“The Wild Robot” director Chris Sanders was feeling a little lost himself.
In 2020, he ventured into live-action filmmaking with “The Call of the Wild,” an ambitious, imperfect adaptation of Jack London’s 1903 novel. Sanders got to work with Janusz Kaminski, Steven Spielberg’s regular cinematographer, and it allowed him to direct Harrison Ford as a grizzled frontiersman. But the film opened a few weeks before the pandemic shut down movie theaters.
For the first time in his career, Sanders had delivered a disappointment.
Then DreamWorks Animation, the studio where the filmmaker had made “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Croods,” wooed him back. He looked at the projects the studio had in development or owned the rights to and quickly zeroed in on “The Wild Robot,” a book by American author and illustrator Peter Brown about a high-tech machine that washes up on an island inhabited by animals.
Sanders took it home and read it. He was drawn to its themes of motherhood — a rarity in animation, a medium largely defined by the absence or tragic death of mother figures — and the possibility of pushing the project’s artistry. He decided it would be his next project.
But Sanders was still a little gun shy. His last project at DreamWorks, a sequel to “The Croods,” was unceremoniously scrapped when Universal purchased the independent animation studio. (It was eventually revived with another filmmaker, Joel Crawford, and released in 2020.) And Sanders’ passion project for Disney, the road movie “American Dog,” was taken away from him after Pixar head John Lasseter was installed at the head of Walt Disney Animation Studios. (It was eventually released as “Bolt” in 2008.)
“I was superstitious enough that I never moved into my office, really,” Sanders told TheWrap. “If you walk into my office, it pretty much looks like nobody’s really there. I could literally pack my office up probably in 15 minutes. I don’t want to say I was unconfident, but I wasn’t going to take anything for granted.”
Sanders remembers having a conversation with Margie Cohn, president of DreamWorks Animation. “Are you cool making this particular story? Because it’s got a different tone and it’s going to have a different feel,” Sanders asked. “That’s why we chose this book,” Cohn responded. “And they stuck with it,” Sanders said. “They were incredibly supportive the entire time.”
On Friday, “The Wild Robot” hits theaters worldwide, with high hopes for Sanders and DreamWorks parent Universal, which pushed the director to go with his gut on the film.
Reviews have been good to rapturous. “‘The Wild Robot’ is a miracle of a motion picture, a big budget animated studio film that’s distinct and personal. Beautifully animated, lovingly told, thrilling and unexpected,” wrote TheWrap’s William Bibbiani.
Part of what makes “The Wild Robot” so exciting is that it is pure, unfiltered Chris Sanders, from top to bottom. In it, a robot, ROZZUM 7134 or Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) washes ashore on a deserted island. She is desperate to find a task, so she takes to mothering a young gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor) and strikes up a friendship with a number of the island’s animals, including a fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal) and an opossum named Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara). As one of the other characters puts it, Roz feels like kindness is a survival skill. And she teaches the other animals how to coexist, for the benefit of the island.
And just as Sanders had attempted with watercolor backgrounds on “Lilo & Stitch,” the proposed painterly aspects of “American Dog” (inspired by American artist Edward Hopper) and the naturalism of “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Croods,” he attempted to craft a look and feel that is unique and special to “The Wild Robot.” It’s a tale of technology that feels lovingly handmade.
Sanders was also adamant that the story not follow the typical “robot becomes more human” narrative that so many stories about artificial intelligence do. “That is a well-worn path that would be easy to fall into,” Sanders said. “I’ve seen that with characters before. [Roz] is very subtle in how she develops and she never falls into that very simplistic, you know, I now have emotions kind of place.”
In the end, he wrote two very different endings for the movie — one that was truer to the book and another that “would be considered maybe a more safe or familiar ending.” DreamWorks pushed him to choose “the more challenging way to go,” which he said was true throughout the process.
Talk about wild.
A history of Sanders
Sanders graduated from California Institute of the Arts in 1984 and joined the Walt Disney Company in the late 1980s. It was a time of reinvention for the company’s animation unit, with the old guard finally making way for a new generation of young talent. He worked as a story artist on “The Rescuers Down Under,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin” and “The Lion King.”
He was one of the few artists from the period whose style was so distinct that others could tell which storyboards were his without even looking at the credits. Sanders was promoted to head of story on “Mulan,” working out of the Walt Disney Feature Animation satellite studio in what was then known as the Disney-MGM Studios outside of Orlando, Florida.
Towards the end of production on “Mulan,” he was approached about making his own film. He thought about a children’s book idea he had considered and then abandoned about a strange creature alone in the woods. It was suggested by Disney executive Thomas Schumacher that he instead make the creature interact with the human world. This was the beginning of “Lilo & Stitch.” (And, yes, the original version of the story does sound similar to “The Wild Robot.”)
Working with director Dean DeBlois, Sanders took advantage of the movie’s smaller budget and the fact that it was produced entirely at the Florida studio, far from prying studio executives’ eyes. He brought back watercolor backgrounds, last used at Disney in the early 1940’s, and insisted on using Elvis songs for the soundtrack instead of brassy Broadway-style musical numbers, as was the style at the time. The resulting film looks and feels unlike any Disney animated feature before or since.
After the disappointment of “American Dog,” Sanders left Disney and went to DreamWorks, where he oversaw a pair of projects that had been orphaned. On “How to Train Your Dragon,” based on the book series by Cressida Cowell, Sanders re-teamed with DeBlois and worked with cinematographer Roger Deakins to give the movie an earthy, candlelit aesthetic. “The Croods,” which began life as a stop-motion project with Aardman and John Cleese, was actually Sanders’ first project at DreamWorks before he got pulled into “How to Train Your Dragon.”
He re-teamed with Deakins, this time working with director Kirk DeMicco along with stars like Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone and Ryan Reynolds. With both “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Croods,” he helped kick off long-running franchises that included sequels, television series and live stage shows. A live-action iteration of “How to Train Your Dragon,” directed by DeBlois, arrives in theaters next year, around the time a new theme park land opens at Universal’s new Epic Universe resort.
Achieving the look
For the striking animation style of “The Wild Robot,” Sanders drew from three key inspirations.
For the sequences on the island, he was heavily influenced by the work of Studio Ghibli and the paintings of Tyrus Wong, whose background paintings for “Bambi” were key touchstones (internally, “The Wild Robot” was often described as “‘Bambi’ meets ‘WALL•E’”). For the sections set in a futuristic city, the team drew on the work of futurist Syd Mead, whose illustrations inspired “Tron,” “Blade Runner” and “Aliens.”
And for a dream sequence early in the film, the filmmakers relied on the original illustrations from “The Wild Robot” book. “Fink tells a story, yes, and we go into another style, because this is what Brightbill is seeing in his head,” Sanders said. “And it is very much a quote from Peter Brown’s book.” When Brown finally saw the sequence, “he very much approved.”
As to how they were going to accomplish this painterly, impressionistic look, he left it to his crew. Sanders said he was inspired by a piece of preproduction artwork. “I identified it as, Can the film possibly look like this? Could it be this impressionistic? And Raymond Zibach said, ‘We’ll go for it,’” Sanders explained.
Later, he looked at a similar sketch that Sanders thought was another exploration. But somebody in the room clicked a button and it started to move. “I realized that’s the film,” Sanders said. But as the buzz died off, he started to worry. He thought, Have we gone too far? “It was so different looking. But then as soon as the characters were replaced, and they were likewise hand-painted, and we saw our first shots complete, I thought, No, this is different. Something is happening,” Sanders said. “And I got really excited about what this film is going to look like when it’s finished.”
As work progressed, Sanders was constantly taken aback. With the movie set in what could be described as a gentle post-apocalypse, he remembers seeing a shot of a whale swimming over the Golden Gate bridge. “I was absolutely stunned,” Sanders said.
The animators were so committed that sometimes he would go into meetings, begin to describe a scene, only for the animator to interrupt him and say, “Actually, it’s already animated.” “They literally broke into the database and pulled the scene out before it was approved and just animated it. And they would always say, ‘And if I got it wrong, I get it, I’ll redo it.’ That’s how excited people were to get this film done,” Sanders said.
That kind of passion certainly helped get the movie done quicker. It was produced in just three years, a mind-boggling pace considering that the production also weathered a lengthy actors’ strike last year. “For us, this was the film of a lifetime. This may never happen again, but everybody devoted themselves to this film,” Sanders said. “The act of making this was singular.”
Still, technically and logistically, the challenges mounted — there were crowd shots with dozens of animals, two incredibly complicated single shots (“oners”) and even time lapse photography, meant to show the progression of seasons on the island. Even a shot of Fink, digging into his nest for the winter, was tricky.
“I hope I didn’t drive everybody crazy on that, but we did that a few times,” Sanders said. “I was like, ‘No, it’s not deep enough.’ I wanted it to feel cozy, but I also wanted it to feel like he was really isolated and lonely. By the time we got to the bottom of that, we worked really hard on that shot.”
That shot was “one of the few that I had a very specific something in my head and kept after it until I felt we’d gotten it,” Sanders said. He is adamant that the greatest advantage of computer animation is its ability to mimic a camera. “I will always contend that that was the most valuable thing that CG brought along, the ability to move a camera like that.”
Sanders lauded Nyong’o’s contributions, as well. “We knew what Roz’s journey was, but the subtlety of her cannot be overstated,” he said. “And Lupita took the lead in finding the character. I would describe it as sculptural. It was a three-dimensional thing that we were working on. Lupita put in a huge amount of work before every recording session. We just sat and talked. We would talk for over an hour sometimes before we ever did anything with the microphone. She really led the way in finding, literally, the voice, but also just the character of Roz.”
Sanders came away from the recording sessions rewriting the scene based on the things that he and Nyong’o talked about. He brought her the modified pages and she reacted to those as well. Together, they were rewriting Roz’s programming.
And …
When TheWrap recently asked Sanders how he felt now that “The Wild Robot” was going to be delivered to the world, he said, “I feel really fortunate. I’m really fortunate that we had everyone that we had together on this journey.”
It seems likely that the cast and crew had such a good time on “The Wild Robot,” that they would want to maintain that unit. Especially since there are two more books in Browne’s trilogy. He said the second movie is still in its infancy. “I have absolutely not started,” Sanders said, while also nodding his head.
Sounds like “The Wild Robot” is not done yet.
