‘The Wild Robot’ Director Chris Sanders On Finding Roz’s “Engineered Optimism” And The Right “Painterly” Style

deadline.com:

When director Chris Sanders decided to take on The Wild Robot, the script had been at DreamWorks Animation for a few years.

In what he deems to be a stroke of luck, Sanders came in at the perfect time when the studio had been developing tools to create an animation style that strays from the traditional CG. “DreamWorks made some incredible advances in getting a more illustrated style up on the screen,” he says. “We leveraged off of that to see how much further we could push that look.” The Wild Robot follows Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a robot stranded on an uninhabited island who soon finds herself responsible for taking care of Brightbill (Kit Conner), a baby goose.

Although the idea was to create a more impressionistic and hand-painted style for the animation, Sanders discovered that the animals ended up looking more believable than those rendered in photorealistic CG. DEADLINE: One thing that really stood out to me when I saw the film was equating natural instinct with programming.

Where did the idea for that come from? CHRIS SANDERS: Unpacking the way that Roz thinks was one of the main jobs when it came to Lupita.