A shipwrecked automaton and an orphaned gosling form an unconventional family in DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot. Screen talks to director Chris Sanders and producer Jeff Hermann about creating the island adventure.
Sometimes a film just needs to incubate until exactly the right person comes along to hatch it. So it proved with The Wild Robot, the children’s novel by Peter Brown about a shipwrecked automaton trying to make itself useful on an island of wild animals, which was optioned by DreamWorks Animation in 2016… and then gathered dust on the company’s development slate for four years. Until, that is, Chris Sanders walked back in through DreamWorks’ doors.
After creating Lilo & Stitch for Disney in 2002, then delivering a franchise-spawning hit for DreamWorks with 2010’s How To Train Your Dragon (alongside his fellow writer/director Dean DeBlois), Sanders had not worked with the animation house since 2013’s prehistoric adventure The Croods (jointly written and directed with Kirk DeMicco). But, having briefly diverted into live-action with Harrison Ford-starring adventure The Call Of The Wild in 2020, Sanders was invited back and given his pick of the slate.
“They laid some projects out quite literally on a table in front of me,” he recalls, “and one of those was The Wild Robot. Just the initial description told me that was the one I was interested in. The idea of a marooned robot that doesn’t know where it is and just earnestly continues to do what it was designed to do… there’s a quiet, sweet nobility to it.”
Perfect timing
Sanders’ return and attraction to Brown’s book was good timing for producer Jeff Hermann. He had just finished the third Kung Fu Panda when DreamWorks originally acquired The Wild Robot, and “fell instantly in love” with the novel, but thought he had lost the chance to work on it when he was then assigned to The Boss Baby sequel Family Business. Fortunately, he had just become available again when Sanders strolled in. “I constantly tell Chris, ‘This project was waiting for you to come back,’” says Hermann. “I can’t think of a better person in the animation community who could have led this film. This is very much what Chris’s sensibilities are, and what he’s best at — telling heartfelt but quirky stories about odd pairings of characters.”
Lilo & Stitch teamed a Hawaiian girl with an alien monster, while How To Train Your Dragon followed a nerdy Viking boy and a dragon. In The Wild Robot, ROZZUM Unit 7134, aka Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), unexpectedly becomes the adoptive mother to a young gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor) after she accidentally crushes everything in his nest, other than his egg. So it is not hard to see a similarity with these other trans-species relationships — although Sanders sees it a little differently.
“I hadn’t thought about it during the production,” he says. He can see “there’s a bit of crossover”, but as a director who has never made a sequel (both How To Train Your Dragon and The Croods continued without him), it was the “new territory” of exploring a mother-child relationship, he insists, that attracted him to The Wild Robot.
Despite the book’s popularity in the US (Brown has already written two follow-ups), it is not hard to see why The Wild Robot may have lingered so long on the DreamWorks slate. Not only is it effectively an original film in the marketplace, but it also features relatively little dialogue and no human characters, with a surprisingly unblinking attitude to the harshness of nature. Meanwhile, its lead character and her emotional journey are reminiscent of another automaton-focused animation adaptation which, on its release via Warner Bros in 1999, was a commercial flop: namely Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. It must have felt like a relatively risky proposition.
“The Iron Giant comparisons were always there from the get-go,” says Hermann. But, he adds, given that film’s evolution into a cult favourite, those comparisons were actually “welcome”, and “something I think we all aspire to”. That aside, “Everyone was aware this was going to be a different film. It is a departure in a lot of ways for us, in terms of the tone, the seriousness of it, the types of topics we tackle and the emotion we bring to some of those topics. And because of that, there was always a lot of focus and conversation throughout the entire process around achieving the right balance of those elements.
“We really do have to credit the studio for having the courage to embrace the fact this was going to be a different film from the very beginning,” he adds.
Sanders, meanwhile, insists he was too busy, “in the best way possible”, to think about how the film might be perceived or received while he was making it. “It’s not until close to the end that you look up and realise, ‘Oh yeah, this is about to come out and it’s an original,’” he says. “And then you get butterflies.”
Of course, the gamble has paid off, with the film having grossed more than $324m worldwide at press time, and ranking as the year’s third biggest non-sequel (after Wicked and It Ends With Us). “That’s exciting, and it’s important to all of us,” says Hermann. “We all want originals, so to see them be received the way they are is really encouraging.” Further validation has come from the film’s best animation nominations at the Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes.
Another gamble that paid off is the creative decision to move The Wild Robot away from the industry standard of photoreal CG animation, and give its colourful, characterful flora and fauna a more impressionistic, freehand-painted feel, far beyond even the painterly style of DreamWorks’ Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. Sanders refers to the “gravitational hold” that the CG-animated look has had on the industry, and how it felt appropriate to break free for this film.
“We have had a lot of animals in CG, and when you get to a medium shot or a closeup, you can see every little hair on their bodies,” he says. “It never stops being amazing to me that a computer can actually handle that level of information. However, photorealism is defying reality. A fox, or bear, or moose in the forest doesn’t look like it’s come out of a salon with perfectly coiffed fur!
“I was concerned from the beginning that people see The Wild Robot in the right way — so it felt necessary to have this impressionistic look, where you don’t see any individual hairs at all,” he adds. “It’s all just brushstrokes, which has the overall effect of a heightened reality, evoking the matted fur on a real animal.”
Sanders cites as his own creative inspirations the hand-animated films of Hayao Miyazaki (“an aspirational goal for us”) and “the soft, wet-oil look” lead artist Tyrus Wong gave the forests in 1942’s Bambi. The process to achieve the animation is described by Hermann as “digitally, by hand” — by which he means it is achieved with “hand strokes” instead of by “measuring out points or making a geographic asset”, even though no physical paints or pencils are used. “We created this tool where an artist can actually draw a line on the screen and then instantly turn that line in space, to give it dimension,” he says. “It pushed the boundaries of what we can do in CG animation, away from the photoreal stuff.”
Given the main draw of adapting The Wild Robot was the opportunity to explore new ground, it might be expected the usually sequel-averse Sanders would move on from Roz and Brightbill. However, he reveals, “Should my producers decide to adapt the second book [The Wild Robot Escapes], I would be extremely interested in working on it, because it’s a fresh story again.”
The next instalment sees Roz back with her creators, but trying to figure out how she can return to her island home. “Peter did a really good job in not repeating himself,” adds Sanders. “I’ve never been super-anxious to do sequels because I feel like we figured it out and I’m looking for a new challenge. But with this film in particular, and the way the second book is constructed, I would be very curious to work on it.”
Hermann hopes to be right there alongside him. “It’s not often you get to have this type of property land in your lap,” he says. “The strong thematics of the film, the strong characters, the top-notch voice cast, the music, the iconography of a robot in nature, the visual boundaries that we’ve been able to break through… Everything on this film exceeded everything we hoped for. We would absolutely love to stay in this world and continue if we can.”
How composer Kris Bowers gave The Wild Robot an organic soundscape
For Kris Bowers, scoring The Wild Robot was the fulfilment of a childhood dream. “When I was a kid, I loved animation,” says the Los Angeles-based composer. “I wanted to be an animator more than a musician for a period of my life, up until high school.” He shares fond memories of watching Looney Tunes and Tom And Jerry cartoons as a child. “They didn’t have much dialogue, so animation was the first medium that demonstrated to me what music can do for storytelling.”
It is surprising, then, that he has not done a fully animated feature before, being best known for dramas such as Green Book and 2023’s The Color Purple (though he did get some Looney Tunes action with Space Jam: A New Legacy in 2021). But that is exactly what drew The Wild Robot’s writer/director Chris Sanders and producer Jeff Hermann to him.
“We thought this could be an opportunity to change things up a little bit,” says Hermann. “One of the things I think is so remarkable about Kris’s filmography is the range he demonstrates. There’s something intangibly unique in how he can make something feel contemporary and current, but also timeless.”
Bowers did not take much convincing. He was already a fan of Sanders and instantly clicked with Peter Brown’s book, having just had a daughter when approached in 2022 (“I was really emotionally taken by Roz’s story of becoming a parent”). But what particularly excited him was his first visit to DreamWorks Animation’s headquarters in Glendale, California, where he stepped out of the elevator and was assailed by concept art and character cut-outs for the film. “I was so excited by what they were doing visually — taking this more painterly approach.”
The distinct look of The Wild Robot provided Bowers with much of his inspiration. “It told me the score needed to have a very specific and clear organic presence in terms of the sonic palette,” he says. And the fact the film has around half the dialogue that is usual for a modern animation meant “the music needed to be just as engaging as the visuals were captivating”.
Seeking his own unconventional approach, Bowers turned to the Sandbox Percussion ensemble. “They play percussion in more of a Foley sense, where they’re playing found instruments, built out of metal pipes and wood slats and playing on tree branches and things like that. I thought that would be an interesting texture to represent the wilderness.”
Bowers worked with the production for two years — far longer than is usual — allowing for a more organic collaboration with the filmmakers. The advantages of this became most clear when they realised that singer Maren Morris’s song ‘Kiss The Sky’ was not long enough for the seven-minute Brightbill flight-training montage it was intended to accompany. “I asked if Maren and her songwriters would be willing to give me the stems to the song so I could try to figure how to build it out,” says Bowers. “They were gracious enough to do that, so I re-edited it, added a little interstitial section, then changed the key when we come back, and then did a reharmonisation toward the end, and added thematic elements from the score throughout.” It was effectively “an orchestral remix”, he says, ahead of Golden Globe nominations for the song and Bowers’ original score, places for both on the Oscars shortlists, and a best music nod at the Annies.
The composer — who won an Oscar in 2024 for jointly directing documentary short The Last Repair Shop — rates The Wild Robot among his most-satisfying projects. “I’ve been in situations [with filmmakers] where they wanted to be essentially anti-music, which I’m down to explore and that’s fun.” But this film enabled him to create the kind of score he had loved most since childhood. “When it comes to the part of me that connected to this medium and craft, it was so joyful to be able to write something that had melody and narrative emotional weight to it,” says Bowers. “That felt like an amazing space to be given as a composer.”
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