🎧 'The Wild Robot' Director on the Hit's Handmade Wonder
Chris Sanders explains the personal artistry that makes his animated film so immersive
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Chris Sanders calls The Wild Robot the most handmade CGI animated film in decades — and he means that very literally. Through a combination of new technology and Sanders’ commitment to making the world of The Wild Robot feel as immersive as possible, “every single bit of this movie has a brush stroke that was rendered by a human hand,” says Sanders, the writer and director of The Wild Robot, on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast.
The exception, in the beginning at least, is Roz herself. The robot voiced by Lupita Nyong’o arrives as a foreign object on the island, and at first, Sanders explains, “She was deliberately left as a traditional CG element. So her surface is white. Perfect.”
As the film goes on, though, Roz changes a lot, both in her physical depiction and in Nyong’o’s phenomenal voice performance, created in collaboration with Sanders, an experienced voice actor himself. “We would sit for upwards of an hour before we even recorded anything, just talking about Roz. How does she work? Let’s talk about the arc that she takes through the film, because we didn’t lay her down right away, exactly as she is in the film,” Sanders says. “It took several iterations to really find Roz in these different phases that she goes through throughout the film.”
In our conversation, Sanders also explains many of the other elements that give The Wild Robot its magic, from the technology developed at DreamWorks Animation in such films as Puss in Boots: The Last Wish that made The Wild Robot possible to the storytelling choices they made in adapting Peter Brown’s book.
The episode also includes a dispatch from the New York Film Festival from freelance film critic Jordan Hoffman, who’s got the latest on the buzz for Nickel Boys, a spotlight on the documentaries your cinephile friends will be talking about for months — and even a bit of party-crasher gossip.