Making of ‘The Wild Robot’ panel: Creative team discusses ‘painterly world’ of the film and ‘Roz’s emotional journey’

“The thing that’s really magical about the book is that there are so many themes and ideas and concepts interwoven together, all or some of which appeal to just about everybody in the audience,” reflects Jeff Hermann on what most enticed him to adapt the 2016 book “The Wild Robot” to the screen as an animated feature film. The producer shares that writer Peter Brown’s original book is “about kindness and empathy and community and found family.” Gold Derby spoke to Hermann as part of our Making Of “The Wild Robot” panel, alongside head of story Heidi Jo Gilbert, production designer Raymond Zibach, film editor Mary Blee, and visual effects supervisor Jeff Budsberg. Watch the complete video interview above.

Gilbert collaborated closely with the film’s director and screenwriter Chris Sanders to translate Brown’s original story to the screen. “We streamlined it a lot,” reflects the head of story. The pruning was necessary because the book and, by extension, the original treatment for the film “didn’t follow a typical three-act structure, so it started to feel a little episodic.” She adds, “We had to make adjustments to figure out how to home in on Roz’s emotional journey.” Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is the protagonist of the story, the title robot who winds up shipwrecked on an island and becomes a maternal figure to a young gosling and helps him prepare for his winter migration.

Production designer Zibach also drew inspiration from Brown’s original book. “The style was very clear, but it felt like a modern fairytale,” he remembers, sharing that what he most took away from the illustrations in the book was “the simplicity of a humanoid robot.” From those original drawings, he worked to “upgrade the design a little bit with detailed touches.” He was also particularly affected by how Brown represented the island, noting, “The island is brutal, it is this other challenge” for Roz to overcome.

WATCH our video interview with Chris Sanders, ‘The Wild Robot’ writer-director

Budsberg was also heavily involved in the design of the universe of the story. The VFX supervisor explains that while Roz “doesn’t belong” on the island, “she also doesn’t belong there stylistically” in the “deconstructed painterly world” that Zibach and the animators were creating. The visual effects come in as he and his team started “introducing a brushed highlight on her skin” and “smearing edges” so that “by the end of the film, she is now painterly.” This evolution in style reflects how acclimated Roz has become to the natural, wild world of the island.

Editor Blee collaborated closely with Sanders to make sure all of this careful design and storytelling work comes across on camera. She says of the director, with whom she had worked before, “He wanted to make something that was different, that harkened back to classic animation… but make it fresh.” That directive entailed a different approach, as Sanders tasked himself and Blee with implementing a “documentary style,” meaning that they would be “finding the subject” with the camera, “not just having a locked-off camera all the time” as well as “having a little bit of handheld, having longer shots so that you could really show off all the work that was being done in art with this painterly look.”

Listen to the complete conversation above to hear about each of the panelists’ favorite sequences – including the incredible migration scene when Brightbill (Kit Connor) accomplishes his task and the scene in the robot graveyard where Roz encounters Rummage (also voiced by Nyong’o) – as well as how everyone worked hard to make Roz immediately lovable in the first 10 minutes of the movie.

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