A guided tour of the visual world of ‘The Wild Robot'

Los Angeles Times

12-02-2025

When multiple Oscar nominee Chris Sanders took on adapting Peter Brown's beloved children's book, 'The Wild Robot,' he wanted to do something different visually than what he was seeing in other movies. The reigning 3D computer animation style, with its smooth surfaces, often bright, even lighting and familiar character designs wasn't right for the feeling he wanted to foster.
'You've got these cute animals, and you've got a forest, and you've got this robot, all these adorable elements. And if we had made the film in traditional CG style, I was absolutely sure it would play too young,' Sanders says of the DreamWorks film. So he and his team looked both backward and forward: They drew heavy inspiration from Tyrus Wong's revered painted environments for 1942's 'Bambi' and used cutting-edge computer animation tools to achieve the analog-looking visuals.
Here, Sanders reveals the thinking behind those and other choices.
'I wanted people to see this film like I saw 'Bambi,' as the most glorious, sophisticated tone poem of a story that packs a wallop. So we began to pursue this more soft, painterly look,' Sanders says, acknowledging they were 'really fortunate that DreamWorks had made some huge advances in breaking away from that traditional CG' style with 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' and 'The Bad Guys' — placing a more illustrated feeling, like a hand-drawn picture book, within reach.
They tweaked the software to produce what looked like real brushstrokes in the rendering of the images. 'We were going for something very specific, again, much more like Ty Wong and his styling for 'Bambi,' ' says Sanders. 'One of our development artists, Daniel Cacouault, was doing these beautiful impressionistic paintings out in France. He was very loose, and instead of flowers being [exactly articulated], he would just dot the paper with little [dabs] of color, red, as flowers.'
'It's like the best paintings when you get really close to them: They fall apart in the most glorious way, become like nonsense. But when you back up, they pull together, and it becomes a mountain or a cloud or a flower. And that's what we wanted to do. So imagine that as a challenge to really get true brushstrokes onscreen. It took many, many iterations and meetings to find just the right balance of the width of the brushstrokes, where they blended into other colors.
' 'Were they a hard edge? Were they a soft edge?' 'What kind of weight of paint we were using?' There's a lot of ingenuity and inventiveness that went into this, but the end result really achieved what I was hoping for.'
Sanders says there was a balance to strike between the photoreal and the almost-impressionistic looks. For instance, letting go of the notion that every leaf on a tree had to be photoreal and separately articulated, instead using looser brushstrokes to imply them, they found, 'It felt in a way more real because you weren't dealing with those repeated leaves. That was something I didn't expect. And same thing with the animals' fur. When you got away from the individual hairs, and now you had these brushstrokes that felt more like matted fur again, there was an interesting reality that came from that. That was all its own. It was a really wonderful thing.
'Whether it be a fish or a bird or a human or a dragon, most of the time, animated characters have human eyes. They'll have a sclera and a beautiful iris, and they're gorgeous. They look like jewels. I felt that that would've broken the spell in our film. It was critical that we look at all the animal eyes and make them be as appropriate to the original animal as possible. [The fox] Fink's eyes are green; they have an oval pupil. 'No human eyes in animal bodies' was one of our rules.'
'The only thing I insisted on in the translation of Roz [the title robot] from the drawings in the book to the screen is that we eliminate the mouth entirely. I did a presentation on robots that I like, with the Iron Giant being the only one with an operational jaw that I felt really worked. Otherwise, I felt too much articulation on the face became distracting. So we gave that limitation to Roz: It was just Lupita [Nyong'o]'s voice, Roz's pantomime and her really complex eyes' that conveyed the character, Sanders says.
'If you bought a ROZZUM Unit 7134 and something went wrong with one of her eyes and you had to replace it, it would be very expensive. It would be like $70,000 to get a new eye. I wanted 'em to feel big and heavy and have a lot of glass in them. We threw a lot of development at her eyes, so there's a lot of stuff going on in them, and boy, it really paid off.'
Among the film's sci-fi moments 'would be the cave; what we always called the robot graveyard. The natural world has been manipulated to create this interesting place to project the future. We have this wall that's tilted up above Roz, and we project the commercial from the damaged robot onto that wall, but the wall has this kind of geometric surface to it, and if you look at it straight on, the image is fairly regular, but if you turn just a little bit, the camera moves a little bit off. It's got this jagged look to it. So it was this really beautiful arrangement of the natural world but using basalt and geometric elements to create a bit of a structure that we would project this futuristic world onto.
And the overall effect with the weird light coming from the tide pools, I wanted it not to be creepy but kind of beautiful and weirdly cozy. So we were heavily manipulating how light would actually work inside a cave like that. There's a luminosity coming from the pools — on a live-action set, you'd be dropping lights in. If it was a real cave, it would be incredibly dark, but we didn't want scary; we wanted beautiful and kind of weird.'
'In the migration, I felt very strongly that this is where Roz and Brightbill [the gosling she raised] are going to separate. I imagined an early-morning flight where Roz and all the geese are starting on the ground. The sun is rising, but it's only high enough to touch the birds once they separate from the ground.
'So Roz remains in that cool morning light, but as soon as Brightbill lifts off her shoulder, he lights up with the rest of the geese and they're this bright golden orange, and you're telling the audience that there's two layers to this story and to the world, and that once Brightbill joins that layer, he's now separated from Roz and she's deliberately left in that cool light, because she has to feel as though she's left behind.'