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DreamWorks Animation, who reached their 30th anniversary this year, have something exceptional to celebrate with - their heartrending, imagination-capturing latest feature, The Wild Robot.

In this painterly animated adventure, Lupita Nyong'o stars as Roz, a helper robot who washes up on a remote island and is forced to adapt to the wilderness and win the trust of the menagerie of animals who call it home.

Writer-director Chris Sanders joins us for our podcast The Love of Cinema to discuss adapting the beloved book, working with his A-list cast, and the film's guiding theme of 'kindness is a survival skill'.

Read on, watch or listen below. 

The Wild Robot is in cinemas from 18 October — Book Now!

I'd love to start off just by talking a little bit about your background, some of the films you worked on previously, because I think looking at your career up to this point gives a perfect picture of why The Wild Robot was such a good project for you.

I started at Marvel Productions, because at the time I got out of college, they weren't really hiring at Disney. But there was one opening in the development department, and that was my transition into story. I was doing some development work on a movie called The Rescuers Down Under, and I was asked to flesh out these development drawings and make it into a storyboard sequence. And that was my transition into storyboarding.

That was really the most important moment, without knowing it at the time. I just stayed in the story department. And that was the most amazing period of learning I ever went through. I got to work with Joe Ranft, Brenda Chapman, Roger Allers, Ed Gombert, some of the most amazing story artists ever.

And I went from The Rescuers Down Under to Beauty and the Beast, and then I worked a little bit on Aladdin, bounced back to Beauty and the Beast to board the scene where he dies and gets brought back and all that. And then I jumped to The Lion King after that. And that was incredible. I did a bit of production design on that as well.

That's where I was introduced to the Florida studio, because about a third of the film was done in Florida. So I spent time at that studio, got to know all the artists and jumped to Mulan, which was entirely done at the Florida studio. So I spent a couple of years there working on Mulan.

And then came Lilo and Stitch. When they asked if I wanted to go back to the Florida studio, I immediately said yes, because it was such a youthful studio, so much energy and so much enthusiasm. And so many good artists that were just growing and learning. I liken it to Disney Studios, probably back in the 1930s.

And then after Lilo and Stitch, I jumped to Dreamworks to work on [The] Croods, jumped from Croods to How to Train Your Dragon, which was my crash course in all things CG. After finishing the first How to Train Your Dragon, I bounced back to finish Croods, and that pretty much brings us to around now. I went on to do Call of the Wild, which was the live action hybrid. And then back to Dreamworks for The Wild Robot.

I hope I didn't take too long on that.

So we come now to The Wild Robot. I'd love to hear about what attracted you to the novel by Peter Brown, because I know it was in discussion at Dreamworks, but also was something that you'd come across in your own life as well.

I was adjacent to it because my daughter was reading it. It's something that's very commonly read at a certain age grade range in the United States. So it was around, I saw it, but I didn't ever open it up.

So I dropped into DreamWorks to see what was up in development. And they described this book, The Wild Robot. I think it was not only the idea of this robot that was lost which was attractive to me, it was the character relationships. These are the kind of things that I really gravitate towards, things that are less fairy tale and more like real life as far as the interrelationships and the emotions that are flowing through a story.

I love fairy tales. Beauty and the Beast, for example, that was one of my favorite things I ever worked on. But things that are more like Lilo and Stitch - where you have fanciful things, but they're in a real environment, you're treating them as though it's really happening - are the things I like best, I think.

Adaptation is also such an under-appreciated art form. You know, speaking personally, as a child I loved the How to Train Your Dragon books. They were such a big part of growing up for me. What ends up in your film is completely different, but it's so true to the essential qualities of the series. What did you see as that essential quality in this book?

The load bearing themes inside The Wild Robot were really powerful and beautiful. One of them was revealed to us when I was talking to Peter Brown. Jeff Herman, the producer and I were on a phone call with him when we first started the project. And he mentioned to us that while he was writing the book, this idea that was running through his head as a guiding principle was the idea that kindness could be a survival skill. And I immediately wrote that down and thought, okay, I need to memorialise that in the script and on the screen.

And the other idea that was a driving factor was the idea that, to survive, you might have to change your programming. You might have to go off script at some point. But that's not going to mean that you're going to be any less who you are.

And so those two things working together were, I think, the main things that I needed to preserve and get from the pages of the book onto the screen intact. So any adaptation was in service to making sure those themes stayed pure.

Let's talk about the look of the film, which has this amazing tactile, painterly style. You've described it as a Miyazaki forest brought to life by Monet. What was your vision for how you wanted the film to look?

You know, I was seeing imagery that was very much like, I would say, Tyrus Wong's stylings for Bambi, that kind of sophistication. It was going to mean that that story we were just talking about, I thought would resonate the way it needed to.

I knew that the animals, the robot, would be something that kids would immediately be attracted to and enjoy. And me too! But I wanted to make sure that it had that kind of resonance and sophistication, so that people would see it in the right way, if that makes sense. I wouldn't say grown up exactly, I think just being true to the scale of the emotional story that was contained in Peter's book.

Kind of epic in scope.

Absolutely. One of the first things I would say to Raymond Zibach, the production designer, was that my dream was for people to go see the movie and be so immersed in this forest, and so beguiled, that when the movie ended and they walked back out of the theatre, they might have a bit of a shock to see the real world again, like cars and people walking up and down the streets. I wanted people to feel like they were lost in this forest to some degree.

You're blessed with an incredible cast. Lupita Nyong'o stars as Roz. I'd love to hear about what her qualities as a performer were that really made you feel she was a good fit, and also maybe how working with her shaped the character a little bit.

Yeah, I cannot overstate how much Lupita took the lead in crafting Roz and deciphering her. I would say that Roz is very much like Lupita in that she's a very intelligent character. Lupita is incredibly intelligent, inventive. I really think she's a bit of a genius, seriously.

Watching her deconstruct Roz so that she could understand the architecture of Roz's brain, the way she thought about things and the way she saw things, was absolutely fascinating.

I never went into a recording session and went straight to the microphone. We would always sit and talk the very first session together.

We talked for well over an hour before we committed anything to a recording. We would modify things on the spot that we could modify. Then I would leave the session with notes and I would sit down and immediately apply those to scenes and to the overall arc of Roz, the character.

Lupita was creating a voice as well. So there's a phase one, a phase two and a phase three Roz voice that was crafted by Lupita. There's that more Siri thing at the beginning, which has this sort of exuberance and enthusiasm where she pushes her voice into this kind of stressed place, but overly happy. And then as the movie unfolds and unspools, she becomes much more just pure Lupita. I would say by the third act, that's Lupita.

It's an amazing cast that you have, a real ensemble cast. Besides Pedro Pascal who voices Fink the fox, and Kit Connor as Brightbill, you have Bill Nighy, Catherine O'Hara, Mark Hamill, Matt Berry, Stephanie Hsu…

[Laughs] It is incredible!

It's a bit ridiculous, to say it like that.

It's kind of insane, yeah.

It's so fitting for this film, that's really about community as well.

Absolutely. The flavour of all these different ingredients was incredible.

Like Bill Nighy, for example. He can say three words, and you're there. And what a great match to the character that he plays, Longneck the goose, who's the wisest and oldest character in the movie. Every time he speaks, boy, you listen. He doesn't have a ton of lines, but the lines he does have move the entire story in a way I can't overstate.

And then Kit Connor, who has one of one of the toughest jobs. Because his character Brightbill…he's good, and he's honest, and he's earnest, and that kind of a character could come off rather flat.

We do temporary voices as we're building our story reels, until we actually can sit down with the actor, and I would drop in and do Brightbill's dialogue. And it was bad. It was awful. I could barely be in the room to listen to the story reel, listening to myself, just thinking, "Oh this character…"

"I hate this guy!"

Yeah. And I cannot tell you how joyous it was when we came to London and recorded Kit. The very first line that he laid down, we're like "Yes, there's Brightbill! He's there!"

There's such incredible depth and warmth and dimension to his voice, and emotional content that he brings to it. We're taking so many things away from these actors, because we leave these sessions with just their voice. To put it all into the voice is is pretty spectacular.

The score, from Kris Bowers, is unbelievable too.

I learned early on to build what I would call 'houses for music' within these movies, places where the characters would stop speaking and music becomes the primary voice, and that became particularly important in The Wild Robot.

Kris Bowers understood the assignment early on, that in a 90-odd minute movie he was going to have over 80 minutes of music. It's wall-to-wall music. So the scale of the task was immense, but the heavy lifting that it did for us emotionally was a major factor.

The migration sequence, at the midpoint of the film, is one of the most emotional bits I've ever worked on in a film, and it's all Kris.

I put such a premium on his music that in that particular case, in that sequence. I was so concerned that he was trying to manoeuvre around our visuals. I felt like it might be interrupting how the music was going to be developing and growing. It's like a tree, I didn't want anything to stunt its growth, or to cause it to have to grow around something. I wanted the shape to be what it wanted to be.

I said to him, stop looking at the visuals. Just work on the music, and once you get to a place where you're happy, we'll get into your slipstream and we'll design the visuals around your music. So in that case, the music actually led the process.

There's such a depth of emotion in the film. It's got an element of simplicity and minimalism to its storytelling in some ways, but the emotional ground that it's covering is phenomenal. Using non-human characters provokes empathy in a way that's really interesting.

Yeah, you know, it is interesting. Robots are particularly good at telling these human stories. I was wondering about that out loud one day, and my wife Jess actually pointed out that maybe one of the reasons that robots are so effective at telling human stories is because any bias you might have to a human actor is going to be removed. There's no originality, no age, no gender, all these things are gone. It's a blank slate that you're writing the story on, and so there's an incredible clarity and purity to what is being transmitted by that robotic character. I think that's one of the reasons that robots are so good at that particular job.

It's such a nice juxtaposition with these nature elements, the wilderness and the animals. I love that connection that's drawn, of animal instincts and robot instincts being similar in a way.

Yeah, and that's one of those things that Lupita really brought to the process. There's a moment where Fink is saying the thing we were talking about, that kindness is not a survival skill, and he's just laying down the rules of the island where if you're not completely selfish you're not going to see another day. She says 'your programming', and so she's trying to relate what he's telling her, about the behaviours of animals, to what she runs on, which are programs. So she's trying to relate the world she's in to herself, which I thought was a really ingenious thing.

I'd love to ask about any pivotal cinema experiences for you.

There's so many animated films, like Bambi…Dumbo, I think, in particular. I think anybody who grew up with animation and loves animation will inevitably mention Dumbo. One of the most sensitive, sincere, moving and disarming stories I've ever seen committed to film.

In cinema in general, I have some odd ones that really meant something to me.

There's a black-and-white Laurel and Hardy film called The Air Raid Wardens. That taught me that in the core of a story, which is mostly comedy, you could have a moment that is especially serious. It's incredibly effective when it does fall inside of a comedy, and has a strong contrast. It's a scene I actually can't talk about, because I'll be an emotional mess.

Likewise, there's a movie called Throw Momma from the Train starring Danny DeVito. Again, it's a nutty comedy, but it has this moment of sincerity in the core of it that really captured my imagination.

There's more I'm sure I can come up with, but oddly enough, those in particular really meant a lot to me, and changed the way that I approached my job.

After working on a film like this for so many years, how does it feel and what does it mean to give it to the world? And, to reference the film let it fly on its own?

I've honestly not been this excited ever before for this moment, for people to see this film.

All the things that are in it, the style that was created for this film, it's groundbreaking. It's so effective and appropriate for this particular film. The voice cast and their performances just were such a joy to be involved in, and watching this whole thing come together day by day was the most energising, joyful experience I've ever had as a director.

These take about three and a half years to make, and even if you've had a great time and you're very proud of the film, after three and a half years, you're ready to be done, right? But that was not the case with this film. We all just wanted it to go on and on. We came to the end, and each animator, as they ran out of footage, would ask "Do you have any other scenes, do you have one more scene?" and we would always be choked up. We didn't want it to end.

Jeff Herman said it best. He said, "You know, this was really the film of a lifetime." And it's true.

 Lucy Fenwick Elliott

Hosted by Picturehouse's very own Sam Clements, The Love Of Cinema podcast goes deep on the best new releases, with a little help from some of our favourite film critics, plenty of special guests, and you, the audience!