SPECIAL: The fundamental principle underlying DreamWorks Animation Wild Robot The producers of the film, produced by Jeff Hermann, in which Lupita Nyong’o voices the robot Roz, and directed and written by Chris Sanders, say that kindness is important.
Based on Peter Brown’s 2016 best-selling book, the film will be released in the US on September 27 and in the UK on October 18. The film follows the adventures of Rozzum unit 7134, aka “Roz”, whose gender has been confirmed by the producers to be female. He gets shipwrecked on a remote island populated only by humans, and learns how to learn by interacting with and exploring his environment.
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Hermann says he formed a bond with the animals on the island and “became something he didn’t expect.”
Roz discovers a goose egg and adopts it, which hatches a gosling that Roz names Brightbill, voiced by Kit Conner.
The film also stars Pedro Pascal as the fox Fink; Catherine O’Hara as the opossum Pinktail; Bill Nighy as the wise goose Longneck; and Stephanie Hsu as Vontra, a robot who will intersect with Roz’s life on the island. Other voices include Mark Hamill, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames.
First look images Wild RobotThe film introduced by Sanders was being shown today at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival. Additionally, some of the film’s animators will discuss their art forms. Additionally, later today, DreamWorks will release the second trailer for the film.
“Motherhood is at the heart of everything, and we were able to delve into the emotional toll,” Sanders explains when we meet at AIR Studios in Hampstead, London.
The building was originally a church and missionary school designed in the Romanesque style. In a large music room, a 67-piece orchestra led by Geoff Alexander performs the score composed by Kris Bowers. Bridgerton Fame.
As music fills the control room, Sanders and his colleagues examine the scenes. Wild Robot on quiet monitors.
Watching Roz help Brightbill make her attempts to fly is undeniably moving. Animated images and Bowers’ melodies provide their own dialogue.
“The gosling is a runt and is chosen by nature not to survive,” Hermann adds, as I am stunned by the images appearing on the monitor.
“He’s not very good at flying and desperately wants to learn, and he grows up thinking Roz is his mother,” he adds.
Hermann told me that when she and Sanders first met Brown, the author said “kindness is a survival skill, and it’s something that resonates with us so deeply, because it’s so relevant in so many ways to what the modern world is experiencing.” Right now. “We wanted this to make a splash.”
Those conversations with Brown about kindness and empathy “helped shape who Roz is because she is programmed not to harm anyone, so she has an innate kindness programmed into her. But he also needs to learn not just to overcome the damage, but to help care for others in a way that will eventually give him a soul.
Sanders, too, is grateful for Brown’s observations about the kindness shown to his creation. This isn’t something Brown explicitly put in the book, he says: “But it’s a good example of what we can put into the movie. “This was a real guide for us when we felt like we were losing track of the story.”
Sanders, who also directed Lilo and Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon and was a writer and story artist Beauty and the Beast, says Roz isn’t malicious, isn’t attacking anything, and has growing emotions, and observes: “Any movie about a machine living a life is inevitably going to be something more dimensional. But this story is more than that; It’s really about relationships.”
When I suggested that DreamWorks host a screening for Congress, Sanders responded with a wry smile: “I disagree.”
Before my eyes get too misty, Hermann shares: Bambi There are “moments of pure terror” in this one. Scary things, devastating things. This was something the book did very well. “So showing kids that the world doesn’t always go your way didn’t shy away from difficult, challenging topics, but it did help you move through it.”
Wild Robot The illustrated novel was Brown’s first children’s book. On his online blog, the author and illustrator describes how he spent months researching what he calls “unnatural things that live in surprising places.”
Brown scribbled notes from science fiction books like Isaac Asimov’s about a robot living in the wild Complete RobotArthur C. Clarke 2001 and Karel Capex’s 1920s science fiction play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robot) – Roz’s name is derived from here. He also worked on volumes exploring the natural world. Among these was Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human and Bradford Angier How to Survive in the Jungle?To help Brown investigate the question: “What would an intelligent robot do in the wild?”
Sanders had many similar conversations with the film’s star, Nyong’o.
“I think it was the most intense discussion I’ve ever had about a character because there’s so much of Roz in her voice,” she says of her admiration for working with Nyong’o.
Sanders adds that all the characters in the film live in their own voices, but observes that Roz “is a lot more nuanced than she is a robot.” It comes from a very unusual place, and one of the biggest discussions we had together was where to start? Where does it end? How will we reflect this?
He praises Nyong’o for her efforts to “find that character and find that voice.”
He marvels at what he can do with his voice, which is “beyond acting.”
A conversation Sanders had with sound designer Randy Thom proved to be an eye-opener, perhaps even a jaw-dropper.
Sanders asked Thom, “What does an artificial voice sound like?” asked.
“And what he came back with was surprising but perfectly logical. “The biggest effort with artificial sounds, he said, is to make them sound as real as possible and not artificial.”
This was an epiphany for Sanders and Nyong’o. “It allowed Lupita to be in a space where she was human, but a very special person. A person who sees things in a very compartmentalized, very structured way. It’s like a giant encyclopedia. “There’s a lot he knows but doesn’t understand,” Sanders says.
“He knows statistics, he knows some things about how things are put together, but he doesn’t understand how they work,” he adds.
In the case of Brightbill, for example, the gosling “is an entity completely outside the database.”
Armed with this knowledge, Sanders and Nyong’o recorded each scene several times.
Sanders laughs and says Nyong’o will read the script changes and “react to those pages and tell me what she thinks and where she thinks it’s missing.”
The filmmaker would go and rewrite some more for Nyong’o to re-record.
“We allowed Roz to be more dimensional from the beginning, because she still has a long way to go, but we wanted people to really connect with her right away,” Sanders explains.
I ask how Nyong’o achieved this breakthrough. He shakes his head. “It’s just Lupita’s way of making moments happen.”
Sanders says he’d be worried if Nyong’o walked in, shrugged, read the lines and went home. I loved that he stepped back, I loved that he had things to say, and I loved that he made me work harder as a writer and director to get this to where it needed to be.
He admits that Nyong’o will “catch me on some things.”
He grins and continues, “He would say, ‘I don’t think that’s right, I think you wrote the wrong direction here.’ And he would tell me what he thought. I don’t think there was a moment when I disagreed with what he said.
“Taking notes is never a party, but you should do it. You can’t ignore them. I can’t do it.”
Dialogues are missing in the movie.
Bowers’ soaring score was researched as thoroughly as Roz’s voice for the film.
There are 80 minutes of music in the film. The movie is 92 minutes long. “As a composer, having a canvas to play on is an amazing gift,” says Bowers, who grew up with love. Silly SymphoniesDisney’s Fantasy “and all those classic cartoons where there is an indelible link between movement and musical. And orchestral music in particular is where much of my love for a score can originate.
“And having the opportunity to work on something where music plays a role definitely feels like a childhood dream,” the composer says.
Bowers was hired before animation began because the producers knew music would be a huge component in the storytelling. He joined us in late 2022 and wrote his first pieces of music in early 2023.
“It also allowed us to repeat the music for a very long time and sit with it—we had just over half the movie done at the beginning of this year, and that made us feel really, really confident with the palette and the themes and all that stuff.
One of Bowers’ first thoughts when considering his score was “how to capture the sound of the wilderness without choosing an instrumentation that would evoke thoughts or connect with any particular ethnicity.”
“There’s something a bit cynical about hearing ethnic things when you see the wild. Personally, if I heard this, I would immediately wonder what culture this sound came from,” Bowers notes carefully.
To this end, he sought out Sandbox Percussion to collaborate. “They play percussion on a lot of found sounds, like a tree branch,” he says of Roz’s efforts to find a sound that resonated with her experiences on the island.
Additionally, the 40-member choir that would join the orchestra at AIR Studios would “only use syllables so that we would have no choice of words or language, and again would not give us any specific cultural context through language.” Bowers says.
I automatically assume Bowers’ rating for Netflix. Bridgerton It was also recorded in London.
“You would think that,” he says, doubling over with laughter.
Not like that. Music of the first season Bridgerton It was composed using a system in which 10-12 musicians recorded at home during the pandemic period. “Then we put it all back together,” Bowers says.
He continues: “We keep doing it that way because we found a sound we really like. All three seasons and Queen Charlotte “It was all done remotely.”
Suddenly the violinists and cellists put down their bows, and for the first time during my visit of four hours or more, I watch a robot named Roz try to teach a gosling to fly.
No music. No words.
Still, the idea of this robot forming a community in the wild fascinates me in a strange way.
It’s nice to have it in theaters during awards season.
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