October 3rd, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot opened No. 1 at the box office last weekend, with one of the biggest debuts ever for an animated film in the month of September. Four-time Annie-winning director Chris Sanders and Annecy winner Jeff Hermann react to the critical and audience success and reflect on three decades of DreamWorks. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: Chris, this is your triumphant return to animation. “Lilo & Stitch”, “How to Train Your Dragon”, “The Croods”, and now No. 1 with “The Wild Robot”. How does it feel?
Chris Sanders: I think we could not be more thrilled because making this film… everybody poured their hearts into this, for real. We all fell in love with this project. We fell in love with the characters, and just the production itself was a bit of a miraculous thing. Just the way it came together. So to see it do well is absolutely thrilling.
JM: And Jeff, you’ve been at DreamWorks a long time, part of movies like “Spirit”, “Kung Fu Panda”, “Boss Baby 2” and a lot of shorts as well. But there is something about the momentum and the spirit behind “The Wild Robot” that feels unique to everything else at DreamWorks. How do you see that first hand?
Jeff Hermann: I think that’s 100 percent accurate. These things are always a labor of love but this one was on a whole other level. From the very get go I think everybody recognized the potential and the promise of this and responded to it. There’s so many layered themes and messages in this movie that I think everyone can relate to, and everyone also saw an opportunity to do something with this visually as well that could separate it and elevate it from everything else we’ve done before. So everybody really gave it everything they had at every step of the way and really collaborated in a way that I’ve never seen before to get the very, very best on screen.
JM: Anytime Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o takes on a project, she is very passionate about it. She chooses ones that she really wants to get behind and support. Chris, how did you see that firsthand in working with her? She voices Roz, the main character — that collaboration and that passion together on this.
CS: Lupita took this very seriously from the very beginning. It was a privilege and a thrill to be able to collaborate with her. Jeff and I and everybody in editorial as well watched Lupita take apart Roz… to understand the architecture of Roz’s mind. And she’s a very unusual character. We all together collaborated to create a character that we could empathize with that would nonetheless take a journey that would start as a character that we empathize with and fall in love with immediately, yet still has a place to go and become a more emotionally resonant and more emotionally responsive being. And amongst all the things that we adjusted script wise, Lupita found a voice. She actually created the voice that you hear on screen, where her voice begins in one place, which we described as an engineered optimism, where she took some inspiration from characters like Siri, and she changes the way her voice sounds. And then it evolves through the movie and by midpoint in the third act, you’re hearing pure Lupita.
JM: Very nice voice performance. And I noticed early on, Jeff, that the animals call Roz the monster. “The Monster!” And they’re sort of scared, and it made me immediately think in the DreamWorks catalog of Shrek and how some of the humans thought that Shrek was the monster and didn’t understand the deep meaning behind Shrek as an individual character who has heart and is kind. Do you sort of see the parallels and the correlation there?
JH: Absolutely. I think it’s something that’s in a lot of the best of these types of films — revealing the hidden potential and the true appeal of everyone inside. Everybody kind of feels like a loner or an outsider at some point in their lives. These films are great parables for helping people understand how to navigate the world and how to see the best in each other.
JM: Roz is raising Brightbill the goose, along with the help of Fink the fox. Chris, there’s a lot of sequences in this, you’ve got big Roz, you’ve got small Brightbill, you’ve got relatively small Fink, all in the same shot. Was that pretty challenging to pull off all those proportions?
CS: It’s a really great thing. You bring that up. A lot of credit goes to our cinematographer, Chris Stover, because yes indeed, you have some framing issues sometimes when you’ve got a character as large as Roz that needs to be in a relatively intimate scene with a character like Fink. So having Fink leap up onto her shoulder or have her sit down low so that we can frame things properly is always a bit of a challenge. There’s no such thing as an easy shot. So a lot of credit goes to Chris for framing these brilliantly and finding and lensing the whole thing as well.
JM: And I love Bill Nighy’s voice performance as Longneck. To me, that’s the strength emotionally of this movie — and the power and the dialogue that he has to say. His performance in “Living”, which he got an Oscar nomination for a couple of years ago, it kind of callbacks to a little bit of that. Jeff, in working with Bill in providing that emotion, how was that experience?
JH: That was amazing. Bill’s a master, right? He really comes in and understands the nuances of the character. You know, it’s interesting, ’cause a lot of people are responding to this character. He’s only in three sequences of the film, but he has such a huge impact. And a lot of that credit, I think, goes to Bill’s vocal performance because he’s able to convey so much with so little screen time. It provides this warmth and this wisdom and this wit, a lot of which comes through Bill naturally. And I think that’s part of the beauty of the whole ensemble that we have is that they’re all A-list actors, but none of it is stunt casting. All of them really embody the characteristics of the characters that they play in one way or another and they really put all that up on screen.
JM: About halfway to two thirds of the way through the movie, Chris, there’s an ambitious section with all of the creatures in the home that Roz has created. You take that sweeping shot around with Fink kind of guiding us through everybody. I feel like that, visually, and with all the different characters and wanting them all to get along with each other, tonally story-wise too, there’s a lot going on there that you pull off.
CS: Indeed. There are two or three things I experienced on this film that as a director I’ve never done before. One of those being these two big oners. We have these two moments of mayhem in the film that are so beautifully realized by kicking them off with these big master shots. We move that camera like you would on a live-action set within a very dimensional set to get the camera work laid down first. And then we begin to block the characters in, block the shot, and it’s this amazing dance where things go back and forth between our cinematographer, Chris Stover, and our head of animation, Jakob Jensen, and all the other animators that are involved in a shot like that. Same with our editor [Mary Blee]. She’s in there as well. So it’s this amazing dance that occurs, but once that shot was accomplished, it was so worth the effort that went into it. You feel so incredibly satisfied. You’ve experienced the moment. You’ve seen goodness knows how many animals fly through that shot. It’s just incredible. We also had some time lapse that I’ve never done before.
JM: Also, the music, Kris Bowers does the score, and Jeff, you’ve got Maren Morris with two songs in this that really tell stories. “Kiss the Sky” and “Even When I’m Not”.
JH: We were really fortunate in that Maren and Kris were both able to begin working and collaborating with us very early on in the process. Normally music comes in quite late in the run of these things. But we had the benefit of working with Kris Bowers for about two years and Maren for probably a little over a year on the music that you heard in the film. That wound up benefiting not just them, but us in the sense of what they were providing us actually influenced some of the storytelling.
JM: Chris, in the marketing for “The Wild Robot”, there were some “How to Train Your Dragon scenes”. We see Hiccup and Toothless and Emma Stone’s character [Eep in “The Croods”] in the DreamWorks [intro before] “The Wild Robot”. Stitch is coming back next year. And you have this. Your work continues to speak to generations and to new generations. And now with this movie, the legacy that you have in animation, what does that all really mean to you?
CS: I wish it meant better parking. (laughs) It’s really exciting. You just work on these one at a time and try to make them the best you can make them. I was in the right place at the right time with the right crew to create these amazing films. With “Lilo & Stitch”, we had the right crew in Florida that were willing to bring back watercolor as a background style, which was amazing. And then to get to the point where I’m experiencing this film, which in a monumental way has brought things full circle artistically, brought things back to that hand-painted style that I feel there’s no substitute for. I’m lucky, timing-wise, that that book was waiting four years for me to come along and find… at the right studio. And in those four years, the studio developed an even greater control of this hand-painted look so that we were ready at the right time in the right place to take “The Wild Robot” further visually.
JM: Jeff, DreamWorks is turning 30, which is amazing. What do you think “The Wild Robot” coming out now, timed to this 30th anniversary of DreamWorks, says about DreamWorks in 2024?
JH: I think this movie kind of represents everything that cumulatively we’ve all been kind of working towards throughout the entire existence of the studio, which is kind of pushing the boundaries of the types of stories we tell. And this one definitely does that in terms of the depth of emotion that it hits, as well as the visual styles. DreamWorks, I think, has excelled at constantly pushing in different directions the visuals of what these films can be, which is the thing that separates us from any other medium. So I think this kind of culminates everything that we’ve been trying to do this entire time.
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