Meet director Chris Sanders, Hollywood’s greatest hope for human-robot relations | Canada Voices

Filmmaker Chris Sanders loves robots – in movies, sure, but also the little automatons he sees every day, from spinning robot vacuums to the delivery robots he encounters regularly around Los Angeles.

“They break my heart. I’ll be driving in my car, and I’ll be stopped at the light. And here comes this little robot. It’s like a baby, you know. It rolls around the corner. Its little headlights are on. It has a little flag, so you don’t run over it or miss it. And it’s scurrying along, trying to get something done. And I almost burst into tears. Like, ‘Are you gonna be okay?’ And if it ever fell over, I’d jump out of my car and help it,” says the animator and director behind such films as Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods.

Sitting in a room at the Ritz-Carlton in the midst of the Toronto International Film Festival, Sanders smiles affably as he thinks through a question about advances in technology, especially when it comes to AI and how it might have influenced his depiction of Roz, the central character of his latest film, The Wild Robot, which opens in theatres Friday.

Based on the popular book by Peter Brown, the animated feature tells the story of ROZZUM unit 7134 – Roz for short – that gets shipwrecked on a remote island. Programmed to help, Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) sets out to find and complete a task. To better understand her new surroundings, she hunkers down to soak in the surrounding sights and sounds. After learning to communicate with animals, she unwittingly becomes an adoptive parent to orphaned gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor).

With help from Fink the fox (Pedro Pascal) and Pinktail the opossum (Catherine O’Hara in a hilarious turn), among others, Roz comes to understand that there’s no manual to being a mom – especially when Brightbill eventually needs to leave the nest and join a flock of geese on their migration.

Roz is constantly reprogramming, which may be common for other movie robots, Sanders says. But Brown’s characterization of her in the book brought a completely new dimension.

“One of the reasons I was very anxious to work on this film is the story,” he says. “I think we are used to seeing robots gaining emotions, becoming human – that’s always going to come along with any robot experiencing life and going on a journey.” But Brown added another element that is often excised from coming-of-age stories: “Motherhood. In animation, moms are notably missing from a lot of stories.”

In fact, the real story of The Wild Robot is how Roz becomes a mother, he says.

“All those magical, unexplainable things of motherhood that I’ve never been able to work with in a film before. And if there’s no other reason, I think, to read the book and watch this movie, it’s that.”

The striking visuals of the film are equally enchanting. It looks like a painting come to life, teeming with astonishing detail. There’s a watercolour wash quality to the forest that Roz and her animal friends inhabit, giving it a mesmerizing, almost dream-like quality. The imagery for The Wild Robot came to Sanders the moment he came across Brown’s book, which was one of several projects in development at DreamWorks Animation. And the timing was just right for Sanders to take it on.

“I was almost frantic because I just connected with everything in the story … I was very anxious to start. And DreamWorks at that point had just finished Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. And they were getting away from that CG style that we’ve been locked into since the very, very beginning. So it was perfect timing.”

The production team pushed themselves further and further from the impressionist sketches they started with, “wrapping geometry” onto storyboards. There was even a moment of panic, when Sanders wondered if they had gone too far. But when he saw the hand-painted quality of the characters, he knew he’d changed the way audiences view animation.

“The images I was seeing of this robot lost in a forest – immediately I had a Bambi vibe. And this is a film that means a lot to me. To all of us who are animation,” he says. “That plus Miyazaki and My Neighbor Totoro. The way the forests looked in that had an enduring effect on me.

“There’s no substitute for the analogue warmth you get from a human-made painting. It’s irreplaceable.”

“Yes, our [computer graphics] camera is there. But also every single, solitary thing is painted by a human being – the skies, the trees, the ground, the character. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m still astonished.”

Another key element of the film is a dialogue between Roz and Fink as they are raising Brightbill: kindness as a survival skill. That idea came through in the first conversation Sanders had with Brown. In the animal kingdom, kindness isn’t an operating factor; if you’re not selfish and devoted to your own survival, you won’t live to see the next day. Roz’s purpose is at odds with that principle.

“Kindness is inspiring – it’s one of the features of the story we fell in love with,” Sanders says. “We can’t have enough kindness, especially as things get busier and more stressful. But the other message of the movie is that, in order to survive, Roz has to change her programming. … It’s not on purpose. It just happens when she becomes a mother to everything on this island.”

Special to The Globe and Mail