Chris Sanders on getting Roz’s design as the right ‘level of simplicity and charm’ for ‘The Wild Robot’

When coming up with the design for Roz in “The Wild Robot,” director Chris Sanders knew he wanted something that would be memorable, classic, and enduring. “That meant we had to find something that had some level of simplicity and charm but also it had to be a little bit different in the venn diagram of robots. You’re always going to have some territory that you’re veering into that,” he tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: Film Animation panel (watch the video interview above). All the artists were trying their hands at it but when the eventual design was brought in by one of the artists, Sanders said he had found the visual rhythm with the spheres that came across in a very friendly way. “That’s exactly how we want people to feel about Roz. I wanted this robot to feel like you could replace a part on her if you had to, that she was user-friendly, and that the things that she did and the things that you saw on her just made sense.”

“The Wild Robot,” from DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures, is based on a series of childrens’ novels by Peter Brown. An intelligent robot, ROZZUM Unit 7134, is marooned on an uninhabited island following a shipwreck. Roz attempts to bond with the island’s wildlife and ends up taking in and raising an orphaned gosling. The film stars Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Matt Berry, Catherine O’Hara, and Mark Hamill.

From the get-go, Sanders and his casting director, Christi Soper, knew that Lupita Nyong’o was their top choice to provide the voice of Roz. The task of finding Roz’s voice was something that Nyong’o dove right into. “It was fascinating for me to watch Lupita deconstruct Roz and then put her back together again, if you will, and just so that she could understand the architecture of her thinking. And then Lupita went even beyond that. She actually created a voice.” They broke Roz’s voice development into three stages and the first stage was the most challenging for Lupita vocally. “She created that sound and we termed it a kind of relentless optimism, the kind of thing you hear from Siri or from Alexa. It’s that sort of positivity that Lupita captured but as the film goes on and the story develops, she certainly becomes a more dimensional being and much more human.”

Sanders’s work in animation goes back to the early 1990s when he worked at Disney and worked on the stories for “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” and “The Lion King.” He would go on to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature three times: “Lilo & Stitch” in 2002, “How to Train Your Dragon” in 2010, and “The Croods” in 2013.