The Film Experience

Photo by Marc Piasecki | © Getty Images for DreamWorks Animation

Paper airplanes fly through the air, zipping across the auditorium and above the audience. Some crash land on unsuspecting heads, while others sway wild into oblivion, lost in dark corners of the cinema. It's a merry sight, which only grows merrier when these crafts arrive at their intended destination – the stage – prompting applause from the crowd in good festival fashion. Within this hubbub of enthusiasm, a sense of community prevails, made more heartfelt by the presence of children among press folk, the families of filmmakers and animators excited to see how the world reacts to their work. Such was the scene at the Annecy Film Festival, as DreamWorks Animation came to celebrate its 30th anniversary and present The Wild Robot…

Photo by Marc Piasecki | © Getty Images for DreamWorks Animation

An erstwhile Disney man who found widespread acclaim with Lilo & Stitch, Chris Sanders is a director whose every work should be perceived as an event. After all, following his time at the House of Mouse and that alien blue menace, the cineaste went on to thrive in the director's chair, often partnered with Dean DeBlois. His greatest triumph to date is probably How to Train Your Dragon, whose family-friendly brilliance is matched by formal innovations that changed the CGI animation game a little more than a decade ago. Who can forget Roger Deakins' involvement in that picture, bringing knowledge from live-action cinematography into the cartoon world?

From realistic lighting techniques to the virtual camera's growing sophistication, the story of Hiccup and Toothless was a landmark for Sanders and animation itself. It was even more critical for DreamWorks, which finally seemed to stop trying to imitate its competitors. Instead, it went its own way, down a path defined by a willingness to experiment and repudiate notions of a set house style. In this, the studio differs from the Hollywood norm, upholding a place of innovation in the industry, even when a picture's artistic merits are otherwise negligible.

However, Chris Sanders' cinema is seldom negligible, and his latest collaboration with DreamWorks is looking to be another triumph that adds luster to his golden filmography. As presented to the Annecy Film Festival crowd, The Wild Robot is an adaptation of Peter Brown's best-selling series - sequels are a possibility - that reaches for a painterly aesthetic, often described by its makers with words like illustrative and impressionistic. It doesn't look like anything else out there, that's for sure, something plain to see from the footage shown at the fest. The images centered on two crucial passages – the very beginning of the picture and a migration sequence that manages to pull at the heartstrings even in this decontextualized presentation.

© DreamWorks Animation

The first clip starts as Brown's book does, in the near future, when a storm at sea leaves boxes full of robots drifting on the waves. Coming ashore, most of the machines are broken beyond repair, but one still stirs with artificial life. She's ROZZUM unit 7134 – Roz for short – and, when a curious otter turns on her system, off she goes into an island with no people to assist. In this predicament, the compulsively helpful robot decides to aid the animal population, though her efforts are clumsy, prone to accidental destruction. It all culminates when, running from a bear, the gentle robot crashes into a goose nest. The feathered mother is gone, and most of her eggs lay cracked open, their insides spilled everywhere. Only one remains, left alone in an unforgiving world. Just like Roz.

With the egg in her possession and a new ability to translate the animal noises into discernable language, Roz takes it upon herself to raise the baby gosling bound to hatch. Indeed, the second clip happens long after, when the chick has grown into an adolescent goose called Brightbill. At this point, adoptive mother and son are at odds, yet united by a common goal. The young bird – the runt of his lost brood - must learn how to fly to go on the migration that takes his species across the globe. There's little time, but Roz persists, a curious image of motherhood made out of plastic and metal, circuitry in place of a heart. Still, it beats with love, exceeding the original programming to become something more. Something that can recognize a universal truth that's the film's emotional backbone – a mother's task is never complete.

© DreamWorks Animation

This latter sequence was storyboarded by Sanders himself, holding within it the picture's first big emotional climax. Oh, but this is not the end of The Wild Robot. There's much more to see as Brightbill witnesses the world where Roz came from, and that very cosmos comes into the island, an unwelcome intrusion with unforeseen consequences. And so, notions of rescue get turned upside down, as does the idea that Roz doesn't belong here. You can see glimpses of it in the second trailer that DreamWorks released last week, along with such varied visions as a human future where ecological disasters have changed the shape of our world, and the Eden of Roz's new home falls under the threat of forest fire glowing like pink ruby.

Every second of The Wild Robot footage is a gift, showing the complex geometry of 3D spaces rendered in flat swaths of color, stipples, and brushstrokes. Notice the butterflies that appear as impasto on canvas, their wings shaped by some virtual paint scraper. Watching them flutter in an impossible wind is akin to witnessing a miracle of animation. Isn't it wonderful when cinema can still show us something we've never seen before? Not that technical innovation is the only game in town. For sure, the artists involved in this production describe their process as going back to retrieve what has been lost in the transition from traditional hand-drawn to CGI animation.

In a full circle moment, The Wild Robot finds that what was thought gone from Hollywood animation is gone no more, merely transformed into something new and old, a step forward and a look back. If that wasn't apparent in this first presentation, it became evident during a panel with the movie's design, animation, and story team. The whole thing started with a slide proudly saying, "made entirely by humans," a rallying cry of sorts within a medium that feels increasingly threatened by generative AI. From there, the attendees were taken on a voyage through the picture's inspirations, going from the foundational references of Bambi and Studio Ghibli's pastoral backgrounds to the art of Tyrus Wong, Hans Bacher, Oscar Droege, John Park, Albeniz Rodriguez, Syd Mead, and John Berkey.

Those brilliant image-makers formed the base for The Wild Robot's unique style, which was accomplished by a series of software inventions, new tools applied with a painter's sensibility. Selective detail allows for striking visions where not everything is being described, merely its impression of light and approximated texture. Sometimes, entire planes of the image are flattened with the camera's distance determining levels of abstraction. This manifests in more than just the backgrounds, however, encompassing every aspect of the picture. Just look at the 65 species of animals – all with eyes taken from real biology rather than animated tradition – Roz's gradual dereliction, or something as apparently straightforward as elemental effects. In The Wild Robot, water isn't mere fluid simulation but a collection of painted surfaces moving across the screen. It's a dream, a memory, rather than barebone hyper-realism.

Photo by Marc Piasecki | © Getty Images for DreamWorks Animation

Apologies, dear reader, for I know such details may not be interesting to you all. However, they filled me with curiosity during those Annecy panels – I am a proud nerd – and the feeling bolstered by the passion shared by everyone involved with the picture. Also, for what it's worth, there's no better way to get into my good graces than to bring silent cinema into modern movie conversations, and that's precisely what The Wild Robot team did. When discussing Roz's movement – a rubber-hose flexibility that gradually changes and restrains itself – Buster Keaton came about as a central reference. The character animation is thus re-imagined as a re-wired slapstick, with a bit of Jacques Tati thrown in for good measure.

In closer talks and roundtables with the Wild Robot team, even more details were shared. I remember Sanders speaking of his attraction to the project in relation to the book's "built-in heartbreak" or the idea that everything has consequence, that robot characters are essentially vulnerable, and that "kindness can be a survival strategy." Then there's the Kris Bowers score, composed before the animation or the film's final shape was complete in a curious inverse of the traditional process. Voice-wise, the cast is starry but judiciously used, with a place of honor for Lupita Nyong'o in the titular role. Even in snippets, there comes across a strong idea of a machine mind's discovery of loss, grief, guilt, the indescribable feelings of a mother who must watch her child go into the world without her.

Not everything is so laden with sorrow or nature's cruel capriciousness, of course. Catherine O'Hara's take on a possum mother proved too unique to resist, leading the story team to adapt their work around a new interpretation of the character, less idealized and more humorously matter-of-fact. Though the filmmakers aim for your tears, they don't seem to want beatific caricatures of motherhood in their movie. Such changes deepened the project and are reflected in an attempt to avoid too much anthropomorphism. You see, though the movie has talking animals, they're not seen as people in critter form. Instead, Roz learns their language and the camera interprets their behavior accordingly. You won't see it in the film, but if you came across Roz in that forest, rather than talking animals, you'd see a humanoid robot behaving like the fauna. There's a strong sense of "let animals be animals" all around.

Similarly, Sanders and company didn't want to sugarcoat the realities of wildlife to their young audience. One feels these artists have learned not to underestimate children or coddle them as viewers. The bittersweet truth of life and death needs to be touched upon, mortality being an essential part of our experience as human beings. It's a commendable way of thinking, and I can only hope the final film reflects all these lofty ideas. Most of what I saw in Annecy about The Wild Robot – and there's much I haven't specified, like a sequence that uses style closer to Brown's original illustrations – suggests a fascinating work well worth our attention as cinephiles. It feels especially essential for those who love the art of animation, be it traditional or cutting-edge. As said before, this picture should be a bit of both.

At the end of my and a group of other journalists' last meeting with the filmmakers, the team made a strong statement: "This is the movie of our careers. The movie we've been waiting for." With such words in mind, it's safe to say The Wild Robot is one of the titles to watch as we head into the second half of the year and the incoming awards season. Who knows? This might be our Best Animated Feature frontrunner.

The Wild Robot opens September 27th in American cinemas. In the rest of the world, the film will be released around the end of September and the first weeks of October.