The Wild Robot director wanted to go beyond CG animation’s capabilities

When Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon co-director Chris Sanders dropped into DreamWorks to see what movies they had on their development roster, he fell in love with The Wild Robot. Originally a series of middle-grade books by writer and illustrator Peter Brown, the story follows a robot named Roz who ends up in the wilderness and forms a deep bond with an orphaned gosling.

It was everything Sanders wanted: subtle, emotional, and character-driven.

“Sometimes when I see a property like this, I actually get a little bit anxious, because I feel like I know what to do,” he tells Polygon. “So I want to be the one that does it. I just feel like, I think I know exactly what to do. Please let me do it, because I know where to go. I have a good direction.”

Sanders, who also co-directed The Croods for DreamWorks, knew what he wanted this movie to be. And now that computer technology is finally capable of approaching the look of hand-drawn animation, he was able to push the movie to look the way he envisioned it. From the first trailers, which revealed a lush, gorgeous movie unlike any other, we were eager to know more. So ahead of the movie’s late-September release, Sanders sat down with Polygon to talk about using his 40 years of experience in the animation world to craft this deeply personal story.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: Is there a movie you previously worked on in your career that you feel prepared you most for The Wild Robot?

Chris Sanders: Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. Those are the most personal films I’ve ever worked on. How to Train Your Dragon was adapted from a book, but it prepared me for this particular film, because when we came on to How to Train Your Dragon, we were inheriting the film from a former director, and they didn’t like the direction that was going. They wanted to make a change. We had to strip the story down to its framework in order to figure out what the problem was. Picture a car coming into a shop, and it’s not running, and you wonder why, and you just take the whole thing apart, and you begin building it up from scratch.

So my experience working on the story for How to Train Your Dragon taught me that it’s OK to treat these things structurally for a while. Before you allow yourself to get into the more fun parts and the characters, it’s okay to back up and look at them structurally. So that’s something that I really took away from How to Train Your Dragon. It served me well in this particular narrative.

How closely did you work with Peter Brown for the movie?

Our very first phone call was to Peter Brown for the project. It was the most consequential phone call of the series. I have yet to meet Peter in person. Our timing on this was very difficult, because he was in the midst of moving, and then he had his first child, and he was also finishing up his third book, and he had a deadline for that. So he was never really able to come out and visit us. We were always doing things over Zoom.

But that very first phone call, he said something that was extremely significant. He told us that while he was writing the book, the theme that was going through his head was that kindness can be a survival skill, and we just immediately wrote that down. I knew that I wanted to memorialize that in script and screen, and that’s exactly what we did.

The Wild Robot grapples a lot with the stresses of parenthood. How do you strike a line between a story that will be accessible to children but still meaningful to adults?

Since I began my journey in animation, I learned that to make a good animated movie for everyone, you work to not exclude. You never quite target anyone, but you do the opposite. You make sure that you don’t do something that would, for some reason, keep someone else — anybody — from enjoying the film. And that doesn’t mean everybody has to understand everything. It’s okay to have stuff that goes over kids’ heads once in a while. I remember when I was a kid, in TV shows and movies, there were certain things, like, I have no idea what’s going on, but I still like this movie. So we work not to exclude.

One of the aspects of the story I really gravitated toward was that there is a strong theme of motherhood that runs throughout — it’s always been a bit of a gag in animation, that there are always missing mothers in these stories. And I’ve come to understand why that is. But in this case, it was core to the story.

So that means the whole thing was really fresh and really different. And I love things that are both challenging and also things I think I can do things with. I don’t mind that there are elements that are a bit of a puzzle, and that might be hard to figure out. Because when you have a good story crew and a good editor, you’ll figure these things out.

What was something that presented a bit of a puzzle?

There were a few, like exactly what Roz’s trajectory is through the film, particularly when she arrives on the island. In the book, she is driven to find a task, and she’s in the wrong place, and there are no people to give her a task, so she is frustrated. That tends to get very monotonous. So one of the things we were really trying to do is keep Roz interesting and compelling, and never let her get into a monotonous place where she’s simply going and asking everybody, “Do you have a job? Do you have a job?”

So finding her attitude as she went into the whole thing, but also weaving the theme of motherhood throughout the entire film. It’s a very powerful thing, and you don’t want to shy away from it, so you want to give it room to breathe. The timing of this movie was very critical as well. It means that I took some of the characters from the book and I trimmed them back so other characters would have more time to do what they need to do. But also that we’d have a movie that had the same pace in its finished form that I was feeling when I read the book.

You don’t want to be hurried. You don’t want a crowded movie. And you don’t want a movie that has too many characters or too much dialogue, where you’re just tripping over yourself like you’re running in front of a lawnmower or something. I’ve definitely seen movies that had that.

Did the voice cast for this film bring anything to their characters that ended up shaping the movie’s trajectory?

It’s one of the fun things about casting a character. You do your best to present a character that’s interesting and compelling. Once an actor says yes to a role, the first thing you do is, you go back through the entire set of dialogue and you rewrite.

Catherine [O’Hara] is a great example. She plays the ultimate mom in this movie — has three families a year at least. So Pinktail the [possum] could have been an overly sentimental character, very concerned about her precious children and this and that. But with Catherine on board, we took a whole different angle that was fresh, and, I thought, just so much fun. She’s over it. Her nurturing wore off many seasons ago. So she’s a very pragmatic mom. She loves her kids, she takes care of them, but there’s a moment where she’s not exactly sure what their names are, because she has too many every year, and so she’s a little bit behind on this and not super concerned. And I loved her take on that character.

Lupita [Nyong’o, who plays Roz] had the hardest task. We wanted the fresh and compelling take on a robot that is growing as a character, and we didn’t want it to be a two-dimensional thing, where a robot goes from being emotionless to having emotion. That’s just too simple. What Roz is going through is far more complex and more dimensional. And Lupita worked very, very hard, because I insisted that Roz have no facial articulation.

I have a lot of feelings about which kinds of robots work best on screen. Lupita knew that 100% of her performance was on her voice. We were going to leave these recording sessions just with her voice, so she had to weave every little piece of nuance and emotion into those recordings.

What we also were tracking was this change: Roz is the most prominent character through the film. She’s the lead. So she has more dialogue than any other character. The sheer scale of what Lupita had to accomplish, on top of the evolution of Roz, and literally finding a voice to begin and end with that were different.

As we went into recording sessions, we had to track that voice as we did different sequences, because we do these things out of order. Whatever sequence is ready to go, that goes into production. That might be a sequence in the third act, or it might be a sequence in the second act. So we’re jumping around and dropping into these sequences, and Lupita had to adjust her voice depending on where she was during the recording session.

I cannot say enough about how incredibly talented she was. But not just talented — she had an incredible work ethic. She sat at the microphone for four hours at a time. I’ve done stuff like that, and it is exhausting — it’s hard to stay focused and on point and fresh at the end of a session like that. She did such a brilliant job.

There’s a long history in movies of robots who develop feelings and relationships. Were there certain characters or movies you drew from for Roz’s design?

There are definitely robot characters that I find are more successful than others: C-3PO, R2-D2, the robot from Forbidden Planet. The only robot that I would say has facial articulation that actually works, in my opinion, is the Iron Giant. So those were the characters I was most looking at, not just because of the lack of facial articulation, but also just because they had such strong designs. That was a very welcome challenge for us, was to create a robot that would be iconic and memorable and would take its place — hopefully, in success‚ within a vast community of very, very memorable robots.

Our design team, namely one of our artists named Hyun Huh, who designed Roz… We were all trying out designs, myself included. But one day, when we came into our art meeting, Hyun presented his design, which is basically the design you see on screen. We all just fell in love with it and said, “You did it. It’s a unified design. It’s simple, it’s appealing.”

And Peter Brown, in his book, describes Roz both very clearly, but also very graphically. Which means a lot of the details were left out, because of his graphic style. We knew we had to have a humanoid robot, not just because of the design presented in a book, but also because Peter Brown told us in person during one of those phone calls what a Rozzum [robot] was: A Rozzum is a generalist. A Rozzum is made to fit into human spaces and work alongside humans, doing jobs with them and for them. So Roz looks human, but she’s also adaptable. She’s a learning robot. She’s a bit like Silly Putty. She can imprint on things and learn things, depending on where she is.

The visual look of this movie is so distinct and evocative. How did you develop it?

It’s one of the big stories of this film. DreamWorks had already made some giant strides in getting away from the CG look that we were so habituated to by design. We were shackled to that look because the technology had limitations. So with The Bad Guys and with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, they had moved into a more illustrated style, which was amazing. But for Wild Robot, we wanted to go well beyond that.

Our development artwork, it’s this loose, sketchy stuff that’s done in paint — digitally, but still painted. I love the look of it. It had the impressionistic vibe, and it was very much the way I was seeing the story as I read the book. So I asked [Wild Robot production designer] Raymond Zibach, could our finished film be indiscernible from those explorations? And he said, “Let’s go for it.”

One of the things they needed to do to achieve that look… We could no longer wrap geometry with textures, which is what we’ve been doing in CG from the very beginning. We need the hand-painted look everywhere. Not just in the sky, but on the ground and in the trees, in bushes and flowers and everything. So that’s what they did. They found a way to paint dimensionally. So there is no geometry in the film, except for the characters. And even the characters have painted surfaces.

[DreamWorks head of look] Baptiste Van Opstal worked very, very hard to get every single feather to be a brushstroke. And if you get close to Fink [the fox, voiced by Pedro Pascal] or Thorn the bear [voiced by Mark Hamill], they don’t have individual hairs, which is the thing we’re also used to [in CG animation], right? You get really close to a character, it’s like, Ah! Thousands of hairs! Computers want to do this sort of photoreal thing, but we wanted everything to be painted. So that’s the big story of this film, is what Raymond and his team were able to achieve.

I feel like this film has truly brought our journey full circle. I would say Bambi was the beginning. Bambi is our touchstone as far as the greatest-looking forest I’ve ever seen in an animated film. Next door to that would also be My Neighbor Totoro by [Hayao] Miyazaki. We have been struggling to get back to that analog warmth that you can only get from the human hand, and we finally did it with this film.

One of the things I’m so thrilled by is that people who look at it, even if they don’t know exactly why it looks different, they nonetheless see the difference and they react to it. It is extremely compelling, and it supercharges everything on screen. I’m really thrilled — I feel like we’ve finally come out of the tunnel we’ve been in for like 20 years, and now we’re open and free to maneuver visually like we used to be a long time ago.

What were some visual influences you drew from?

Certainly Bambi, [and that movie’s lead production illustrator] Tyrus Wong. In the futuristic parts, we looked at Syd Mead and his design sensibility, because everything is sleek and beautiful. We wanted the world that Roz ended up in to be the exact opposite of where she was supposed to be. We also took a lot of inspiration from wildlife photography and wildlife documentaries — the way that you use long lenses, because you’re obligated to stay far away from your subjects. So certain parts of the film have a vibe like you’d get from a nature documentary, because of computing it.

Over the past five years or so, we’re seeing more and more movies that push the envelope for what computer animation can do. You’ve been in the industry for decades — why do you think that’s happening now?

I think it all does come back to technology. That was the thing that anchored us right in one spot. We got more chain every year, but we were still anchored to that CG look. We were obligated to wrapping geometry, and we got better and better textures every year, etc., etc. But it still had this weird sort of photoreal vibe, even though movies like The Croods kept it as simple as possible, so it was still very appealing. But I do believe it was mostly technology-based. And I think that what happened was, there’s a tipping point we finally reached, where we can finally technologically move beyond where we were.

What recent animated movies have really stood out to you in that vein?

I think I would be surprised if anybody didn’t say Spider-Verse in answering that question. That film was such a wake-up call, and it put everybody on notice that things have changed. That was a sea change. The second one came out, and was equally as fantastic. But the first Spider-Verse, I think everybody was buzzing about that after they saw it. You couldn’t stop talking about the look of it, and the style and the feel of it. I’m so glad that it actually it had a great box office and it was recognized at awards season.

So I know I’m bringing up something you said almost 20 years ago, but there’s a quote from back in 2007, when you left Disney to go to DreamWorks, where you said you liked the way DreamWorks looked at animation. Do you remember what you meant by that?

I suspect what I was probably talking about was… It sounds like a negative, but it’s actually a positive. We don’t really have a house style [at DreamWorks], meaning they’re not obligated to a certain look where if they abandon that, they’ll be dinged for it. And I think this [movie] is a great example of that strength. We’re able to explore different looks for different films, depending on what’s going to be the most effective look for the film.

What was it like returning to DreamWorks for The Wild Robot? Did anything change? What stayed the same?

Studios always evolve. Artists come, artists go, and we all circulate between studios. I was at Disney for a while, for a long time, and then came to DreamWorks, and I may go someplace else someday! So it has evolved. But the thing about DreamWorks, I think, that has stayed consistent is an obligation to the audacity of the scale of the film.

That’s something [Disney veteran and DreamWorks co-founder] Jeffrey [Katzenberg] was always really good at. We as filmmakers tend to get closer and closer and closer to a project until, like, you’ve got this monocle on, and you’re a watchmaker looking at these little tiny parts. And Jeffrey had this great way of just sort of figuratively grabbing you by the collar and pulling you back and making you look at the film as a whole. Are you doing the big, giant things that you expect from a film? He always was great in focusing on the scale and the level of audacity in these movies.

What was something you worked on early in your career that really shaped the way you looked at animation and filmmaking going forward?

There’s quite a few, quite a few things… I should keep a list of these things! Every film, you learn something. How to Train Your Dragon. Beauty and the Beast. The Croods. Mulan. You learn something from each one of them.

One of the most important things I learned from Lilo & Stitch from [composer] Alan Silvestri was that music is one of the most effective storytelling tools you have in your arsenal. I have come to really, really rely on that. In How to Train Your Dragon, a great example would be a sequence we call “the forbidden friendship.” That was when Hiccup found himself alone in that cove with Toothless. We just turned the dialogue off, and music becomes the voice of the movie. It’s one of the most enchanting things you can do, is have characters talking once in a while. It really makes people pay attention.

We do that a lot in The Wild Robot. One of the things I’m really, really proud of in this particular film is the pace we were able to achieve. We had about 50% of the dialogue that these films normally have, so we have a lot more wide-open spaces. Nonetheless, I still designed what I would call “houses for music” within the movie. We just drop dialogue and let music take over. So there’s quite a few places where Kris Bowers, our amazing, amazing composer, was carrying the narrative for us.

Where do you most want to see animation go in the future?

I’d love to see it go in all sorts of directions. We finally escaped the gravitational pull of planet CG, and I feel like we’re all free to maneuver. So just myself, personally, I cannot wait to explore different styles, depending on the type of story that we’re telling. Animation is more alive and well than ever before. One of the things I’m getting such a kick out of is seeing how animated films are really doing well this year in the theaters. [Ed. note: As of publication time, Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, and Kung Fu Panda 4 were all top 10 biggest box-office earners for 2024.] They’re some of the best films this year, flat-out, right?

I love seeing animated films get their due as far as just good audience participation. I think that tackling more serious subject matter… You can tell a story for any audience, any age group, as long as you’re aware of what age group you’re speaking to. You can capitalize things. So The Wild Robot actually tackles some pretty grown-up stuff and some pretty heavy themes, but we do it in a way that is understandable and digestible to anyone. So I think [American animation is] just broadening the spectrum of the types of stories that we tell.

The Wild Robot hits theaters on Sept. 27.