“There is another way”: making The Wild Robot

• The Wild Robot screened in the BFI London Film Festival as a special presentation on 13 October and is released across the UK on 18 October.

“Nothing beats hearing live musicians, especially here in this city, which is just remarkable when it comes to the level of musicianship,” says Kris Bowers, the composer for DreamWorks Animation’s new production The Wild Robot. It’s June, and Bowers is at a converted north London church turned sound studio, recording choral tracks for the film’s soundtrack. Scenes are still being worked up in California while Chris Sanders, the director, Jeff Hermann, the producer, and Mary Blee, the editor, accompany Bowers on his London recording stop en route to the Annecy animation festival, where they’ll screen a handful of scenes to industry watchers. 

On screen, a gosling is learning to fly. The odds are against him not only because he’s the runt of its nest, but because he’s an orphan – raised by a robot, Roz, who is now trying to help him into the sky to join his migrating flock. There’s a lot of improvisation involved (Roz has not been programmed for goose-flight coaching) but as take-off is achieved, the choir sing rising harmonies and the flock soar up into an indigo and violet sky and away from the robot left standing alone on her wild island, her gosling charge now successfully raised and gone. “Chris [Sanders] had wanted the feeling here of a train leaving a station: from the first note, you feel ‘this is going, we can’t stop it’,” says Bowers. 

The film, an adaptation of Peter Brown’s hit children’s book, lands its shipwrecked service robot on an uninhabited island where she’s accidentally activated by the local wildlife. Integration is not easy but Roz is persistent, and enterprising: she anoints herself carer for the orphaned gosling after an accident, but has more to offer the rest of the island’s inhabitants too, especially if she can transcend her programming, and help the animals surpass the limits of their own primal instincts to better their fates – individual or mutual. (As the story slowly widens its lens, that question takes on greater weight.)

“We all had pretty much the same reaction to the book, which was that it was completely compelling and unique, but also accessible and relevant,” says Hermann, who previously produced DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016) and The Boss Baby 2: Family Business (2021). “And not just to ourselves but to the greater world we’re living in now. We gravitated to the dichotomy of putting technology and nature together, but also the message of kindness and empathy, and the heartfelt nature with which it was told.” 

“Early on we had a conversation with Peter Brown,” says Sanders, co-director of Hollywood hits from Lilo & Stitch (2002) to How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and The Croods (2013) and director of the recent live-action Call of the Wild (2020). “One thing he told us – something that was never memorialised in the book, but which was nonetheless a guiding principle – was that kindness can be a survival skill. That was one of the most important things I learned from Peter, really. His book is earnest and has a good heart, and hopefully the movie can maintain that”. 

“It’s a harsh life, kill or be killed on this island,” says Blee, a veteran of the DreamWorks editing department. They expanded the role of Roz’s animal sidekick, Fink the Fox, beneath whose wisecracking facade is a lack, a loneliness. “Fink is worldly, a sort of teller of reality: he literally says kindness is not a survival skill, you need to learn how to make it in this kind of environment. And Roz is innocent, but she’s the one who changes the island and says there is another way.” 

While Roz and the animals talk – she learns their language(s) – there’s less dialogue than in a typical Hollywood ’toon or talkie, which opened space for the animation, the visuals and performance and music to step forward. “I began by thinking about combinations and clashes of synthetic and organic sounds, Roz being a robot on this deserted island. But the organic being at the forefront, because she’s just one robot,” says Bowers, who was working on his first animation soundtrack after having previously scored everything from Green Book (2018) and The Color Purple (2023) to Dear White People (2017-21) and Bridgerton (2020-). (As it happens, he’d fallen in love with music via animation, and planned to be an animator until embracing music at high school.) “So I came up with a sound palette with synth sounds for Roz specifically, and they’re most present when we’re more in her head, but more organic when it’s the island taking the lead.

“I also knew I didn’t want to go in the direction of ‘ethnic’ instruments that are often used to portray the wild, because I didn’t want to articulate through the music where we were or what culture we’re pulling from. But in my research I stumped upon a group called Sandbox Percussion, who play on random scraps of metal and glass and tree branches. That kind of found percussion felt an interesting way to introduce a wild texture that I hadn’t really heard before.” Likewise the open, wordless singing: “I didn’t want the choir singing some language, again to avoid being culturally specific. But because she’s a robot on an island with animals, I wanted to use the voice, and especially in moments where there’s something else going on – these moments where there’s almost a human quality she’s growing in to.” 

For Roz’s design, Sanders and his team looked at “film history’s most significant robots” to see what they liked more or less, says Hermann. “Chris kept gravitating back to robots that had less facial articulation so that the viewer could project on to her. Peter Brown’s illustrations also had a simple humanoid shape and somewhat stylised design, but we also took elements from some of our favourite robots, particularly Studio Ghibli’s Castle in the Sky, with her long arms.”

Beyond her design, Roz also needed to be an adept pantomime, communicating often without dialogue. “We looked at a lot of silent film comedians, especially Buster Keaton,” says Hermon. “He was the great stoneface, never changing his expression, which is what Roz was going to have to contend with. So he was a great model for our animators to look at how he used his entire body to convey feeling.” (Hermon admits one cheat: a full-body lighting package, which helps illuminate Roz’s inner state.) 

As for the island Roz lands on, Sanders explains, “we really wanted to have a believable and immersive and beguiling, dangerous-feeling wilderness. So I was fortunate DreamWorks had arrived at a place we could springboard off the painterly look developed for The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish [both 2022] – and push it further. All of our surfaces, our skies, our trees are painted by human beings. There’s no geometry covered by rubber-stamping. 

“With hand-painted backgrounds like these, we’ve come full circle to where this whole craft began. Miyazaki’s backgrounds, Bambi’s backgrounds, The Lion King’s backgrounds: they do the best job of creating a world that you can get. Our goal was to get the finished film looking as close to the initial exploratory development drawings as we could get: so abstract and colourful, loose and free and beautiful, and they reminded me a lot of some of the inspirational art by Tyrus Wong that guided Bambi.”

Blee, the editor, got to watch all the different departments’ work coming together as she worked. “We’d cut things in and sit having our own little screening going, saying ‘Oh my goodness’. There’s a scene that has wisteria and a light source behind it that is so stunning… but you could just pause on any frame and look around finding all the different details. It evokes emotions I can’t even verbalise, but when you take that work people have poured their soul into and layer it you end up with a bit of magic. You feel the humanity in the work.”