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At a time when the subject of AI is on everyone’s minds, it’s not unusual that DreamWorks Animation’s upcoming fall movie The Wild Robot seems to be one of the most-talked about titles of the year. The beautiful adaptation of the popular book series by Peter Brown generated a lot of buzz as soon as the first-look trailer was released in early March, and it’s likely to become one of the big contenders of this year’s award season.
The Wild Robot is written and directed by Chris Sanders (How to Train Your Dragon, Lilo & Stitch) and features Lupita Nyong’o as the voice of the lead robot ROZZUM unit 7134, a.k.a. Roz, who is shipwrecked on a deserted island and has to adapt to its new surroundings. She even forms friendships with the animals living on the island and adopts an orphaned gosling. The all-star cast includes Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy, Kit Connor, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames.
In an exclusive interview with Animation Magazine, Sanders recalls connecting with the book’s innocence and earnestness immediately. “Peter Brown’s book was at once deceptively simple, and emotionally complex,” he mentions. “I like stories and characters unafraid to feel, and to risk greatly. As I made my way through the pages, I felt more and more that I was the right person to bring this to the screen. I saw it all. Protecting the character and spirit of a story while finding a way to translate it to film is a delicate thing, and something you only get one chance to get right. I felt confident I could do just that.”
Pure Emotions
He also praises the movie’s emotion and powerful story. “I only engage with projects that take risks, and go to audacious places,” Sanders admits. “But with The Wild Robot, there was also an unusual purity to the world which I never expected to encounter in my career. The animal characters have no cars, jobs, neckties or cell phones. The animals move like … animals! I knew immediately we had to elevate our visuals so they would allow the emotional wavelengths to fully resonate.”
“Put simply, the style of this film needed to be worthy of the story we were telling,” Sanders points out. “Wild Robot is set in the natural world, and the business-us-usual photorealistic CG look we’ve become habituated to would look tired and cheap. We needed grace, power, and poetry in our visuals. I proposed a question: can the painterly studies we generate in early stylistic exploration be identical to the end goal? Can our visual departure point also be our destination? Can this film look like a painting? The answer from our artists and engineers was a resounding, ‘Yes!’ DreamWorks built on the advances seen in The Bad Guys and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, pushed the boundaries from there, and created something never seen before. Several times now, in central dailies, I’ve been looking at what I thought was a piece of development exploration, and someone pushed the play button … and it started moving: it was a finished shot from the film!”
Universal Pictures will release DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot in theaters on September 27.
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