The Wild Robot, a film based on Peter Brown’s novel, presented a unique opportunity for the filmmakers at DreamWorks Animation—a chance to embrace a new creative direction combining a distinctive painterly visual style with a deeply emotional narrative.
Chris Sanders, the film’s director and writer, was drawn to the central theme in Brown’s story that kindness can be a survival skill. But how do you successfully translate a chapter book into a transformative film? Fortunately, Sanders had previous experience in this arena having adapted and directed the How to Train Your Dragon book with Dean DuBlois.
“The book is something you consume at your own pace,” says Sanders. “You can dwell on it for months, but a film, you have about an hour and a half to tell your story.” To accomplish this cinematic goal, Sanders and the story team focused on what the director calls “load-bearing themes,” including the idea that sometimes “you must become more than you are programmed to be.”
“Roz was able to emote very powerfully, maybe even more powerfully and more effectively than if we hadn’t overburdened her with a jaw or eyebrows.”—Chris Sanders, Director
Head of Story Heidi Jo Gilbert says the team intentionally deviated from the studio’s typical reliance on snappy dialogue to create a story that would resonate on a deeply emotional level, one that is layered and nuanced, engaging with audiences through themes of survival, kindness, and identity as the robot Roz washes up onto a rugged island inhabited by animals. Trained as a helper robot, she searches for ways to be useful, and as she faces the inhospitable environment, she tries to befriend the animals. In doing so, she challenges her own programming as well as the natural order of the wildlife around her.
In order to show Roz’s character arc, the film is honest about the concept of hardship or loss, with several scenes focused on the natural cycle of life and the unpredictability of survival in the wild. “From the beginning, we wanted it to be less dialogue, [more] visual storytelling, and not shy away from emotions,” says Gilbert.
The story team needed to show the edge and authenticity of the real world so there was room for Roz to grow. But the initial scene that introduces Roz’s character and programming into the forest was challenging to get right, says Gilbert, adding that it ended up being one of the last sequences to be finished.
Gilbert likens the story team’s approach to a “writer’s room that can draw,” where each member contributed ideas that shaped the characters and refined the emotional beats of the film to develop organically, an approach cultivated by Sanders throughout the filmmaking process. In fact, Sanders describes himself not as an architect or writer of the film, but rather a gardener, says Head of Character Animation Jakob Jensen, referring to the fertile environment developed by the director to give root to creative solutions.
Modern Art
Influenced by traditional animation techniques in Bambi and Sleeping Beauty, the team drew inspiration from painters like Tyrus Wong, who deconstructed landscapes to create focus and emotional resonance through abstraction. Similarly, they sought to make the environment feel organic and painterly, offering a contrast that emphasized Roz’s out-of-place presence in the natural world.
Another source of inspiration: Studio Ghibli. “It really felt emotional and personal, almost like an artist in the woods sketching and painting,” says Production Designer Raymond Zibach. “All the [Hayao] Miyazaki films depict nature in just such an amazing way.”
VFX Supervisor Jeff Budsberg explains that this distinctive style involved the intentional juxtaposition of Roz’s sleek, metallic form with the lush, deconstructed landscapes of the island. The use of brushstrokes and painterly textures gave the film a unique hybrid of 2D and 3D elements, enabling a vision that married the warmth of traditional painting with the spatial depth of CG technology.
“You could have dynamic camera moves, characters walking through the space, wind-foliage interaction, dynamic depth of field—you have all these sophisticated things that add so much richness to the world, but it looks 2D,” says Budsberg.
The technical challenges of realizing this vision of “a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest” were significant. Budsberg describes how each CG department had to think about the end goal rather than focus solely on physical accuracy or detail. In fact, the team developed custom shaders that allowed them to recreate the look of brush strokes in 3D space.
An internally developed tool called Doodle allowed the artists to draw assets like foliage in 3D that provide more freedom in the modeling process. “When you can build something with strokes, the artist’s hand flows right through into the asset,” says Budsberg. “I can draw an asset in under an hour as opposed to building a bush, which would take days to a week. There’s an expressiveness that is lost in just the meticulous construction of something.”
Beyond the 3D tools, the production design team was tactical in their approach using the environment to guide the viewer—not only to direct their attention, but to engage them in an experiential way. “I think with the way the story is told, it does draw you in because you follow [Roz] into the forest,” says Zibach of the deliberate framing of shots with branches or leaves. “We were always set dressing and composing things that really made you feel like you’re close to that environment. Limiting the wide shots added to that effect.”
This kind of cinematography was used as an important storytelling device: at the beginning smaller, intimate shots invite the viewer to experience the world through Roz’s lens. As the story progresses, the world gets bigger and opens up visually with wider shots that align with larger emotional story points, like when Brightbill, a gosling that Roz has developed a maternal bond with, flies away for the winter.
On the Move
A key challenge for the animation artists was to convey Roz’s emotional journey without relying on typical facial articulation. Roz’s eyes are designed as lenses, and her movements had to reflect her emotions without traditional human gestures. Jensen and his team found inspiration in silent film actors like Buster Keaton and French mime and comic Jacques Tati to convey emotion through exaggerated body language and movement.
“Roz was able to emote very powerfully, maybe even more powerfully and more effectively than if we hadn’t overburdened her with a jaw or eyebrows,” says Sanders.
Jensen says the team embraced the challenge and experimented with Roz’s physicality as she evolved in the environment, starting with overtly robotic motions that eventually progressed into more organic movements. The window of this physical transformation narrowed, he says, as they discovered that the audience needed to connect with Roz early on in the film and her physical expression was key to that dynamic.
Roz begins her journey on the island showing off all of her gadgets, spinning claws or the ability to capture photos and print them out. But as the story moves forward, she transforms in what Jensen calls a sort of reverse peacocking. “She does fewer shots with her head going 360 [degrees] just because she can, it becomes much more contained and organic and real,” says Jensen. Ultimately, it’s the emotion that is conveyed through body posture and how it connects with her dialogue that drives the narrative.
As Roz evolves in the story, she becomes increasingly integrated into her surroundings both visually and through plot. “Through the course of her journey, she gets banged up and beat up,” says Budsberg. “But what if incrementally she becomes more and more like the world around her stylistically. The lines start to disappear and there’s one big highlight just brushed all the way down.” Roz transforms throughout the film until she blends artistically with her environment, a subtle visual nod to her evolution.
Fur, Fins & Flight
A vibrant eco-system of forest animals populates the island from beavers and otters to ducks and owls, each with a different type of locomotion. “You have to have grounded performances,” says Jensen. “If they’re not grounded, you don’t believe it.” While the animals’ behavior is naturalistic, their facial expressions are more anthropomorphic.
“We were always set dressing and composing things that really made you feel like you’re close to that environment.”—Raymond Zilbach, Production Designer
On a technical level, the filmmakers wanted to achieve the sophistication and the richness that you get out of real fur without seeing every hair. “When you paint things, you’re thinking about silhouettes and shape language and gradients of value and color, and then you’re adding hatching maybe where the light is hitting,” says Budsberg. “That’s really hard to do [in CG] because the renderer wants to make something physically accurate.”
The effects team developed tools such as an Accent shader to manipulate the light response to make it look like it’s brushed and painterly. “We approached fur and feathers as a painter would, [a] broad-stroke underlayer with successive layers of accents of texture that were only revealed through light,” notes Budsberg.
The realistic yet expressive depictions of the wildlife anchor the story as Roz’s relentless kindness collides with the animals’ instincts to be wary of potential predators. Slowly, Roz starts to engage with the animals on the island, and develops an unexpected friendship with Fink, a tough-talking fox. “He’s representative of the island in that the animals on this island have to be selfish,” says Sanders. “If they’re not, they won’t see another day.”
The filmmakers’ constant attention to the influence of art in conveying emotion was essential for building relationships like this one, which allows both characters to reveal their vulnerabilities as they grow and heal. It becomes a wonderful lesson and reminder for the audience—that finding common ground through kindness is a skill worth cultivating.
