AROZZUM unit 7134 service automaton — also known as “Roz” — is shipwrecked on a deserted island in The Wild Robot, a critically acclaimed new animated feature directed by Chris Sanders. Based on Peter Brown’s best-selling novel of the same name, the film follows Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) as she inquisitively adapts to her unfamiliar new surroundings and begins to gain the trust of the island’s animal inhabitants.
As the marooned robot becomes increasingly assimilated into the flora and fauna of the island, she blossoms into a loving caretaker, who takes an orphaned gosling under her own wing. Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry and Ving Rhames also lend their vocal talents to this deeply-captivating story.
Animated entirely in-house by DreamWorks, Roz’s adventures unfold in a brilliantly-detailed, painterly style that dazzles the eye and immerses the viewer. Director Chris Sanders, VFX supervisor Jeff Budsberg and production designer Raymond Zibach shared an inside look into bringing The Wild Robot to life on-screen.
DIRECTING
How did you adapt the source material for the screen?
Chris Sanders: “As I read the book, I was seeing some very sophisticated imagery in my head, likening it to the way I felt when I saw Bambi and those beautiful backgrounds styled by Tyrus Wong. I wanted to have a certain level of sophistication to the look of the film, because there were elements that I knew would appeal to children automatically — the animals, the robot — and I was very concerned because I thought, ‘This is a movie for everyone.’ So I wanted to really raise the artistic vibe of the backgrounds and the characters so that people would see the film in the right way, if that makes sense.
“I was working on the narrative in editorial with the story team. Jeff Budsberg (VFX supervisor) and Raymond Zibach (production designer) were creating this very unique look, and the whole thing came together so beautifully.
“There was a day where I was in a meeting that we have every week called ‘color dailies,’ and in that meeting you look at designs. You look at some things from the color script. You look at these color sketches. where we do exploratory paintings looking at different parts of the film, just deciding what we want the weather to look like, the lighting. I was looking at what I thought was one of those exploratory paintings and someone pushed a button, and it began to move dimensionally. I realized, ‘Oh, that’s the finished film!’
“That’s how painterly we pushed it, so that I didn’t even realize it was the real film for a moment. I actually had a moment of panic. I was in a bit of suspense for the next couple of weeks because I thought, ‘Had we gone too far?’ That’s how radical the look really was. But once we placed the characters into the shot, it was magic. It all came together, and I thought, ‘No, we have something really amazing on our hands.’"
How did you approach the challenge of bringing a character to life without any facial articulation?
Chris Sanders: “That was a limitation I wanted to give the animators. I felt very strongly that all the robots that I really relate to and fell in love with had no mouths. Or if they did have a mouth, it didn’t move. I would say that the only robot I know of that had a bit of facial articulation that worked was the Iron Giant. Otherwise — C-3PO, R2-D2, Robby from Forbidden Planet — they have no faces or very limited articulation.
“Peter Brown’s illustrations from the original book had a very simple line indicating that Roz had a mouth, and that was the only thing I said, ‘Let’s get rid of it.’ I wanted to give the animators that limitation because I knew that would push them in other ways. That through pantomime and through Lupita’s amazing voice performance, I was very confident we could get everything we wanted and maybe more, because I feel like in the absence of over-articulated faces, an audience will project their emotions onto that blankness, almost like a canvas. I felt like the end result was just very incredible.”
How did you bring a traditionally-animated feel into the CG world?
Chris Sanders: “There’s such reverence for 2D animation or classic animation amongst all the animators, amongst all the artists. There’s a graphic quality to animation that will always have this different way of communicating with our brains. I think we look at paintings and we look at drawings in a different way. I think that graphic sort of communication, combined with what I feel was a great sincerity that we put into the story. It is not a cynical book, and we didn’t want the film to have any sort of cynicism to it. It’s a very earnest, honest story — very sincere.
“I have to also mention Kris Bowers’ incredible score. Kris Bowers, I would argue, is the largest voice in the film. There are many, many places where I built what I call ‘houses for music’ within the story, which I learned — an experience on Lilo & Stitch had a big effect on me — that we then applied to How to Train Your Dragon sequences like ‘Forbidden Friendship,’ where Hiccup and Toothless are working out their relationship and have no dialogue. Those moments are very, very powerful. So I have several places in this film where dialogue pretty much just stops and music takes over. Those moments for me are the most transportive, elevated moments in our film for sure.”
Do you have any advice for up-and-coming animators?
Chris Sanders: “This whole idea of following your dreams is great, but if I had a dream to be a singer, that wouldn’t have worked out because I can’t sing. My voice doesn’t do that. I was talking about this with Jeffrey Katzenberg, and he broke in and said, ‘No, follow your talent.’ And I thought, ‘That’s brilliant. Follow your talent.’ If you have an aptitude towards animation or design or background painting, go with that. Listen to that.
“I started out in the story department at Disney. As I transitioned into directing, both Dean [DeBlois] and I thought, ‘Well, how can we do this? I don’t know how to animate. I don’t know how to draw a background. I certainly can’t paint very well. So how are we going to do this?’ We both realized we would do it by staying where we belong — in story.
“When I direct, I don’t insinuate myself into other people’s departments, into their business. I stay where I belong, so we talk about things from a story perspective. When I talk to animators or background artists or people who are doing the light, or if I’m in editorial, I talk about the needs of the scene, the needs of the story. If an animator goes off and animates a moment and it’s not the way I saw it in my head, but it checks all the boxes, then we’re done. I’m not going to say, ‘That’s not how I saw it.’ You did it. That allows people personal freedom to be as creative as they can possibly be without interference.
“I say all this because all things go back to story. Whether you are lighting something, if you’re painting something, if you’re designing something, think about the story. In a single image, you can have a lot of story. I would say, ‘Look at a Norman Rockwell painting.’ That’s the thing I think that makes his art endure, is there’s always a story within that painting. In one piece of art, you can have a story. And by putting story in things, it makes it relate to people, and people can relate to it. It’ll make it work better.”
VISUAL EFFECTS & PRODUCTION DESIGN
How did the film’s new color space help tell the story?
Jeff Budsberg: “Raymond (Zibach) and I had some conversations early on. I told him that I wanted to overhaul our entire color space because I thought that would enhance the painterly aspect of the film — offering more hues to the 3D artists, similar to more hues on an artist’s palette for a painter. If you can give someone more pigments, I think that gives you a more visceral experience and it allows us to push into areas that are more saturated and more vivid. When I walk into a forest, there’s something about the greens that are so rich, so vibrant in there. If we can give us a little bit of that, it can give the audience something that may be imperceptible, but they’re going to feel it.
“So I told Raymond I wanted to do this, and I fully expected him to be like, ‘You’re insane,’ because this affects every single department at the studio, from the art department, from computer hardware, to display hardware, to our theaters, to how the artists author textures and materials, to the renderer, to editorial. Raymond is as adventurous as I am and said, ‘Let’s try it!’
“We moved from sRGB primaries and working display space into full ACES working space and then a P3 color space. Early on, we were going to do a couple of tests in the art department to see if we could get to a place that allows us to explore this space. When you change your color space, you have this mental mapping of color in your head that’s really difficult to decouple. Now you can reach out even further into the gamut of perceivable hues, so I think that’s one of the trickier things to overcome. We can solve the pipeline problems — how you deliver images and media from department to department. You can solve the hardware problems. But the really challenging thing is rewiring your mental mapping of color in your brain.”
Raymond Zibach: “For me, it was the potential to head off issues, because we always had issues when we would go to HDR grade. We’re working in sRGB and you’re opening it up to get these brighter highlight areas. The benefit (is) going to be holding on to more color as we get into that highlight range.
“I have actually been through several changes of LUTs and color profiles because I’ve been at the studio for over 25 years. This isn’t the first time, but this was the first time in a long time that we had done a big change, and I knew the potential was going to be great for us because the HDR grade is always challenging. Our palette has a lot of subtlety, and anything that gets a better range for us artistically, I was really into.”
The film’s environments feel so full of life. Which tools did you develop to control the wind, water and foliage?
Jeff Budsberg: “There are so many aspects that go into foliage. We want the modelers not to model a plant traditionally — we want them to draw the plants, but in 3D. They’re using a stroke tool called Doodle to be able to author bushes and shrubs with more of an illustrative fashion. Then we set dress with something called Sprinkles, which is our art-directed, paintable, set-dressing tool.
“But the key innovation on Wild Robot is not just the developing of those tools, but coupling them so that the same artist set dressing can decide, ‘I want to make a bespoke flower,’ and you just draw it on the fly in 3D and you’re working between this camera space and 3D space, and able to easily transition between the two. The same artist is the one thinking about the final image, not just, ‘I’m going to dress the world,’ but really thinking about, ‘How is this image constructed? What are the assets that I need? How do I deconstruct them in the same asset...’ So that’s part of the toolset.
“The really interesting thing about the Doodle toolset is it’s actually building a 3D articulation rig as you’re drawing. So all of these things can deform in the space, and those are the advantages that you get doing this in 3D versus something like 2D cards. In 3D, the character can interact with these assets. They can blow in the wind. They can deform. You have all of the artistic freedom to draw whatever you want…I think it gives the audience a really rich experience because they’re like, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’ It looks painted, but it’s moving.”
Raymond Zibach: “I think we used to have a harder time because we were working in a lot of separate packages. Because most of this is Houdini workflows, you could develop these processes, and they will actually just keep building on each other as you go. That used to be really tough when we had a separate lighting package, and effects was using multiple different packages.”
Jeff Budsberg: “I think the takeaway is that on Wild Robot, there’s not just a modeler and a surfacer and a lighter — the gamut of skill sets is blending. The surfacer is drawing assets as well as thinking about lighting. The artist in [character effects] for the groom — which never thinks about lighting and shading — has to think about how to make the groom in a way that looks aesthetically painterly at the end of the day. The lighters are acting like painters — how they manipulate the space with light and filters and colors. I think it allowed everyone to become even stronger artists because they’re reaching across disciplines in ways that they hadn’t done before.”
How did you approach the film’s production design?
Raymond Zibach: “As the tools were getting targeted and developed by Baptiste (Van Opstal) and Jeff, we’d come back to the art and go, ‘What are those designs?’ Because a lot of times on the production-design side, you have an aspiration for how far you can push the look, and then you have the limitation of what’s actually possible. But on this film, with the development that Jeff and Baptiste did right away with Ritchie (Sacilioc), the art director, I was like, ‘Alright, looks like they can do it all. Let’s create these pages.’
“We are creating either silhouettes for modelers or our look-dev department, surfacing and adding all these textures. We broke everything down because we knew the potential for them to actually do it all was there, because I think a lot of times the ‘art to art direction’ is a shorthand for what it’s going to be. But we were like, ‘No, this is exactly what they can do.’
“That Doodle tool ended up speeding up modeling so much. When you think about modeling organic geometry in Maya, it’s pretty painstaking. And now they’re drawing and painting and creating a skeleton and a preview texture that looks like a brushstroke all at the same time. I’m not waiting three departments down to see what the heck this thing is going to really look like.”
Jeff Budsberg: “That level of meticulous construction would take days to a week for a bush. It allows us to approach the problem with a level of artistic deconstruction. You might draw the same bush three times, but deconstruct it differently, and you would use a different bush depending on how far it is off the camera. We call this a level of artistic detail.
“We had to go back to this collaboration between art and technology. We would come up with ideas of things that we could pursue on the execution side. Raymond’s team would go back and try to push the envelope of what they could do. Some of the critical innovations revolved around brushed edges, because that’s something that’s very stereotypical computer-generated imagery. Having techniques to add a feathered edge — almost like a brush running over a textured paper — or smudging nearby assets together to get something that feels like wet-on-wet painting, we call it badger brushing, where we take a really stiff type of brush and smear those edges. We already have these really great painterly assets, but we can push it even further into something that’s really novel.
“We had these great spatial filters developed on Bad Guys and Puss in Boots. You want to push that to the next level, but the challenge on Wild Robot is everything has this feathered transparency. All of our AOVs (arbitrary output variables) — traditionally you have one on this pixel, you have one position or one normal. But with feathered transparency, that doesn’t work because you see through the objects. So if you wanted to filter things, we needed to extend the Cryptomatte data format to be able to do some of these very clever spatial filters on the compositing operation.
“Having these tools at the artists’ disposal, as opposed to something that’s just like a procedural filter, was so critical because you feel the artist’s hand.”
Raymond Zibach: “Because great painters are actually great editors that are choosing what to show off and what to change, and what to manipulate to show their point of view. Now we have those tools, and we can work fast enough. I think that was the problem before. You could maybe have something that could emulate what we did, but it would be painstaking.”
Jeff Budsberg: “We have all these tools at our disposal. But if you can bring some of that forward into the asset construction, it makes your job so much easier. You still have all those incredible things that you can do later to manipulate the image. You would never make a realistic bush and filter the bush to make it look painterly. If you want a painterly plant, draw the plant.”
Raymond Zibach: “You don’t want to be filtering stuff later to cover up something you don’t like. What we ended up with was every asset just looked so cool that it could stand on its own. When you want to blend it in, it’s going to look great, too. Because that was kind of an older mindset, ‘Alright, we’re just going to filter out the reality of stuff.’ But this just ended up being way more targeted.”
Do you have any advice for artists interested in pursuing a career in animation?
Raymond Zibach: “It depends on where you’re at as far as your animation journey, but I always recommend keeping a sketchbook. I think it’s just great for yourself to always be drawing. Whether you’re going to end up hand drawing your animation or not, I think a skill set of always designing a bit for yourself is really important. I think that’s why Jeff is such a strong visual effects guru and master. He also has a very traditional background in art, and I think that’s really important for animation.
“The other exciting thing about animation is you can really find out a lot online just for yourself, and that I think is amazing. You can find all the different places to go and learn, and then learning even from YouTube. There’s just so much out there that we didn’t have growing up in this business. I think that’s really exciting for people that are curious about animation.”
Jeff Budsberg: “It’s all about the quality versus the quantity. I don’t want to see a five-minute piece that’s subpar. Show me five seconds that blow me away. That requires a discipline that is difficult to grow because you have to not only execute the work, you have to be almost like a painter when you think about, ‘What am I trying to do? Where am I trying to guide the eye? What am I trying to achieve?’”
Raymond Zibach: “Having a point of view and what kind of statement you’re trying to make is really key. It’s all about communicating. What are you trying to get across? Is it coming across strong enough? Walk away from it. Come back. Is it coming through for you? That’s such a big discipline.”
Jeff Budsberg: “Ask your buddies. Have someone else look at it, get their feedback, and don’t take it personally. It’s not a reflection on you. You’re always just trying to make it better. I think that’s the big takeaway. I think it’s less important to learn very specific pieces of software and more important to learn the fundamentals behind them.”