When director Chris Sanders decided to take on The Wild Robot, the script had been at DreamWorks Animation for a few years. In what he deems to be a stroke of luck, Sanders came in at the perfect time when the studio had been developing tools to create an animation style that strays from the traditional CG. “DreamWorks made some incredible advances in getting a more illustrated style up on the screen,” he says. “We leveraged off of that to see how much further we could push that look.”
The Wild Robot follows Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot stranded on an uninhabited island who soon finds herself responsible for taking care of Brightbill (Kit Conner), a baby goose. Although the idea was to create a more impressionistic and hand-painted style for the animation, Sanders discovered that the animals ended up looking more believable than those rendered in photorealistic CG.
DreamWorks Animation/Universal Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
DEADLINE: One thing that really stood out to me when I saw the film was equating natural instinct with programming. Where did the idea for that come from?
CHRIS SANDERS: Unpacking the way that Roz thinks was one of the main jobs when it came to Lupita. When she joined, she took the lead on trying to decipher the intricacies and the nuances of the way that Roz thinks, and it was amazing for me to watch Lupita deciphering a character that she was going to be voicing. I don’t think we even recorded anything beforehand, we just sat and talked about the scenes and the overall arc of Roz and her journey.
One of the things that Lupita created was that voice that you hear in the final film. That’s not something that we did electronically. Lupita really created that, what we would call “engineered optimism” that was in her voice when she first starts out on the island, and then that all changes gradually as Roz spends more time and begins to evolve.
DEADLINE: Engineered optimism is a pretty great term for that.
SANDERS: Lupita likens it to a Siri or an Alexa, that enthusiasm that they have for all things.
DEADLINE: The animation style is absolutely incredible. Did you always know that you wanted it to be hand-painted?
SANDERS: I wanted this very sophisticated look, and I wasn’t exactly sure what we would do to achieve it. We were looking for something that was more painterly and softer. I think our inspiration was largely Tyrus Wong’s look of Bambi and those beautiful, oily washes that created that soft, gentle look. It was so poetic. So, we pointed to him in particular as our goal visually, and they absolutely achieved it. I was actually surprised as they were creeping towards this, they would show me different tests and different stations as they advance towards this final look, but I didn’t realize how fully they’d realized it until I was in a meeting called color dailies. In this meeting, you look at conceptual sketches for sequences that are upcoming and final designs and color and all sorts of things, and I was looking at what I thought was another color sketch for an upcoming sequence. When that image started to move, I realized how completely they achieved the look.
Concept art of Fink the Fox (Pedro Pascal) in ‘The Wild Robot’
DreamWorks
DEADLINE: I’ve talked with the production designer, Raymond Zibach, about the animation before too because I just love that concept art look. It’s breathtaking to see something that looks like concept art animated.
SANDERS: It really is amazing. One of the things that really surprised me in getting away from that photorealism that we were locked into for such a long time, and getting into this painterly, more impressionistic look that extended from the backgrounds to the characters themselves, was the overall effect was more believable. Not realistic per se, but believable, and that was what really surprised me about this. A good example would be when a CG character had a lot of fur, you would see every single solitary hair, which was incredible. It always blew my mind that our computers could handle that kind of detail, but a real animal in the real world doesn’t look like it came out of a salon. It doesn’t look like it just got a blow out, and it’s all clean and perfect. They have matted fur that gathers into groupings, so those brush strokes that were applied to our fox, Fink, is a good example of how the believability factor just shot forward on this because his fur in motion looks more realistic in a lot of ways, which was not something we were going for. Not photorealistic, but more believable.