On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.
When filmmaker Chris Sanders began to imagine what his fifth animated film, “The Wild Robot,” might look like on the big screen, he was stuck on one crucial idea: how to turn Peter Brown’s deep-feeling and beautifully rendered YA novel about a caring robot and the baby goose she adopts into a movie for everyone.
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“One of the things we talked about a lot, was how do you make a movie like this for a broad audience?” Sanders said in a recent interview with IndieWire. “We’ve talked a lot about who you work to not exclude, but you also don’t try to target anybody specifically. Anytime I’ve been near that, when you try to deliberately target any particular group of people, I think inevitably you miss and it throws things into a very strange place.”
That meant crafting a film that could appeal to all ages, not just the built-in audience of kiddos who would naturally gravitate toward a colorful world mostly populated by chatty forest animals and the charming robot (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) who brings them together.
“One of my most critical concerns from the very beginning was making a movie for adults,” the filmmaker said. “I absolutely knew by nature of the story that kids were going to be interested. A robot in the wilderness and these really adorable animals? It’s naturally going to be interesting to kids, very kid-friendly. I was really concerned that the style of the movie and the storytelling be something that adults would really engage with in a big way, and that’s where the whole style of the island came from.”
For Sanders, the recipient of this year’s IndieWire Honors Spark Award, dedicated to honoring those who advance and delight in the craft of animation, that meant a combination of both the look and the feel of his lauded film.
“Visually, I think that was the biggest challenge: to find an artistic and aesthetic altitude that was worthy of the story,” Sanders said. “It’s just natural for me to operate in those kinds of zones because I came from ‘Mulan,’ ‘Lilo & Stitch,’ ‘How to Train Your Dragon,’ where I love to attend to the big emotional wavelengths of these things and to not shy away from it.”
Sanders, who has directed animated hits like “Lilo & Stitch” (he even voices the cuddly blue alien) and “How to Train Your Dragon,” pointed to a wide variety of other animated classics as his creative waypoints: everything from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” to “My Neighbor Totoro” and the “always inspiring” classic “Bambi.”
Even during production on a new film, Sanders said he likes to watch other movies to keep his brain fresh and his imagination bold. “You get so busy on your particular film, you get so into the details, sometimes you just need to remind yourself what a movie is,” he said. “I’ll go to see a movie, it can have nothing to do tonally with the thing I’m working on, it can be a drama, it can be a comedy, it can be almost a near documentary. It could even be a horror film. It just reminds you of what a movie is, the audacity of it, the boldness of it.”
Mostly, Sanders and his team — as you can see, the filmmaker nearly always says “we” when chatting about his creative choices, rarely just “I” — wanted to tell a story they would all enjoy. Perhaps that was the ticket.
“We were just so busy making a movie that entertained ourselves, because I think we’re very representative of the core audience,” he said. “All of the things that people were feeling when they watched it, we felt when we were making it. … Our wish was that, when the movie was over, people would walk out of the theater and just have a moment of, ‘Oh, I’m back,’ to really try to immerse people and beguile them with the environment.”
Sanders, who also adapted the script for the film from the first book in Brown’s beloved trilogy about the wondrous robot Roz and the lush forest (and all its furry friends) she eventually makes her home, was so struck by Brown’s book that he could instantly “see” some of the key scenes he wanted to bring to the big screen while reading.
“It absolutely happens,” he said when asked about those “lightbulb moments.” “As I’m reading a book, if I see [even one moment] very clearly in my head, I get very anxious that other people will see what I just saw. In ‘The Wild Robot,’ there were several places like that. One of the most notable would be in the very middle, the migration. It isn’t the climactic finish of the movie, it’s just the midpoint, and yet it’s one of the most compelling things I’d ever worked on.”
In the film, Roz is unexpectedly shipwrecked on an uninhabited island while she’s out for delivery to the wider, decidedly human world. While the animals that live on the island — foxes (like one voiced by Pedro Pascal), squirrels, bears, beavers, falcons — are initially scared of their new mechanical citizen, Roz finds sanctuary when she adopts young Canadian goose Brightbill (voiced by Kit Connor) after she (oops) accidentally kills his entire family. Ever driven by her programmed directives, Roz makes it her job to get Brightbill ready for an upcoming migration.
“I liked the complexity of it, the spectacle, the scale,” he said. “I always work to music and immediately as I was reading this, music was going through my head, visuals were going through my head. What an incredible moment.”
Of course, Roz and Brightbill (plus Pascal’s fox Fink) eventually come to love each other, seeing each other as their own chosen, slightly weird but deeply adorable family. And while Brightbill is, at first, angry at Roz for forcing him to migrate (and thus, take him away from his new clan), his goose mentor Longneck (voiced by Bill Nighy) offers him some key context to her choices as his surrogate mom, just as they — and hundreds of other geese — finally take to the skies.
“At that moment of truth, when Longneck lays this big last piece of information on him to consider, there’s no longer time for him to apologize, there’s no time left to make things right,” the filmmaker said. “This is something that I have experienced in my life, that I’ve waited too long to say something, and the regret that I carry is huge. So I love the complexity of the moment and these two characters are doing their best to navigate that moment while this really huge thing is going on and time has run out and the train is leaving the station and Brightbill has to be on that train.”
What was thrilling for Sanders was “not only these big, magnificent events that were visually compelling, but the incredible complexity and power of the emotional wavelengths that were flowing” through them. And, yes, those first sparks of an idea, those lightbulb moments, are very close to what we see onscreen.
“In the case of the migration, pretty close, because I actually [story] boarded it,” he said when asked about how closely his vision and the final product align. “I thought, ‘I know exactly what I want, let me just jump in there, I’ll board it, and I’ll get it up there.’ I had a very specific series of shots that I really wanted to get up on screen, some of those high angles with all the birds and Roz running with her arms out and stuff like that. I usually have a pretty clear thought for what I want, and in that particular case, I took the extra step of, I’ll just board it. That one didn’t shift very much at all, it pretty much stuck.”
That look is essential, because while “The Wild Robot” was computer-animated, it also comes with a distinctly painterly look. A combination of technological advancements and old-school attention to details, which included hand-painted elements (artists used styluses, not brushes, in a 3D environment, but the look and feel are wonderfully familiar), made it possible.
“I hadn’t been on a film that did that since ‘Lilo & Stitch,’” Sanders said of the hand-painted elements. “The idea that we had matte painters painting the sky, painting the trees, oh my gosh. It made such a gigantic contribution to the emotional resonance of that film. It cannot be understated. We are so at the verge of another Renaissance, as far as seeing new styles of things now. I’m really thrilled by it.”
Given the tremendous success of the film — it has so far made nearly $320 million at the global box office, with glowing reviews from both critics and audiences to boot — talk of a sequel is only natural. After all, “The Wild Robot” is part of a trilogy of novels.
“We have not yet begun to do anything on a sequel yet,” Sanders said. “I think we’re very hopeful. I’ve definitely read the second book, and I plan to actually re-read it because his books have many, many chapters. When I read it the first time, I just read it. I just needed to digest it. And the second time through, I’m actually going to make some notes to myself that, perhaps, may come in handy.”
Whatever the filmmaker tackles next, Sanders believes animation is returning to “more handmade-looking things.”
“I am not somebody who is lamenting the disappearance of traditional animation,” he said. “I love traditional animation and I know it’ll always be there. I was just watching ‘Robot Dreams,’ and it’s hand-drawn and it’s the perfect style for that story, but the fact that we have now finally broken away from that gravitational hold that we were under technologically is the thing that’s so thrilling to me about where we are right now. I feel like we’ve come through a tunnel and we are looking at a big open field and mountains, and we can finally see the sky, and now we can finally go back to more broad, stylistic choices.”
He credits “Into the Spider-Verse” for breaking down those doors “with a Sherman tank.” “That was such a revelation, that film worked so well because of it, and it got the Oscar,” Sanders said. “It so deserved it. That just let everybody know, ‘Oh, we are open and free to maneuver, should we be able to get our software to the point where we can do it.’”
While audiences might not be too fussed about the mechanics that make this all possible, they do feel it in the final product. That’s what really gets Sanders going.
“People noticed the difference on ‘The Wild Robot,’” Sanders said. “I was wondering, well, we are so attuned to it within the studio, I saw it as looking like a radically different thing, and I actually wasn’t sure, when we show this to a general audience, are they going to see the same things that we are? And they sure did, people would comment on it, and oh, that made me happy.”
“The Wild Robot” is available to download or rent on various streaming platforms, including Apple TV, Amazon Video, Fandango at Home, Microsoft Store, and more.
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