‘The Wild Robot’ Composer Kris Bowers & Songwriter Maren Morris

It’s not difficult to find a connection with Roz, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, in The Wild Robot, especially for songwriter Maren Morris, who had a young child when she began writing the original song “Kiss the Sky” for the film. The song resonated so well with the story that composer Kris Bowers says “Kiss the Sky” had a major influence on his score, even past the scene it was written for.

The Wild Robot follows Roz, a robot stranded on an uninhabited island and soon finds herself responsible for taking care of Brightbill (Kit Conner), a baby goose. As she pushes past her programming and embraces the wild, Bowers incorporated more natural sounds in the score to highlight her growth.

Both Bowers and Morris received Golden Globes nominations for their work on The Wild Robot.

DEADLINE: Tell me about writing “Kiss the Sky”, what was your inspiration?

MAREN MORRIS: I had a 2-year-old at the time, he’s now four and a half, but I was coming from that deep connection to Roz’s point of view, of being thrust into this motherly role and not knowing what she’s doing or what she’s capable of yet, but also that bitter-sweetness of knowing that you’re not in control. They’re their own entity and they’re going have their own hopes and dreams and methods of going about it. You have to relinquish the reins a little bit, and so that was kind of the inspiration of “Kiss the Sky”. I can give you all of these influences and tools to make the right decisions but ultimately, you’re going to have to jump off that cliff alone. We all have to.

DEADLINE: Kris, let’s talk about that scene. How did you incorporate “Kiss the Sky” into your score?

KRIS BOWERS: I always have to give credit to Mary Blee, the picture editor, for coming up with the idea. She had basically cut together this long sequence that was the entire flight training montage, and the middle of it had that conversation between Roz and Longneck (Billy Nighy). She wanted “Kiss the Sky” to play through the whole sequence, but we didn’t have enough material. It felt very clear what was needed musically so I asked if they would be able to reach out to Maren and the songwriters to share the stems with me, which they were really gracious enough to do, and I took those stems and built out the sequence and added a little interstitial section and came back with the key change and reharmonization at the very end. But all of it was just following the emotion that was just clearly built out in what Mary did and trying my best to have the score just lift the emotion of the song in the context of the film a little bit more, and also have moments where the orchestra is quoting themes from the score as well.

DEADLINE: Maren, what was it like seeing your song animated for the first time?

MORRIS: Deeply emotional. It was at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), that was my first time being able to see the full film finished at the premiere, and I did not realize that the song in that sequence had been lengthened to six and a half minutes. Originally. It was just going to be a three- or four-minute scene and it was extended in such a beautiful way with the dialogue and Kris’s score threaded throughout. It was just such a treat to be able to watch it with all of these strangers and the cast and crew and just be really bowled over by the moment. I mean, I was shattered. I was in tears.

DEADLINE: Speaking of quoting the score Kris, tell me about your process for this one. How did you musically capture that idea of a robot living in the wilderness?

BOWERS: There were basically two sides, the organic and the synthetic, thinking about Roz being the synthetic and being in this very natural environment. I first thought about nature because it’s the predominant energy in that balance of the two. I wanted to find a way to represent that in an unorthodox way, but also in a way that still honored the high level of musicality that I wanted the orchestra to have, just because of how much they were going back to traditional animation in the way that this looked. I also wanted to go back to that era of composition where the orchestra was very, very dynamic and then I ended up finding this modern classical percussion ensemble called Sandbox Percussion, and they play percussion much more like Foley artists in terms of what they use as instruments.

I remember going to their studio in New York, and it looks like a warehouse where it’s just a bunch of pipes and springs and slats of wood, and all kinds of random things that they build these percussion sets out of, and I thought that’d be a fun way to mirror a lot of the diegetic sounds in nature. And then for Roz, it was creating a suite of synth sounds that were inspired by how technology sounds in our life. Every piece of technology we have has a certain aesthetic to it in terms of the beeps and boops and ticking… so borrowing from some of those things, we created the sound of her synth world.

DEADLINE: I know the visual style of Roz changed throughout the film as she became wilder, going from CG to hand painted, was that mirrored in the score?

BOWERS: Yeah, it definitely changes. One way is going more from synthetic to organic, and in the beginning it’s much more cerebral in terms of the way that the writing functions under her processing of the island. A lot of that music has more arpeggios and all these things that feel like processing and a lot of activity in that way. Even her theme has this kind of otherworldly, harmonic approach to it because in a lot of ways she’s like an alien to this space. And then as it progresses, her main theme changes both in harmony, because it has a bit more warmth to it and doesn’t have the same otherworldly sound to it as frequently, and instrumentation wise, because they’re more organic instruments. 

One of the biggest things I did was using the choir very sparingly, only used in moments where Roz is developing beyond her programming. The first time we hear the choir is the moment where she and Brightbill touch heads and all her body lights up. Chris and I talked about wanting to have this ethereal moment with that and something that links to this idea that there’s something intangible happening to her whenever she’s close to Brightbill. As the film progresses, and she develops as a character and becomes more and more lifelike, those are moments where the choir becomes more present.