Chris Sanders on The Wild Robot & Live-Action Lilo & Stitch

Chris Sanders has spent his career making movies about outcasts building new families. His first feature, co-directed with Dean DeBlois, was Disney’s Lilo & Stitch (2002), maybe the ultimate animated film about the power of finding your people in an unexpected place. (Sanders also did the voice of Stitch in the film — and, indeed, continues to do the voice to this day in Stitch’s many iterations, including the upcoming live-action remake.) His latest, The Wild Robot, could give that Disney classic a run for its money. It’s the story of a robot, Rozzum Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who finds herself lost in the middle of a forest and struggles to assimilate into the animal world, which rejects her. As the robot, nicknamed Roz, tries to care for a young orphaned gosling named Brightbill (Kit Connor), she continues to deal with the woodland creatures who see her only as a monster. If that sounds like a tearjerker, you’re right: It is. But the film is devastating precisely because it’s not cloying; its striking visual design merges computer animation with rough, almost Impressionistic hand-painted characters and backgrounds, and both the sharp screenplay and the irreverent voice performances avoid fuzzy clichés at every turn. And although The Wild Robot is based on a children’s book by Peter Brown, Sanders admits that it carried some surprising personal resonances even he wasn’t aware of at first — echoes that reach all the way back to the Disney movie that put him on the map in the first place.

Your original idea for Lilo & Stitch, long before you made that movie, had Stitch landing in a forest and living among the animals. That concept obviously evolved and changed dramatically. But seeing The Wild Robot, I realized it was very similar to that. Did that resemblance ever strike you?  
Here’s the weird thing: I didn’t even make that connection until about two weeks ago. I went over to visit Dean DeBlois, my co-director on Lilo & Stitch, who is in the midst of working on the How to Train Your Dragon live-action reboot. And he pointed that out! He said, “It’s kind of like you went full circle and went back to the film that you were trying to make before you moved Lilo & Stitch into the human world.” The thing that Tom Schumacher at Disney said to me at the time was “The animal world is, in a sense, alien to us, so we’re not going to get the greatest contrast with an alien among animals. We should maybe consider moving it into the human world.” So this is really the same thing — but the opposite, where we do want Roz to be in an alien world.

The animation style in The Wild Robot is unique. The textures of the characters and the environments look like brushstrokes from a painting. How did that develop?
As I read the original book, imagery was flooding into my imagination. I knew that, given the nature of the story, it could skew unintentionally young if we didn’t have a sophisticated look. So I asked our production designer, Raymond Zibach, for something more in the realm of Bambi. We were already creating some color sketches, explorations for what this film might look like. Several images were looking very, very loose and painterly — because people are just doing these very quickly. I loved that look. I always bemoan the loss of that kind of spontaneity in animation, as things are formalized and cleaned up and imagery is perfected. So I asked Raymond, “Would it be possible for the finished film to be indiscernible from these rough sketches?” And he said, “Let’s go for it!”

Ever since CG came into the picture, we have all been struggling as filmmakers to make our worlds look more handmade, because that’s where you get this emotional resonance. Usually, we battle this by wrapping geometry with textures. So backgrounds, rocks, trees — they have geometry inside them, just like our characters do. But in the case of The Wild Robot, we no longer have geometry under the background, under the trees. As far as its art direction is concerned, for the very first time we have 100 percent painted environments; from the sky to the ground, to trees, to bushes, everything is hand-painted. In order for the characters to fuse and to wed with the rest of the world, they too needed to be hand-painted. The birds’ feathers, the fur for the animals, are simply not there — it’s just brushstrokes that are rough. It’s like when you go to a gallery and you see a beautiful painting, but then you happen to get real close to it and all of a sudden it just becomes these blobs of color that don’t make a lot of sense. That’s what our characters are like. If you get very, very close to them, it’s just these rough brushstrokes. So there are no individual hairs that are represented. An exception to that would be that Fink, the fox, has these whiskers — but if you look at the whiskers, those are also brushstrokes.

But then, into this beautiful painted environment. Roz deliberately arrives on the island as a CG element. We did not give her surface a painted texture in the beginning. As Roz spends more time on the island, we replace her CG surface with a painted surface. And by the middle of the film, by the beginning of the third act, she is now a 100 percent hand-painted-surface character, just like the animals are. She literally begins to fuse with the island as she adapts and becomes a resident.

You just mentioned that animators have been trying to make their work look more handmade. Obviously, in the U.S. particularly, computer animation has taken over everything. But even now, 30 years into the revolution, filmmakers are trying to get back to that hand-drawn style?
Yeah, it’s because back in the day, changing the style of your film was relatively easy and exciting. We would always have different styles, depending on the kind of film that we were making. But when CG came along, we were gravitationally obligated to this particular look, just because the technology wouldn’t let us escape. Everybody has struggled with that because we lost that ability to be as dynamic and as surprising visually as we used to be. When we saw Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, that was a revelation. Somebody finally escaped that gravitational field, that gravitational pull! And at DreamWorks, they followed up with Bad Guys and with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. So we’d already gone a certain distance down that amazing road leading away from CG looks. I was really asking, “How much further can we go?”

And I will say the entire crew adopted this film in a way that I have never seen before. For example, with our animation crew, usually we’ll launch a scene: I’ll sit down and talk to an animator — after all, they are our actors — and say, “Well, this is what the scene is about,” and we’ll have a long discussion before they go off to animate it. In the case of The Wild Robot, I would come into some of those sessions, I would begin to describe a moment, and the animator would say, “Actually, I already animated it!” And I would say, “Excuse me — what?” And they had broken into the database, removed the scene, and had gone ahead and just — they did it. They animated it!

It’s funny — artificial intelligence really became a thing in the news as we were making this film. And oddly enough, The Wild Robot is more human-made than anything I’ve worked on since CG started. Again, we go back to the hand-painted surfaces and the analog warmth that we get from a hand-painted sky. There’s no replacement for that. But there’s also no replacement for the interaction we have with humans on our crew. You could never have typed in enough commands to make this film with AI. You have to sit with people, and you have to debate things. I have a head of story named Heidi Jo Gilbert, and she would push back on things and disagree with me. Our editor, Mary Blee, very same thing. When I come into editorial, it’s not just “What do you want, Chris?” It’s human interaction that created this film.

Director Chris Sanders.
Photo: KC Armstrong/Deadline via Getty Images

You made the transition from hand-drawn animation to CG animation back with How to Train Your Dragon. Was that a challenge to go from one format to another?
How to Train Your Dragon was a crash course for me in all things CG. By the time I arrived on that film, they had already been working on it for some time. The characters were designed, rigged, finalized, a lot of the environments were finished, and we only had a certain amount of time to make some changes based on what Dean and I decided needed to be done. One exciting thing was the ability to move the camera in space. It’s something that we don’t talk enough about. Of all the gifts that we got that came along with this whole CG phenomenon was the ability to finally use a camera like you would on a live-action set. You can change lenses; you can move the camera; you can push; you can pull. There’s a gigantic emotional component that comes from that — it cannot be understated. Of course, some people went a little bit too far, and they’d zoom through coffee-cup handles for no reason whatsoever.

In Lilo & Stitch, there was one scene where we had a jet flying straight down a main street in Honolulu. And we wanted that dimensional push with the camera, which means it wasn’t just a zoom. We had to move things in dimension to get the feeling that the camera’s pushing forward. But it was traditional animation, so we started to work on that shot very early in the process. It was the longest-running shot in production. And we eventually had to cut the scene because of 9/11! It’s not in the movie. But with CG, you can do all that much more easily.

Also, in Lilo & Stitch, the original design for Nani had a little coffee cup drawn on her shirt. And in traditional animation, there comes a day when people sit down with you and say, “Okay, that coffee cup is going to increase our production time by three months.” We couldn’t have that coffee cup. (At the very end of the movie, in the last title sequence, Stitch picks up a shirt, turns it backward, and it has the coffee cup on it; they did that as a freebie just for me, because they knew it was sad for me to lose the coffee cup.) But they would actually have people sit with stopwatches and time the colorists on how long it took to color each of the characters and then they would do these serious calculations to see if they could hit their deadline — how long it takes to clean up a character, how long it takes to color a character. I actually learned about this while we were making Aladdin. I was in the Ink & Paint department. Someone came in and said, “Okay, we’re going to have to lose three colors off of Jasmine!” They said, literally, “We will miss our deadline for the film by four weeks if we don’t take three colors off of Jasmine.” She had maybe 15 different-colored lines, and they had to maybe take it down to ten. Now, suddenly, with CG, we had all these textures and we had reflections and all these amazing things. And you could change things much easier. That was another big plus.

But we also lost the squash and stretch that just came along with the party as you’re doing a hand-drawn character. One of the things we were battling in CG was this weird sort of puppet feel with the characters, particularly in their shoulders and their elbows and their arms. They had this strange marionette quality to them. Writing software that would allow the animators to change the exterior shapes was a huge goal for us in animation — to try to make the characters look easier on the eyes, to get some of that life back. Now, I feel like we’ve finally come out of this tunnel and anything is possible again. Stylistically, we are much freer to maneuver than we ever have been before.

I feel like what Lupita Nyong’o does in The Wild Robot is really fascinating. She has to portray a robot voice and then slowly the voice changes — but without ever really going overboard with the shift. She never entirely stops being a robot. It’s incredibly moving.
I think Lupita shares more in common with Roz than I would’ve known at first. She has a very thoughtful process of understanding the character and understanding the story. She takes things very seriously, in the best way possible. We would typically start our recording sessions with an hourlong discussion about just what’s up with Roz, and what are her motivations throughout the sequences we’re looking at?

Trying to find Roz’s voice, we began in a more robotic place. Roz’s delivery was never “I. Am. A. Robot. What. Is. Going …” It was never that 1950s sort of robot. However, trying to find the angle at which we would enter the story with Roz took a lot of work, and Lupita was the key in finding that. We realized, when she begins the story, Roz should have enthusiasm but also some emotional availability, because we need to connect with her as a character. She’s in a sympathetic position as an outsider who is lost and overwhelmed by this situation. And when she is rejected by the animals around her, she does react — not in a big, huge way but in a very tangible way. When she’s following this deer and trying to strike up a conversation and the deer simply kicks her in the face and her head sinks into her shoulders, there’s a kind of sound. She’s discouraged, and that helps us connect to her as a character.

One of the first things we did was call Peter Brown, the author, and just have a chat. And in our very first conversation, Peter said something that we never forgot, which is that the guiding principle going through his head as he wrote the book was that kindness can be a survival skill. He never memorialized that in the pages of the book, but we were very grateful that he revealed that to us. This is never a mission statement for Roz, but she has an unrelenting kindness that begins to change the culture of the island and the animals around her.

In terms of Lupita manipulating her voice, I would visualize it as, like, taking a guitar string and tightening it slightly. The voice that Roz presents at the beginning of the movie is a more tensioned voice. It’s like if you’re walking to a party and you’re nervous about making a good impression, you might be like, “Hello, my name is Chris. How’s it going?” It’s this higher register that she creates when she says, “Hello, my name is Roz. Do you need assistance?” But as the movie continues, Roz relaxes her voice and she starts using contractions, and she starts sounding more down to earth and more human.

People sometimes look down on voice performances — these never get honored during awards season — but in cases like this, you realize how much genuine acting skill is required to pull off a part like this.  
There is this tired trope that actors like to do animated films because they can show up to recording sessions in their pajamas. And it’s a lot more work than that, both emotionally and physically. Lupita would go into a recording session and she would work four hours nonstop. And because of the number of takes, the number of iterations, by the end of the session she would be almost voiceless. So physically, it’s very demanding. And Lupita, in particular, had the largest task of any of our voices because Roz has no facial articulation save for her lenses. That was something that I insisted upon. I think that robots work best when they don’t have a lot of articulation on their faces. We, as an audience, tend to project emotions onto things, and I think the only robot with facial articulation that was truly effective was the robot from The Iron Giant. In all the other cases, C-3PO, R2-D2, the Forbidden Planet robot — they don’t have any articulation on their faces, and, boy, do they work great. But it means that Lupita carried 100 percent of the burden of the emotional transmission for Roz through her voice.

Photo: Walt Disney/Everett Collection

I see that you’re still doing the voice of Stitch in the live-action Lilo & Stitch. Is it weird to be involved in that way in a new version of something that you originally created?
As a matter of fact, I’m going in this afternoon for a four-hour recording session. Being a voice on a version of the film that I did not write or direct is not new to me. After Lilo & Stitch was finished, they came to me and said, “We want to play some voices for you.” And they played people trying to sound like me, and I was confused. I’m like, “Why am I listening to these?” They said, “Oh, well, we’re going to replace you, because going forward, there will be many, many needs for Stitch voice recordings.” And I immediately said, “Oh, no, no, no, no! This is my guy! I will be the voice.” That was one of the best decisions I think I’ve ever made in my career because it’s kept me close to a character that I created in a way that means I get to check in and see him in these different things. During a year, I will routinely come into a recording studio and record for toys, for parades, for ice shows. I even did a thing for a TikTok voice, which was one of the most amazing recording sessions I’ve ever been in. It’s hard to even describe that recording session. So I’m not a stranger to being just a voice actor in these situations. The difference here is that I know this particular movie pretty well, so I might see a couple shots and I’m like, Oh, I know where this is from.

Have they consulted with you at all on the new movie? 
Not really. I would say that I had a lovely conversation with director Dean Fleischer Camp very early, before they began shooting. He gave me a call and asked if I wanted to return as the voice. I had yet to meet him in person, but we spoke until the battery on my phone gave out. He seemed to have a great enthusiasm for the project and seemed like a thoughtful guy. I only knew him from his film Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. Had I not been deeply embroiled in The Wild Robot, I may have tried to fly out there and visit the set or something. But this was their baby.