“The Wild Robot” will probably make you cry. But don’t let your eyes well up too much — or you’ll miss out on the movie’s groundbreaking animation.
Adapted from the children’s novel of the same name, “The Wild Robot” follows Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), an advanced robot who shipwrecked on a deserted island.
Roz stomps across the island, desperate for a tasks that fulfill her hard-wired hunger to help. But to the wildlife that inhabit the land, Roz is behemoth they prefer to avoid.
In a last-ditch effort to help on an island of self-sufficient creatures, Roz becomes “a first time parent by accident,” director Chris Sanders told The Deseret News.
Her child? Brightbill (Kit Conner), an orphaned gosling dependent on Roz for survival. Roz lacks parental programming and must push outside her computerized comfort zone into the complete unknown.
“I think anybody who’s a parent has experienced that ... nervousness of ... treating your kid like they’re going to break if you drop them. But then the reality is, you just make it up. You make it up as you go,” Sanders said.
Like his previous films — such as “Lilo and Stitch” and “How to Train Your Dragon” — Sanders reminds viewers of the importance of finding belonging in a family, even if it is an unconventional one.
“It’s a really, really complex and beautiful story that has a lot of emotional depth to it” Sanders said. “It was really important to me that people see this film .. .in just the right way.”
To elevate the movie’s “powerful message,” Sanders employed state-of-the-art animation.
Sanders: ‘It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before’
While reading “The Wild Robot,” imagery for the movie came to Sanders’ mind.
“And it wasn’t simple, it was really rich,” Sanders said.
Sanders believed the emotional depth of “The Wild Robot” needed to be supplemented with fresh animation. He wanted to stray from the CGI look we’ve grown accustomed to and implement a storybook-like animation style.
Thanks to recent animation advances and talented artists, Sanders was ale to bring the imagery in his head to life.
“I was really lucky that DreamWorks had gotten to the point technologically that we could get away from that CGI look that we were really like locked in to. And the only reason it stayed that way for such a long time is that that was the limit of the technology that we had,” Sanders said.
“Anytime you see a movie, I guarantee you’re seeing the very outer limit of that Studio’s capabilities, because everybody wants their films to look the very, very best.”
The animation in “The Wild Robot” builds on the animation used by DreamWorks studios in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” and “Bad Guys” — but it’s “way, way farther” advanced.
“In fact, when you see this film, you’re looking at a technological breakthrough,” Sanders said, “because there is no geometry underneath anything except the characters. Everything is hand painted dimensionally. And so this entire film looks like a moving painting, and the effect that we got from that was bigger than I ever could have expected.”
Sanders believes the film’s animation is a primary reason “The Wild Robot,” “will have such a huge effect on (its) audience.”
“It does for me every time I watch it,” he said. “It just doesn’t wear out. It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”