct sounds. We call it phase one, phase two, and phase three. Lupita created these. There’s no electronic trickery so she sounds very, very different in the beginning of the film than she sounds at the end.
There’s this wonderful opportunity we had with the sequence where Roz has a conversation with herself in the cave. We call it the robot graveyard and this is something that was never in the book. I created that sequence for a lot of different reasons, but one of them was I wanted Roz to really see where she was supposed to be.
That’s an interesting moment because Lupita is playing the phase one Roz where she’s fresh out of the box and the phase two and a half to three Roz, where she’s much more human. She’s using contractions, she feels relaxed, she feels emotional,which the first version feels much more, I think disciplined.
AF: Animation has changed so much since you first started working in hand-drawn animation. The visuals in this film have a bigger focus on impressionism over realism. I think it’s the first time I’ve heard a film’s animation style described as imagining “a Miyazaki forest brought to life through the work of Claude Monet.”
Sanders: I think that’s an unusually apt description. We were looking for that more advanced look, more painterly look. I felt it was necessary because I didn’t want the film to feel too young. I feel like if it had been a CG look that was more business as usual, it would have skewed young. We were at the point where we had made some huge advances visually and getting away from that very hyper realistic look that we were obligated to technologically. Artists have been working against that for a long time.
If your character is covered with fur, you don’t want it to look like it just came out of a salon and got blow dried. You want it to feel more natural and matted. We would try to gather the fur and make it look as real worldly as possible by making it look not as perfect. This more painterly style was a huge advance because we could paint dimensionally. We didn’t need structures underneath the trees or the rocks. We could actually paint the things like a matte painting, but paint it dimensionally so we can move a camera through the scene and we could light it. That is a hundred percent something that’s never happened before. That more painterly style—every character and every background was painted.
The matte painting was one of the big heroes of this whole film. As we move Roz through the film—Roz is the only character that is traditional CG at the very beginning. When she comes out of the box, she doesn’t fit with the rest of the world. But there are 30 different Roz’s that we trade out starting almost immediately. As she gets worn and torn and she gets mildew on her surface, we start giving her a more painterly surface. So by the midpoint of the film, she belongs to the island. She’s a part of the island, visually.
AF: As a filmmaker working in animation, do you see AI having any impact on the industry going forward?
Sanders: There’s some very interesting things that were spoken about last night at the Saturn Awards. Nicolas Cage actually made a very, very interesting and impassioned speech about keeping humans in the lead. My hope is that AI becomes a support thing. It’ll find its place in the system to support human artistry. I think Nicolas Cage said it really beautifully. He said, We don’t want robots to dream for us. We don’t want machines to imagine for us. That’s for us, right?
I think that any emerging technology, I feel, disrupts things at first and then eventually finds its place. I still remember when Quartz watches really started to take hold and they said that mechanical watches, that was a thing of the past. They were dinosaurs. Quartz watches were more accurate, right? But nobody loves a watch like a mechanical watch. Mechanical watches just became more refined, more expensive maybe, but they still are there because there is no substitute for that.
There’s no substitute, for example, just for me to get on my soapbox—when you paint something digitally, there’s no original. When you draw or paint something physically, a real ink on paper, paint on canvas thing, there’s only one and the value of that is gargantuan. A Monet is a Monet partially because there’s only one original, that one and only. I’m always urging students and young artists, draw and paint for real, on paper, on canvas. Those things you will treasure in the future and in success, those are the things that are gonna be valuable.
AF: Turning attention over to the score, what sort of direction did you give to Kris Bowers about what you were looking for?
Sanders: Kris was such a wonderful choice. Universal Music suggested Kris as our composer. He was brand new to me. I’ve worked with Alan Silvestri and John Powell in the past, but Kris was a brand new entity. The thing is, I knew his music from movies. I gathered up as much of his music that I hadn’t heard as possible and I loved every bit of it. It was such a beautiful match, sensibility-wise, because he’s got such a powerful vibe inside his music, but it’s very gentle at the same time, which is very much like our film.
Kris came in, he agreed to be our composer. He joined the project really early and began making melodic sketches, if you will, of the different characters’ themes years before we were on the scoring stage. He had the biggest voice in the film. Again, we’ll go back to those open spaces that we had in our film, where there was not a lot of dialogue. Those were the spaces that Kris was going to dominate. Out of a 90 some odd minute movie, we have over 80 minutes of music, just shows you how big his job was.
AF: There are a few other Wild Robot books. Where do things currently stand on making a sequel?
Sanders: Ah. I think we’re still waiting and watching this first one to play out. In fact, we just opened in the last territory just two weeks ago in Japan. It was really cool that we’re in awards season, but the movie is is still premiering out there. We’re just coming to the end of the run of the first one and I guess we’ll see if the studio’s interested.