Lupita Nyong’o on Animated Film

Animated movies, by and large, haven’t been great to moms. In classic Disney films, mothers are usually dead by the time the story starts (The Little Mermaid) or killed as a major plot point (Bambi) or forcibly, devastatingly separated from their children (Dumbo, Sleeping Beauty, etc.). And let’s not even get started on the stepmoms.

“I learned way back on Aladdin why there aren’t moms in these films,” says Chris Sanders, the animation veteran who has directed such features as Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. “When I first started working on Aladdin, there was a mom in the story, and almost immediately, she was causing problems. Your protagonist has to be able to make mistakes. And moms are there to keep you from making mistakes. She very quickly disappeared from the story, and suddenly the movie began to work.”

But with The Wild Robot, Sanders and his filmmaking team created an animated feature centered specifically on motherhood, one that has left adult audience members openly crying in reviews on social media.

The Wild Robot is based on the Peter Brown children’s book of the same name and follows a helper robot named Roz who crash lands on an island populated only by wildlife. Roz develops a bond with a young gosling, Brightbill, taking charge of his development and, with some help from the locals, teaching him to fly so he can migrate south for the winter. 

DreamWorks acquired the story before the book came out in 2016. Then it sat in development until Sanders, who worked with the studio on Dragon and The Croods, stopped by the Glendale headquarters looking for his next project. 

“I love the built-in emotional cliff,” says Sanders of Brightbill’s migration. “I liked that aspect of it, that Roz would be so focused on raising this gosling that she wouldn’t really see this emotional cliff that she was heading toward.”

Brown’s story gently broaches otherwise difficult subjects for kids, including themes surrounding growing up, climate change, technology and, yes, death. “I do a lot of school visits and library visits and book festivals, and I get such a great reaction from kids when I just treat them like they’re my friends,” says the author. 

Like Brown, the Wild Robot film team was adamant that their film would not talk down to the kids. Luckily, DreamWorks is not a stranger to incorporating difficult subject matter in children’s entertainment. The animation studio earned praise for 2023’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, which tackled the complex subject of anxiety, with a scene involving the titular feline experiencing a realistic panic attack. 

And with its rugged natural setting, placed somewhere vaguely in the Pacific Northwest, The Wild Robot does not shy from the circle-of-life sequences in which the island’s furry inhabitants are at odds with (and sometimes ingest) one another. “If there isn’t real consequence to the world, the whole movie won’t work. It has to be a life-and-death kind of place,” says Sanders. “The only thing that surprised me is we actually got away with the decapitated raven’s head. Never got a note on that one.”

The look of the movie needed to match the complexity of its themes. Sanders felt that the computer-generated style that has dominated much of animation for the past two decades (think: rounded edges and exaggerated features) would lean too young. Animated features like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Puss in Boots broke away from those aesthetics, each venturing into new territory in their own ways.

The Wild Robot filmmakers found their look when going over early concept art that had the island’s natural environment and its animals — foxes, bears, beavers, opossums and others — drawn in a painterly way. The images were abstract, with brushstrokes plainly visible. Production designer Raymond Zibach thought, “ ‘We’ll never be able to go that loose.’ And Chris was like, ‘Well, why can’t it be?’ ” 

The team looked to illustrator Tyrus Wong’s work on Bambi, artwork made by watercolors and pastels, and the whimsical forests of Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro for inspiration. The sweeping vista, mountains, meadows and oceans in The Wild Robot look like they could share a museum wall with Edgar Alwin Payne. For his part, Zibach drew inspiration for the film’s setting from his own childhood hiking the trails of Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and watching the Planet of the Apes TV show film in Bronson Canyon.

But the tech used for modern animation is not particularly conducive to the inherent disorder of nature. “CG wants to be so perfect. It does photorealism so well,” explains Zibach. “We’re fighting this technology constantly, trying to make it more artistic.” So how do you build an impressionistic version of the wilderness using systems developed to mirror the natural world in exactitude? 

“You would never make a realistic bush with all of this crazy hierarchy of branches and thousands of leaves, and then filter it to make it look painterly. It would look like an Instagram filter. It doesn’t look like somebody painted it,” says VFX supervisor Jeff Budsberg. Instead, the VFX team came up with tools so that modelers could build painterly natural environments in 3D, along with the animals’ fur coats. He says, “They’re using strokes and splatters like an illustrator.” 

At the beginning of the film, Roz’s hard lines and chrome stand out against the natural landscape, but her silhouette changes as the movie moves along. She loses a leg that is replaced by a stump, and moss grows on her sleek surface. 

“One of our dramatic arguments of this movie is kindness is a survival skill,” says head of story Heidi Jo Gilbert. As Roz makes an impact on the island, the island makes an impact on her. To really drive this point home, the filmmakers gave her a more painterly look over time to match her new family of creatures. Says Budsberg, “We make her looser and looser over the course of the film and, if we were doing our job right, you didn’t pay attention to any of that.” 

With the look of the movie unlocked, the filmmakers went searching for the voice of their robot. Since Roz has no mouth or facial expressions, the vocal performance carries a heavier burden than the average animated character. 

Lupita Nyong’o, who was immediately taken by Brown’s homage to parenting, first looked to the most ubiquitous examples of robotic voices: Siri and Alexa. “Their sense of relentless optimism became like the jumping-off point for my interpretation,” says Nyong’o. Throughout the film, Roz’s voice changes as she gains a greater understanding of the natural world and experiences more emotion. But for much of the first act, Roz’s voice exists in a higher register, which proved to be difficult to maintain for Nyong’o, whose voice sits much lower.

“I got injured because we did it one too many times over a number of days,” remembers the Oscar winner. “I developed vocal polyps, and I had to be on vocal rest for three months, and I was approaching surgery, but the vocal rest healed me.” When she was able to get back into the recording booth, Nyong’o and Sanders created a map for the different versions of Roz’s voice based on where the character was in her journey. She says it was about “calibrating my vocal performance as I went along.” By the end of the film, Roz’s final voice is Nyong’o’s own speaking voice, emerging after Roz experiences the extreme love and loss of parenting.

Filmmakers found their wily fox with a heart of gold, Fink, in Pedro Pascal, but not the Pascal with whom audiences are familiar. The actor is known for roles in The Mandalorian and Game of Thrones where he is using an accent, but the Wild Robot team wanted him to use his normal speaking voice, collecting clips from late night talk shows to present to the studio. Says producer Jeff Hermann, “He was so used to putting on a voice in anything he had done, and he expected that’s what we hired him for, but it was just the opposite.” Other island inhabitants are voiced by Catherine O’Hara, Bill Nighy and Mark Hamill.

Casting Brightbill proved to be the most difficult, with the character so dependent on the vocal performance. The young character “could come across like teenage angst and a little angry,” says Hermann. “If we, the audience, don’t like Brightbill, we’re not going to believe Roz loves him.” During the search, Hermann saw Kit Connor on the Netflix series Heartstopper and was particularly taken by the scene where he comes out to his mom, played by Olivia Colman. Says Hermann, “He has this energy, but also a vulnerability.” 

In the same way that The Wild Robot pulled from animation history to find the unique look of the film, composer Kris Bowers took cues from how those classic animated films were scored. The composers of the old Disney animation would write to picture, meaning that the music would directly and orchestrally respond to the visuals onscreen. Explains Bowers, “A lot of music for animation back in the day, every two seconds is completely different. It has all this movement to it, it’s not as predictable.” In contrast, many live-action contemporary feature scores are composed as loop-based, meaning there are four or five musical phrases that repeat, which allows the filmmakers to edit the image up until the last minutes without the composition falling out of sync for the action. 

Says Bowers, “It’s like, if you wrote a sentence, and then they asked you to make that sentence 12 words longer.” It gets the same message across, but composers are filling space with those modern scores.

The Wild Robot is a film about the discovery of new emotion, so Bowers, who had his first child months before joining the production, focused on melody, pulling inspiration from John Williams scores like Jurassic Park. Bowers also mimicked the film’s convergence of technology and nature, tapping the musical quartet Sandbox Percussion, whose members play organic (pieces of wood) and inorganic materials (metal pipes, oxygen tanks). The composer also added synths to his orchestral score, as well as bowed metal, where a violin bow is rubbed against metal instruments like a cowbell or a Vibraphone, for when Roz has a particularly intense feeling. “It’s almost like her vibration,” he says.

The Wild Robot, which carries a budget of $78 million, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival before hitting theaters Sept. 27 with near-universal praise from critics (“A delightful story of survival and community,” reads The Hollywood Reporter’s review.) It has earned $324 million. Audiences, especially those unfamiliar with the book, seemed caught off guard by the emotional gut punch the film delivers. 

“For a while, my social media was filled up with people posting videos of themselves crying,” says Brown, who was often tagged in the videos. “It’s unusual for people to have that kind of emotional reaction, but then for them to take the extra step of recording it [afterward], that was really touching to me.”

Ultimately, The Wild Robot, tackling perennial subjects like parenting and more contemporary ones like technological sentience, is a movie for the moment that could also only be made in this moment. 

“In the whole history of animation, considering the many hundreds of films that exist, to try to come up with a brand-new look is ambitious,” says Hermann. “It really required having people who’ve been in this profession for their lives, for decades, for entire careers, who have been passionate and really loved this art form, to know how to wield it in new ways.”

This story appeared in the Jan. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.