‘The Wild Robot’ Director and Composer on How Real-Life Parenting Worries Influenced the Score

variety.com:

Lauren Coates Parenting isn’t easy — whether you’re a top-of-the-line robot or an Oscar-nominated composer. It’s a lesson Lupita Nyong’o’s Roz learns the hard way in “The Wild Robot,” DreamWorks’ three-time Oscar-nominated animated adventure film.

In addition to nods for best animated feature and best score, “The Wild Robot” was also nominated for best sound, making the film the first DreamWorks movie to be nominated in the category.

At a Variety FYC Screening presented by Universal, director Chris Sanders and composer Kris Bowers sat down to talk about shaping the sonic landscape of Roz’s island and what drew them to the story of ‘The Wild Robot.’ “When I dropped into Dreamworks to see if there was anything in development that I might be able to work on, they showed me this book and from the very first few sentences I was hooked,” Sanders said. “The motherhood story at the core, the intricacies, the delicate emotional scale of the story, I was hooked.

I immediately called back and said ‘Please, what do I need to do to be attached to this story?’” Bower says his Oscar-nominated score for “The Wild Robot” was shaped by his expectations and worries regarding parenting: “One of the first themes I wanted to approach was the migration sequence.