The idea behind “The Wild Robot” sounds like a paradox: An artificially intelligent machine transforms itself into an emotional creature after exposure to the wilderness.
Chris Sanders attends the premiere of “The Wild Robot” during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival at Roy Thomson Hall on Sept. 8, 2024, in Toronto, Ontario. (Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
Those emotions are not a malfunction, but rather a result of natural evolution for our android protagonist, Roz. In author Peter Brown’s hit book, and now the DreamWorks movie it’s based on, it’s also a matter of survival.
“When I first talked with (author Brown), he immediately mentioned something that had a huge impact on the movie,” said writer and director Chris Sanders, a Colorado Springs native and veteran of Disney and DreamWorks Animation features such as “Lilo & Stitch,” “The Croods” and “How to Train Your Dragon.” “It’s the idea that kindness can be a survival skill, and sometimes you have to change your programming and become more multidimensional to survive.”
The animated sci-fi tale, which hits the big screen on Sept. 27, is another stab at Oscar gold for DreamWorks, as well as the final film being produced in-house at the studio known for “Shrek.” Its last movie, the 2022 feature “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” was an uncommonly thoughtful sequel/spin-off that netted its creators a Best Animated Feature nomination.
“The Wild Robot” looks likely to nab another, with its jaw-droppingly beautiful visuals, richly constructed world, and themes and action that avoid the zany, slapstick-laden formula of most talking-animal stories.
“Programming is a theme in any robot movie, but this was a substantially different tone,” said Sanders, who graduated from Arvada High School before going on to the California Institute of the Arts. “Roz sees the animals as having individual programming, which is just her way of looking at things. She puts their behavior in terms she can understand.”
Indeed, the robot’s accidental crash-landing on a lush, deserted island kicks off a series of events that blur the organic and artificial. Voiced by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o, Roz is a service robot designed to meet the needs of humans. And yet there are no humans to fulfill her purpose, so she turns her attention to decoding the animal kingdom, from an insecure beaver and a grumpy bear to an orphaned gosling (Brightbill, voiced by Kit Connor) that she’s more or less forced to parent after accidentally killing his parents in her crash-landing.
The menagerie is driven by a skilled voice cast that includes Pedro Pascal (as Fink the fox), Catherine O’Hara (Pinktail the possum), Bill Nighy (Longneck the goose), Mark Hamill (Thorn the grizzly bear), Stephanie Hsu (bad robot Vontra) and Ving Rhames (Thunderbolt the falcon).
Sanders and his team offer clever sequences that inject realism into the otherwise fantastical scenes, cross-wiring the best parts of Pixar and Disney movies such as “WALL-E” with “Zootopia.” In one montage, Roz translates the chirps, barks and growls of the animals into a language that she (and we) can speak and understand — something like a Universal Translator in Star Trek. Most movies wouldn’t even bother explaining how they can communicate.
Writer-director Sanders, who grew up hiking and picnicking with his family along the Front Range — “every weekend, if the weather was good enough,” he said — saw opportunity in the blank spaces of the book. Author and illustrator Brown’s source material was first published in 2016 and ascended to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list while spawning its own middle-grade series.
Like a cross between “WALL-E” and “Zootopia,” DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot” explores whether or not living things can be more than their programming. (Provided by DreamWorks)
“When I got into the book and the journey of the story, I realized these were really fresh characters I could attach myself to,” he said. “I got inside them immediately and understood their relationships are more subtle and intricate and felt more real than they would in a fairytale. I’ve worked on those before, and am proud of those projects. But as fanciful as the (‘The Wild Robot’s’) plot is, this felt like it was really happening because the relationships are believable.”
The movie contrasts the robot’s programming — and the idea that it can evolve past it — with evolutionary instinct and self-preservation. Without giving anything away, hard lessons lead to revelations about working together and the merits of personal sacrifice for the greater good.
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Above all, there’s an artful, refreshing wisdom to “The Wild Robot” that’s missing from most movies, kids’ or otherwise. Sanders’ Colorado past showed him nature’s big-screen beauty, as well as the different ways one must adapt to the outdoors, and he certainly internalized that before moving to Hollywood, he said.
“Whether we were on a trail or having lunch, I always got altitude sickness,” Sanders remembered with a laugh, naming Devil’s Head, the Flatirons and the Royal Arch among his favorite spots. “I was super duper prone to that, whereas my brother never got sick. I never really connected that (to the book); it was just part of being a kid.”
Studying animals up close, however, was not part of being a kid, Sanders said. That could be why he’s so attracted to depicting them as an adult.
“We never had pets (growing up),” he said. “That’s why I drew them.”