Chris Sanders is a one-of-a-kind artist.
As a kid, looking through various “art of” books for the 1990s Disney classics, you could always pick out a Chris Sanders illustration or a Chris Sanders storyboard, even without a little note explaining that it was him. It was just obvious. It wasn’t just the style of his illustrations or drawings; it was how much story and emotion was conveyed, breathlessly, with every line.
His latest film as a writer/director, “The Wild Robot,” contains all that we have come to expect (and love) from Sanders – an art style that boldly pushes the medium forward, characters that are so easy to love and root for, and a truthfulness to the occasionally harsh realities of life that are never dwelled on but are instead depicted with frank objectivity.
It’s incredible to see his vision so fully realized, and it was enough to look back through his 35-year career, from his early time at Disney to the difficulty of a very painful canceled project to his latest (and greatest) triumph, “The Wild Robot.”
Early Years at Disney Animation
After graduating from the California Institute of the Arts in 1984, and after serving for a few years as a character designer for Jim Henson’s “Muppet Babies” animated series, he began working at Walt Disney Feature Animation in 1987. He contributed to 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast” and 1992’s “Aladdin,” but then Sanders started work on what was then an underdog production that would become a zeitgeist-capturing juggernaut – “The Lion King.”
At the time, one of “The Lion King’s” directors, Roger Allers, was pushing for Sanders to be the movie’s art director. “And I pushed back and said, ‘I’m not an art director.’ He was very excited about me being art director. We all went to Africa on this wonderful trip – I went to Africa as potential art director, along with Lisa Keene. We were going to co-art directors,” Sanders told TheWrap during our expansive chat.
“After I came back, I really struggled. I am not a painter, I’m not a layout person. I was really struggling with even what to do with my day. I didn’t know what direction to go. And eventually [producer] John Hahn came and sat down with me. He closed the door and he said, ‘How would you feel about not being the art director?’ And I said, ‘This comes to me as a huge relief.’”
Don Hahn confirms this and said, “Yes I did move Chris away from art directing. Not any fault of his. I don’t remember the reasons but Chris will. Suffice it to say he’s one of those polymath artists who can bring really unconventional ideas to the table that have amazing heart and emotion and expresses our humanity in a profound way using art and music and allegory in a way that only animation can do. I always felt so lucky to have him on my films.”
After he was removed as art director, Sanders got sent to Florida to work out the design of two key sequences – the “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” musical number and the sequence where Simba communicates with his dead father, who appears to him in the clouds. In other words, the two sequences that broke from the reality of the rest of the movie (or as Sanders describes them “visual departures from the regular film”).
“He reshaped, in many ways, what Disney animation was,” said Schumacher, who was head of Disney animation and who is now president of Disney Theatrical Group. He points to an early sequence from “The Rescuers Down Under” where the message is relayed across various animals as an early indication of Sanders’ unique command of story and said that his contributions to “The Lion King” were “the two things that changed that movie, I think, more than anything.” The sequence with Mufasa’s ghost made the entire team wonder, according to Schumacher, What could this movie be? “Chris was so central to that,” Schumacher said.
Hahn remembers the Mufasa ghost sequence as “an example of Chris finding a visual way to express a story point that elevated the film from being a dusty nature documentary to this profound allegory of how we carry on for our ancestors.” According to Hahn, Sanders and Brenda Chapman pitched the sequence while Ennio Morricone music played. “The movie was never the same,” Hahn said.
The Walt Disney Feature Animation outpost at the Disney-MGM Studios theme park at Walt Disney World, just outside of Orlando, Florida, had opened with the rest of the park in 1989. And after a slow start, by the time “The Lion King” was in the works a few years later, “They could actually handle production,” according to Sanders.
Sanders described the vibe of the Florida studio as “like Disney probably was back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, where it was just fresh and new and had all of this enthusiasm and talent.” “I was deeply impressed. They sent me out to Florida about a week at a time, maybe three or four different times,” Sanders said. “I got to know the team out there. Fast forward to ‘Mulan.’ I returned to be head of the story and move there and got to know everybody out there even better. And that time I stayed for about three years.”
Schumacher credits Sanders with the central concept of “Mulan” and the main character going to save her father, not fighting for some selfish cause. “This idea that she doesn’t want to disguise herself as a boy to get what she wanted, that she did it to protect her father’s life. She didn’t fit in the world, but she wasn’t looking to escape the world. I think the power of that movie. And that’s Chris Sanders,” Schumacher said.
Schumacher recalled being at a corporate retreat when he said, “We want to make the ‘Dumbo’ of our generation.” “Dumbo,” of course, was made after the company had overspent on “Pinocchio.” It was made quickly and cheaply, but with a firm commitment to artistic expression (this is, after all, the movie that gave us the trippy “Elephants on Parade” sequence, among others). After the retreat, people would come up to Schumacher and say, “It has to be Chris.”
Sanders was in Florida working on “Mulan” and Schumacher took him to dinner. Schumacher told Sanders that he and Eisner had chosen Sanders to make the next “Dumbo.”
But there were two big decisions he had to make at the beginning – would it be CGI or hand drawn? And would it be made at the studio campus in Burbank, recently erected on the cusp of the 134 freeway and designed with appropriate post-modernist flair by architect Robert A.M. Stern; or in the more stately, made-to-order buildings at the theme park in Florida? Sanders knew he wanted the film to be hand-drawn (“CG wasn’t really ready for those kinds of designs to work,” said Sanders). And when it came to the proposed location, “I didn’t hesitate a second,” said Sanders. Florida it was. “I knew what they could do,” Sanders said.
“Lilo & Stitch”
When Schumacher approached Sanders about directing his own movie, Sanders fled to Palm Springs. He stayed in a hotel, ordering room service and cappuccinos, determined to come out of there with something concrete. “I told myself, I’m going leave with a book that people can look through and understand the story. Pitching an alien story, I was very concerned that people would see the wrong thing in their head because there were a lot of scary alien movies, and this was a departure from that,” Sanders said. “I thought, If I illustrate the story, if they say no, at least they’re saying no to my story.”
Sanders returned with a 19-page illustrated version of what would become “Lilo & Stitch.” When he presented it to Schumacher, Schumacher said, “We really like it, and I want to make this movie on one condition, that it looks like you drew it.” It was the first time, in the history of Walt Disney Animation, that the look for an entire animated feature would be based on an in-house artist — “Hercules,” for example, was based on the work of Gerard Scarfe; “Atlantis” took major inspiration from Mike Mignola, and so on. “I had no idea what to do next, because I did not perceive my drawings to look any different than anybody else’s,” Sanders said.
Two volumes of a guide, later expanded to three, were created. They were called “Surfing the Sanders Style” and they were meant to guide other Disney artists in how to recreate the filmmaker’s unique sensibilities. (An artist on the “Lilo & Stitch” DVD explained it as like taking a regular character design and inflating it with air.) “No one was more fascinated to see this book than I was,” Sanders said.
The perfect accompaniment to Sanders’ design aesthetic was watercolor backgrounds, which Disney had utilized in the 1930s and ‘40s but had long abandoned. By Sanders’ calculation, the format hadn’t been used in 60 years. By this point Sanders had another director by his side, Dean DeBlois, and the pair said, “Yes, watercolors.”
The directors were presented with two test paintings by art director Ric Sluiter – one was an actual watercolor background and the other was in gouache, which is what all the Disney animated movies were using. DeBlois and Sanders went with the watercolor. “[Ric] went back to Florida and said, ‘We have a problem. We have to figure this out.’ They began the process of figuring out and they did it. They figured it out. They found equivalents of the paper, the pigments, and I don’t think that kind of like adventurous spirit and open mind was present at Disney at the time in California. At Florida, it was,” Sanders said.
The distance between Burbank and Orlando also allowed for “Lilo & Stitch” to develop free of the kind of claustrophobic oversight that can drown any project with as much personality and as many idiosyncrasies as this. Sanders credits Schumacher for protecting the film in that way, with Sanders remembering him say, “All the strengths of this film lay in fragile places and it will never survive the corporate gauntlet. We’re going to hide it. We’re going to keep it from everybody across the street.” (“Across the street” meaning all the other divisions of Disney, like consumer products and marketing, along with the C-suite of executives who at the time were overseen by Michael Eisner. John Lasseter, who would take over animation after the company bought Pixar, was famous for being very good “across the street.”)
Sanders recalled that whenever anybody like Eisner would bring up “Lilo & Stitch,” Schumacher would wave them away, saying, “Oh it’s a thing we’re working on, it’s not quite ready yet.” Eisner finally saw the film at a test screening in Las Vegas, when it was almost fully finished. “Michael was standing talking to some people, and he was really very animated and enthusiastic. He called Dean and I over, and he said, ‘I love this film. I can’t explain it. It’s different, it’s weird, but I like it. It doesn’t really fall into any category that I could explain, but I like it. It’s strange, but I like it,’” Sanders remembered. “Every time he said, ‘I don’t get it, it’s weird,’ he would always then say, ‘But I like it.’ That was really confirming that, had he seen it in its more nascent form, it might have been pressured to become something else.”
The director compared it to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang – the car, not the movie. “It came rolling out of that shed, all done, with all of its quirks intact,” Sanders said. The quirky little movie became a phenomenon, making $273 million on an $80 million budget, generating robust merchandise sales, leading to several theme park attractions and inspiring a live-action remake that is one of Disney’s big movies for the summer of 2025.
Pretty good for a movie that nobody knew about.
“American Dog”
Following the success of “Lilo & Stitch,” Sanders began developing another original idea at Disney – “American Dog.” “The body of it was this road trip,” Sanders said. “This dog who does not know what the real world really is, because he was born and raised on a movie set, so his understanding of the world is that everything is easy, and he is amazing at everything, because he’s been so fooled by all this stuff. He thinks he can drive a car, he can do all these different things that he cannot do. When he’s accidentally released into the outside world, it’s devastating for him, and he’s extremely depressed and confused.”
At this point Schumacher had left and Eisner was not thrilled with the script. At one point in the story the dog, Henry, is responsible for destroying a large stockpile of money that some of the other characters had saved for their future. That’s when the other characters come up with an idea: take him back to the studio and ransom him to replace the money that Henry destroyed. “Eisner said it is completely unbelievable that a movie studio would spend a million dollars for just one shot in a film. And then he paused and said, ‘Well, we would do it, but other people wouldn’t believe it.”
The movie shared the same DNA as “Lilo & Stitch,” according to Sanders. The story reels were legendary; they were set to John Williams’ score to “1941,” with another big moment set to The Sylver’s 1975 single “Boogie Fever.” There was a radioactive rabbit and a cat with one eye that Disney actually allowed Sanders to leave the building with. The art style was inspired by American painter Edward Hopper.
One day, Sanders was called into an office with producer Clark Spencer and studio heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull. “I knew. I was like, I’m going to get taken off my own movie,” Sanders said. “And sure enough, I went to their office and they said, ‘Thank you very much for your time, and we’ll be changing leadership on this. Were going to go in a different direction.’ It had been difficult that entire time. Nothing on that film was easy. It wasn’t a huge surprise, but it was the hardest thing, career-wise, I have ever experienced. I just drove out to the desert for several days, not sitting on a cactus or anything, but I found a place to stay and just had to deal with it.”
Back in California, without Schumacher’s guardianship, “American Dog” couldn’t survive the corporate gauntlet. (It was eventually reconfigured as “Bolt.”)
“We had gotten to a place where I was supposed to be running Disney Theatrical and Disney Feature Animation and Disney TV Animation at the same time. And I felt like a giant failure doing all of them at the same time. And it was silly to be trying to that and living on airplanes,” Schumacher said. He said he doesn’t talk a lot about “American Dog.” “I understand what happened and I couldn’t fix that at some point. I’m not some hero but my respect and affection and admiration for what Chris has done, but also how his brain works, is boundless. I feel badly that his Disney time ended badly.”
Ironically, soon after, Sanders was pulled back into Catmull’s office. Catmull, who had co-founded Pixar and had also orchestrated an industry-wide wage-fixing conspiracy, wanted to talk about Sanders’ future. “I said, ‘Will I be able to direct again?’” Sanders said. “And he said, ‘What about art directing?’” Sanders told Catmull, just as he had told Don Hahn years earlier on “The Lion King,” that he wasn’t an art director. “That was the horrible moment that I realized I can’t be here. If I’m ever going to direct again, I have to leave,” Sanders said about Disney at that time.
And then he got a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had taken over animation when Eisner and Frank Wells had been installed at the studio in 1984 and, a decade later, after Wells’ tragic death, left Disney to form DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Katzenberg invited Sanders to DreamWorks Animation. Sanders started working on what would eventually become “The Croods,” noodling on an idea that had originally been developed for an Aardman stop-motion project. But a year into that project, Katzenberg came to Sanders and said, “We have a troubled film called ‘How to Train Your Dragon.’ We would like you to take it over.’”
At Disney, Sanders’ film had been taken away. Now, at DreamWorks, Sanders was taking over somebody else’s film. “I understood that they must be going through it. I really felt for them,” Sanders said. Still – Sanders knew what it would take to make “How to Train Your Dragon” soar.
“How to Train Your Dragon”
When Sanders arrived on “How to Train Your Dragon,” based on the book series by Cressida Cowell, he immediately called on his old partner Dean DeBlois to direct alongside him.
“We had very little time to shape that up. And I remember we had lunch with Jeffrey and he said, ‘As you know, we usually make these films three times. You only have time to make it once and you’ve got to get it right,’” Sanders said. This taught Sanders and DeBoils “something we’ve never really encountered before” – they would ignore the specifics of the story and just look at it structurally. “We became almost engineers – ignore the narrative, ignore all the fun stuff, let’s look at the engineering underneath it,” Sanders said. “We stripped the movie down to its framework and every couple of days we’d have a meeting with Jeffrey.” They came down to discover the biggest issue – either the movie was about Vikings who raised dragons and ride them or Vikings who are at war with the dragons. “That was the short circuit in the original book and in the original [version] of the movie,” Sanders said. They chose the latter version (obviously).
The other big issue was the main dragon, Toothless. “The original Toothless was too underpowered,” Sanders said. If the main character was going to befriend a dragon, “it has to be the most dangerous dragon,” not a tiny, three-foot dragon (which is in the final version of the movie – it bothers Hiccup when he’s trying to have lunch). This required a completely new design for the dragon; the only new character they got to design since they were so short on time and low on resources. “We suggested that we do a complete rethink and redesign the dragon and make him like a dragon that flies only at night. He’s like a stealth fighter. He’s more compact, like a Corvette. He’s like a little sports car,” Sanders said. “He’s extremely frightening to the Vikings, because they’ve never even seen one clearly, because, again, he’s dark and he flies only at night.”
“How to Train Your Dragon,” released in 2010, was another mammoth hit, grossing nearly $500 million at the worldwide box office. It led to two more movies, a Christmas special, several television series, and an entire theme park land that will open this summer at Universal’s Epic Universe park outside of Orlando. And, coincidentally, a live-action version will also debut this summer from Universal.
Still, Sanders carries a takeaway from the making of “How to Train Your Dragon.”
“I learned a lesson I’ve never forgotten, which is, it is good and okay to look at your story from an engineering standpoint before you get involved in the fun stuff and get distracted by that, because I think that was the problem with the first film,” Sanders said. “They stuck very close to the book, and there’s lots of fun stuff in the book, and they got really distracted by trying to make this stuff work, and were ignoring that there was a larger issue.”
“The Croods”
Since Sanders had exited “The Croods” to help fix “How to Train Your Dragon,” he returned to the project once his obligations were done. (DeBlois would direct the other two “Dragon” movies along with the live-action adaptation.) “I had already signed on to sail that ship, so I went back,” Sanders said.
The appeal of “The Croods” was the fact that the main characters were all cavemen. “It was fun to work on characters that had no social concerns about acting out. They were all id. If they were upset, they could be just massively upset, stuff that we can’t do. They could throw tantrums, and they could be very upset, and they could be frightened, and it was really fun,” Sanders said. It also allowed him to design a bunch of crazy primeval creatures.
After “The Croods,” Kirk DeMicco, Sanders’ directing partner on the first film, pitched “a really solid idea – if the first film was the world’s first family road trip, then the second film would be the world’s first neighbors.” The movie would open with the Croods running from all sorts of danger and mayhem. “They decide we need to find a safter place to live. They go house hunting in this cute little sequence and find this amazing spot on the beach with a billion dollar view of the ocean,” Sanders said. “They build a house quickly and then overnight, continental drift smashes another continent into theirs and ruins the view with a giant tree with another family.” The other family is way more advanced. The dad (voiced by Nicolas Cage) becomes “immediately threatened and he falls into a childish competition with the neighbors.”
The project would fall apart due to creative differences and Universal outright purchasing DreamWorks Animation. Still, a television series came after and a charming sequel (directed by Joel Crawford) was eventually released in 2020. Sanders and DeMicco received “story by” credit.
“The Call of the Wild”
After “The Croods 2” fell apart, Sanders was taking meetings. One of those meetings was with Erwin Stoff, the Hungarian-born producer and president of 3 Arts Entertainment. “He was thinking about doing a hybrid version of ‘Call of the Wild’ so that the dogs could actually be directed. We looked at some amazing tests that were, I thought, quite impressive as far as the look of it all,” Sanders said. He quickly signed onto make his live-action debut – an adaptation of Jack London’s immortal 1903 novel. As someone on the production told him, “You’ll be working with the Yankees.” And it’s true – the cast included Harrison Ford and Dan Stevens, it was produced by James Mangold and it was shot by Janusz Kamiński, one of the few non-Spielberg movies the cinematographer has lensed in the past 20 years.
“It was exciting and very, very intimidating. I never got used to every single day on set just feeling like, Can we make the day? Can we get everything we’re going to need to get? I had this dread that we would be driving away from a set and a bulldozer would be flattening it, and all of a sudden I would think, Oh, no, I forgot to get a shot,” Sanders said. “My producers immediately assured me that will not happen. We will not leave until we get every shot. And we did. We got every shot we needed.”
Still, Sanders was not prepared for the physical toll of directing a live-action feature. He remembers the producers telling him that they were going to get him a driver, which he at first thought was ridiculous. He can drive himself! But the producers assured him it was for his own safety. “And sure enough, in that car, I would fall asleep five seconds after I sat down and they would wake me up. I’d be home,” Sanders said.
Andrew Stanton, who directed “Finding Nemo,” said of making his live-action debut, “John Carter,” that he could just ask for a chicken on set instead of having to draw a chicken and model a chicken and get sign-off on the design of the chicken. Sanders was similarly wowed by making “The Call of the Wild.” “There were moments like if I said out loud, ‘I needed a mummy and a sarcophagus,’ within five hours, there would be a mummy and a sarcophagus and it would look like it had come from 1000 years ago. It was so beautifully done. They can accomplish anything.”
Sanders was similarly impressed by Kamiński and his department. “At one point we had a very tight, confined space, but we needed to do a crane shot, and Janusz said something to somebody else, and all of a sudden they built a stairway. There was a wooden stairway, and the Steadicam operator just walked down the stairway, and we had a crane shot, and that sort of thing had never occurred to me that you could do that.”
“The Call of the Wild” had the misfortune of opening right before the pandemic shut down theaters globally. Also, and just as impactfully, the company he had made “The Call of the Wild” for (20th Century Fox) had just been acquired by Disney, leading to a lot of releases from around that time falling through the cracks, Sanders’ film included.
But the movie did change in another way. Sanders told me that he wound up adopting the dog that they used as reference for Buck, which Sanders’ wife had found on Petfinder and perfectly fit the specifications of the dog in the original book. Buck now lives in Sanders’ house. Talk about wild.
“The Wild Robot”
There was about a year when Sanders was working on “The Call of the Wild” while, as he said, “the studio was deciding whether or not they wanted to make it.” In that year he wasn’t working on much. When the movie was finally out, he wanted to jump into something quickly.
Sanders dropped back into DreamWorks Animation, where he immediately zeroed in on Peter Brown’s book “The Wild Robot.” He had no idea that the studio had the rights for around four years. Sanders’ old partner DeBlois had even worked on a treatment. “He had identified it as of all the projects that were in development, the one he was most interested in. I did not know that and I, too, identified that same project. Dean’s sensibilities and my sensibilities continue to line up,” Sanders said. He read DeBlois’ treatment and the original book (which his daughter had already been a fan of).
In a “very short amount of time,” Sanders was working on “The Wild Robot.” It would be Sanders’ first time directing an animated movie by himself and the first time since “American Dog” developing a project from the ground up. (He said that he would love to do one more truly original project.)
And, crucially, Sanders said that he would not have been able to do “The Wild Robot” “had it not been for some of those disasters, some of those missteps.” He remembers getting caught up while working on the story for Disney’s “Mulan,” and even in those early days on “How to Train Your Dragon.” Don’t get too enamored with, as Sanders said, “the soft bits.” You’ve got to think about structure and character and work to that. He didn’t want to spend too much time on a movie; there were projects in the past that took six years. And he took advantage of where DreamWorks Animation was at the time that he was making “The Wild Robot.”
“I think ‘Wild Robot’ had the most fortunate timing of anything I’ve ever worked on, due to DreamWorks studio having developed that more painterly illustrated style, it was exactly where it needed to be for us to push it the next step and make wild robot look like it looked,” Sanders said. “I had a huge concern that if ‘Wild Robot’ looked more like a traditional CG film, because of the nature of the story, it would play way too young, and a huge part of our audience might not go see it.” Sanders wanted to keep “the sophistication level and altitude at a certain spot.” He and his collaborators looked at the work of Hayao Miyazaki and of “Bambi” painter Tyrus Wong.
Sanders said that he would have been happy if they got “halfway there.” “They got 100% of the look that we were hoping for, to the point where it almost frightened me the first time I saw it,” Sanders said. When he saw a painterly, impressionistic background move, he wondered, Have we gone too far? Is it going to be too abstract? But when he saw the painterly characters in place, “I saw it was the opposite. It was going to be something very unique.”
The experience on “American Dog” stayed with him, to the point that he was constantly worried he was going to be removed from “The Wild Robot.”
“With all the things I was trying to innovate with this film, I never thought I was going to make it to the end,” Sanders said.
Not only did he make it to the end, he’s got three Oscar nominations to show for it.
