The chaotic Robot manager wanted to go beyond CG animation’s capabilities

When Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon co-director Chris Sanders dropped into DreamWorks to see what movies they had on their improvement roster, he fell in love with The chaotic Robot. Originally a series of middle-grade books by author and illustrator Peter Brown, the communicative follows a robot named Roz who ends up in the wilderness and forms a deep bond with an orphaned gosling.

It was everything Sanders wanted: subtle, emotional, and character-driven.

“Sometimes erstwhile I see a property like this, I actually get a small bit anxious, due to the fact that I feel like I know what to do,” he tells Polygon. “So I want to be the 1 that does it. I just feel like, I think I know precisely what to do. delight let me do it, due to the fact that I know where to go. I have a good direction.”

Sanders, who besides co-directed The Croods for DreamWorks, knew what he wanted this movie to be. And now that computer technology is yet capable of approaching the look of hand-drawn animation, he was able to push the movie to look the way he envisioned it. From the first trailers, which revealed a lush, gorgeous movie unlike any other, we were eager to know more. So ahead of the movie’s late-September release, Sanders sat down with Polygon to talk about utilizing his 40 years of experience in the animation planet to craft this profoundly individual story.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Polygon: Is there a movie you previously worked on in your career that you feel prepared you most for The chaotic Robot?

Chris Sanders: Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon. Those are the most individual films I’ve always worked on. How to Train Your Dragon was adapted from a book, but it prepared me for this peculiar film, due to the fact that erstwhile we came on to How to Train Your Dragon, we were inheriting the movie from a erstwhile director, and they didn’t like the direction that was going. They wanted to make a change. We had to strip the communicative down to its framework in order to figure out what the problem was. image a car coming into a shop, and it’s not running, and you wonder why, and you just take the full thing apart, and you begin building it up from scratch.

So my experience working on the communicative for How to Train Your Dragon taught me that it’s OK to treat these things structurally for a while. Before you let yourself to get into the more fun parts and the characters, it’s okay to back up and look at them structurally. So that’s something that I truly took distant from How to Train Your Dragon. It served me well in this peculiar narrative.

How closely did you work with Peter Brown for the movie?

Our very first telephone call was to Peter Brown for the project. It was the most consequential telephone call of the series. I have yet to meet Peter in person. Our timing on this was very difficult, due to the fact that he was in the midst of moving, and then he had his first child, and he was besides finishing up his 3rd book, and he had a deadline for that. So he was never truly able to come out and visit us. We were always doing things over Zoom.

But that very first telephone call, he said something that was highly significant. He told us that while he was writing the book, the subject that was going through his head was that kindness can be a endurance skill, and we just immediately wrote that down. I knew that I wanted to memorialize that in script and screen, and that’s precisely what we did.

The chaotic Robot grapples a lot with the stresses of parenthood. How do you strike a line between a communicative that will be accessible to children but inactive meaningful to adults?

Since I began my journey in animation, I learned that to make a good animated movie for everyone, you work to not exclude. You never rather mark anyone, but you do the opposite. You make certain that you don’t do something that would, for any reason, keep individual else — anybody — from enjoying the film. And that doesn’t mean everybody has to realize everything. It’s okay to have stuff that goes over kids’ heads erstwhile in a while. I remember erstwhile I was a kid, in tv shows and movies, there were certain things, like, I have no thought what’s going on, but I inactive like this movie. So we work not to exclude.

One of the aspects of the communicative I truly gravitated toward was that there is simply a strong subject of motherhood that runs throughout — it’s always been a bit of a gag in animation, that there are always missing mothers in these stories. And I’ve come to realize why that is. But in this case, it was core to the story.

So that means the full thing was truly fresh and truly different. And I love things that are both challenging and besides things I think I can do things with. I don’t head that there are elements that are a bit of a puzzle, and that might be hard to figure out. due to the fact that erstwhile you have a good communicative crew and a good editor, you’ll figure these things out.

What was something that presented a bit of a puzzle?

There were a few, like precisely what Roz’s trajectory is through the film, peculiarly erstwhile she arrives on the island. In the book, she is driven to find a task, and she’s in the incorrect place, and there are no people to give her a task, so she is frustrated. That tends to get very monotonous. So 1 of the things we were truly trying to do is keep Roz interesting and compelling, and never let her get into a monotonous place where she’s simply going and asking everybody, “Do you have a job? Do you have a job?”

So uncovering her attitude as she went into the full thing, but besides weaving the subject of motherhood throughout the full film. It’s a very powerful thing, and you don’t want to shy distant from it, so you want to give it area to breathe. The timing of this movie was very critical as well. It means that I took any of the characters from the book and I trimmed them back so another characters would have more time to do what they request to do. But besides that we’d have a movie that had the same pace in its finished form that I was feeling erstwhile I read the book.

You don’t want to be hurried. You don’t want a crowded movie. And you don’t want a movie that has besides many characters or besides much dialogue, where you’re just tripping over yourself like you’re moving in front of a lawnmower or something. I’ve definitely seen movies that had that.

Did the voice cast for this movie bring anything to their characters that ended up shaping the movie’s trajectory?

It’s 1 of the fun things about casting a character. You do your best to present a character that’s interesting and compelling. erstwhile an actor says yes to a role, the first thing you do is, you go back through the full set of dialog and you rewrite.

Catherine [O’Hara] is simply a large example. She plays the eventual mom in this movie — has three families a year at least. So Pinktail the [possum] could have been an overly sentimental character, very afraid about her precious children and this and that. But with Catherine on board, we took a full different angle that was fresh, and, I thought, just so much fun. She’s over it. Her nurturing wore off many seasons ago. So she’s a very pragmatic mom. She loves her kids, she takes care of them, but there’s a minute where she’s not precisely certain what their names are, due to the fact that she has besides many all year, and so she’s a small bit behind on this and not super concerned. And I loved her take on that character.

Lupita [Nyong’o, who plays Roz] had the hardest task. We wanted the fresh and compelling take on a robot that is increasing as a character, and we didn’t want it to be a two-dimensional thing, where a robot goes from being emotionless to having emotion. That’s just besides simple. What Roz is going through is far more complex and more dimensional. And Lupita worked very, very hard, due to the fact that I insisted that Roz have no facial articulation.

I have quite a few feelings about which kinds of robots work best on screen. Lupita knew that 100% of her performance was on her voice. We were going to leave these recording sessions just with her voice, so she had to weave all small part of nuance and emotion into those recordings.

What we besides were tracking was this change: Roz is the most prominent character through the film. She’s the lead. So she has more dialog than any another character. The sheer scale of what Lupita had to accomplish, on top of the evolution of Roz, and virtually uncovering a voice to begin and end with that were different.

As we went into recording sessions, we had to track that voice as we did different sequences, due to the fact that we do these things out of order. Whatever series is ready to go, that goes into production. That might be a series in the 3rd act, or it might be a series in the second act. So we’re jumping around and dropping into these sequences, and Lupita had to adjust her voice depending on where she was during the recording session.

I cannot say adequate about how incredibly talented she was. But not just talented — she had an incredible work ethic. She sat at the microphone for 4 hours at a time. I’ve done stuff like that, and it is exhausting — it’s hard to stay focused and on point and fresh at the end of a session like that. She did specified a superb job.

There’s a long past in movies of robots who make feelings and relationships. Were there certain characters or movies you drew from for Roz’s design?

There are definitely robot characters that I find are more successful than others: C-3PO, R2-D2, the robot from Forbidden Planet. The only robot that I would say has facial articulation that actually works, in my opinion, is the Iron Giant. So those were the characters I was most looking at, not just due to the deficiency of facial articulation, but besides just due to the fact that they had specified strong designs. That was a very welcome challenge for us, was to make a robot that would be iconic and memorable and would take its place — hopefully, in success‚ within a vast community of very, very memorable robots.

Our plan team, namely 1 of our artists named Hyun Huh, who designed Roz… We were all trying out designs, myself included. But 1 day, erstwhile we came into our art meeting, Hyun presented his design, which is fundamentally the plan you see on screen. We all just fell in love with it and said, “You did it. It’s a unified design. It’s simple, it’s appealing.”

And Peter Brown, in his book, describes Roz both very clearly, but besides very graphically. Which means quite a few the details were left out, due to his graphic style. We knew we had to have a humanoid robot, not just due to the plan presented in a book, but besides due to the fact that Peter Brown told us in individual during 1 of those telephone calls what a Rozzum [robot] was: A Rozzum is simply a generalist. A Rozzum is made to fit into human spaces and work alongside humans, doing jobs with them and for them. So Roz looks human, but she’s besides adaptable. She’s a learning robot. She’s a bit like Silly Putty. She can imprint on things and learn things, depending on where she is.

The visual look of this movie is so distinct and evocative. How did you make it?

It’s 1 of the large stories of this film. DreamWorks had already made any giant strides in getting distant from the CG look that we were so habituated to by design. We were shackled to that look due to the fact that the technology had limitations. So with The Bad Guys and with Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, they had moved into a more illustrated style, which was amazing. But for chaotic Robot, we wanted to go well beyond that.

Our improvement artwork, it’s this loose, sketchy stuff that’s done in paint — digitally, but inactive painted. I love the look of it. It had the impressionistic vibe, and it was very much the way I was seeing the communicative as I read the book. So I asked [Wild Robot production designer] Raymond Zibach, could our finished movie be indiscernible from those explorations? And he said, “Let’s go for it.”

One of the things they needed to do to accomplish that look… We could no longer wrap geometry with textures, which is what we’ve been doing in CG from the very beginning. We request the hand-painted look everywhere. Not just in the sky, but on the ground and in the trees, in bushes and flowers and everything. So that’s what they did. They found a way to paint dimensionally. So there is no geometry in the film, but for the characters. And even the characters have painted surfaces.

[DreamWorks head of look] Baptiste Van Opstal worked very, very hard to get all single feather to be a brushstroke. And if you get close to Fink [the fox, voiced by Pedro Pascal] or Thorn the bear [voiced by Mark Hamill], they don’t have individual hairs, which is the thing we’re besides utilized to [in CG animation], right? You get truly close to a character, it’s like, Ah! Thousands of hairs! Computers want to do this kind of photoreal thing, but we wanted everything to be painted. So that’s the large communicative of this film, is what Raymond and his squad were able to achieve.

I feel like this movie has truly brought our journey full circle. I would say Bambi was the beginning. Bambi is our touchstone as far as the greatest-looking forest I’ve always seen in an animated film. Next door to that would besides be My neighbour Totoro by [Hayao] Miyazaki. We have been struggling to get back to that analog warmth that you can only get from the human hand, and we yet did it with this film.

One of the things I’m so thrilled by is that people who look at it, even if they don’t know precisely why it looks different, they nevertheless see the difference and they respond to it. It is highly compelling, and it supercharges everything on screen. I’m truly thrilled — I feel like we’ve yet come out of the tunnel we’ve been in for like 20 years, and now we’re open and free to maneuver visually like we utilized to be a long time ago.

What were any visual influences you drew from?

Certainly Bambi, [and that movie’s lead production illustrator] Tyrus Wong. In the futuristic parts, we looked at Syd Mead and his plan sensibility, due to the fact that everything is sleek and beautiful. We wanted the planet that Roz ended up in to be the exact other of where she was expected to be. We besides took quite a few inspiration from wildlife photography and wildlife documentaries — the way that you usage long lenses, due to the fact that you’re obligated to stay far distant from your subjects. So certain parts of the movie have a vibe like you’d get from a nature documentary, due to computing it.

Over the past 5 years or so, we’re seeing more and more movies that push the envelope for what computer animation can do. You’ve been in the manufacture for decades — why do you think that’s happening now?

I think it all does come back to technology. That was the thing that anchored us right in 1 spot. We got more chain all year, but we were inactive anchored to that CG look. We were obligated to wrapping geometry, and we got better and better textures all year, etc., etc. But it inactive had this weird kind of photoreal vibe, even though movies like The Croods kept it as simple as possible, so it was inactive very appealing. But I do believe it was mostly technology-based. And I think that what happened was, there’s a tipping point we yet reached, where we can yet technologically decision beyond where we were.

What fresh animated movies have truly stood out to you in that vein?

I think I would be amazed if anybody didn’t say Spider-Verse in answering that question. That movie was specified a wake-up call, and it put everybody on announcement that things have changed. That was a sea change. The second 1 came out, and was equally as fantastic. But the first Spider-Verse, I think everybody was buzzing about that after they saw it. You couldn’t halt talking about the look of it, and the kind and the feel of it. I’m so glad that it actually it had a large box office and it was recognized at awards season.

So I know I’m bringing up something you said almost 20 years ago, but there’s a quote from back in 2007, erstwhile you left Disney to go to DreamWorks, where you said you liked the way DreamWorks looked at animation. Do you remember what you meant by that?

I fishy what I was most likely talking about was… It sounds like a negative, but it’s actually a positive. We don’t truly have a home kind [at DreamWorks], meaning they’re not obligated to a certain look where if they abandon that, they’ll be dinged for it. And I think this [movie] is simply a large example of that strength. We’re able to research different looks for different films, depending on what’s going to be the most effective look for the film.

What was it like returning to DreamWorks for The chaotic Robot? Did anything change? What stayed the same?

Studios always evolve. Artists come, artists go, and we all circulate between studios. I was at Disney for a while, for a long time, and then came to DreamWorks, and I may go someplace else someday! So it has evolved. But the thing about DreamWorks, I think, that has stayed consistent is an work to the audacity of the scale of the film.

That’s something [Disney veteran and DreamWorks co-founder] Jeffrey [Katzenberg] was always truly good at. We as filmmakers tend to get closer and closer and closer to a task until, like, you’ve got this monocle on, and you’re a watchmaker looking at these small tiny parts. And Jeffrey had this large way of just kind of figuratively grabbing you by the collar and pulling you back and making you look at the movie as a whole. Are you doing the big, giant things that you anticipate from a film? He always was large in focusing on the scale and the level of audacity in these movies.

What was something you worked on early in your career that truly shaped the way you looked at animation and filmmaking going forward?

There’s rather a few, rather a fewer things… I should keep a list of these things! all film, you learn something. How to Train Your Dragon. Beauty and the Beast. The Croods. Mulan. You learn something from each 1 of them.

One of the most crucial things I learned from Lilo & Stitch from [composer] Alan Silvestri was that music is 1 of the most effective storytelling tools you have in your arsenal. I have come to really, truly trust on that. In How to Train Your Dragon, a large example would be a series we call “the forbidden friendship.” That was erstwhile Hiccup found himself alone in that cove with Toothless. We just turned the dialog off, and music becomes the voice of the movie. It’s 1 of the most enchanting things you can do, is have characters talking erstwhile in a while. It truly makes people pay attention.

We do that a lot in The chaotic Robot. 1 of the things I’m really, truly arrogant of in this peculiar movie is the pace we were able to achieve. We had about 50% of the dialog that these films usually have, so we have a lot more wide-open spaces. Nonetheless, I inactive designed what I would call “houses for music” within the movie. We just drop dialog and let music take over. So there’s rather a fewer places where Kris Bowers, our amazing, amazing composer, was carrying the communicative for us.

Where do you most want to see animation go in the future?

I’d love to see it go in all sorts of directions. We yet escaped the gravitational pull of planet CG, and I feel like we’re all free to maneuver. So just myself, personally, I cannot wait to research different styles, depending on the kind of communicative that we’re telling. Animation is more alive and well than always before. 1 of the things I’m getting specified a kick out of is seeing how animated films are truly doing well this year in the theaters. [Ed. note: As of publication time, Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, and Kung Fu Panda 4 were all top 10 biggest box-office earners for 2024.] They’re any of the best films this year, flat-out, right?

I love seeing animated films get their due as far as just good audience participation. I think that tackling more serious subject matter… You can tell a communicative for any audience, any age group, as long as you’re aware of what age group you’re speaking to. You can capitalize things. So The chaotic Robot actually tackles any beautiful grown-up stuff and any beautiful dense themes, but we do it in a way that is understandable and digestible to anyone. So I think [American animation is] just broadening the spectrum of the types of stories that we tell.

The chaotic Robot hits theaters on Sept. 27.