On the cover of Peter Brown’s best-selling children’s book “The Wild Robot” are massive evergreens and a matching dark green seascape. Atop a pile of enormous boulders is a tiny but unmistakable image of a robot: Roz, the book’s protagonist, with her bucket-shaped head, squared-off shoulders and two headlights for eyes.
“With a book, the cover is often all you’ve got to pull the reader in,” Brown said in an interview. “I very deliberately designed Roz to look simple, so that when people saw the book cover they would immediately know that it’s a robot.”
Movies, however, have a bit more freedom when it comes to automatons. “There’s motion, there’s sound effects, there’s all this other stuff that can tell viewers pretty quickly that they’re looking at a robot,” he added.
So when the artists and designers at DreamWorks Animation set about adapting Brown’s book and its mechanical star for the big screen, they let their minds run free. In place of the static, unblinking silhouette of Brown’s book cover, DreamWorks created a leaping, whirling, battling protagonist who can scuttle up steep cliffs like a crab and swing from place to place via long telescoping arms.
For a studio like DreamWorks, makers of the “Kung Fu Panda” and “How to Train Your Dragon” franchises, coming up with the dramatic action sequences and cool character design was relatively easy. The challenge for the film, which opens on Sept. 27: keeping the soul of a character that millions of readers had fallen in love with over the course of Brown’s trilogy, a character that was, yes, a robot who could stand alongside Hollywood’s and anime’s most exciting droids and bots, but was also, at heart, an adoptive mother trying her best to care for an orphaned gosling.
Having the Academy Award-winning Lupita Nyong’o voice Roz was a huge help, said Chris Sanders, the film’s director. From the very start of the movie, it’s the actress’s voice that lets viewers know that Roz is friendly — often to a fault — and female.
“But I also think our artists nailed the design,” he said.
The process was a long one. Artists tried out a variety of head shapes (some bucket-shaped, like the Brown original; others triangular, or oval) and body types (some chunky and segmented, with mechanical innards exposed; others with barrel chests). Some had tiny feet; others had big chunky boots. Some had rudimentary mouths and noses, including an early design by Sanders, which featured a head that recalled the sweeping fins and lidded headlights of a 1958 Buick. “I did those illustrations fairly quickly,” Sanders said.
Early on, however, the modeling supervisor Hyun Huh devised a circle-heavy look for Roz that became the prototype for everything to come: a big round head and body, her face completely void of features other than two big round eyes. “When I started designing, I was just doodling, making spheres,” Huh said. “So when you look at Roz, everything is a sphere.”
“Hyun’s design had such strength and charm,” Sanders said. “It was cute, but it was also very simple and very true to Peter’s original designs and illustrations. All of us just put our pencils down at that point.”
From there, the refining began. Everyone loved Roz’s round head, but it was tough to tell which way she was facing. “Chris said he wanted more feeling of direction,” said the art director Ritchie Sacilioc. “So I thought, well, if I just put a teardrop shape on the back of her head, you’d know that she was facing one way or the other.”
Without a mouth or brows, the eyes had to do a lot of the heavy lifting, emotion-wise. Roz’s digital peepers widen with wonder, or narrow when she’s sad, via lenses and shutters that mimic a camera’s. “I was really pushing for some very elaborate eyes,” Sanders said. “I asked, can you make them look expensive? I wanted them to look like the most expensive Panavision lenses you could possibly get your hands on.”
To make Roz’s exterior more visually interesting, designers came up with a series of running lights on her face and body that resemble the lines of a circuit board. The lights “were there from the very beginning, and I didn’t think much of them,” Sanders said. “They were just a great design feature. What we didn’t understand was how effective those lights would be in transmitting her emotions and telling the viewer how she felt about things.”
Once Roz’s general look was firmed up, the designers were called upon to equip her with all sorts of gadgets and mechanical tools. “I always thought of my Roz as a robot who hadn’t had any of that other stuff installed yet,” Brown said. “She’s sort of your basic factory-issued robot. Chris’s version of Roz is tricked out with lots of different tools and capabilities.”
Through the course of the film, those tools are slowly revealed: claws that can climb sheer cliffs; fingers that shoot flames; arms that function as vacuums and leaf blowers; a homing beacon that emerges from the top of her head; and so on. Just as viewers discover Roz’s abilities on the fly, so too did the artists who were called upon to create her Swiss Army knife collection of tools, said the production designer Raymond Zibach.
“There’s a ton of gadgets that got added to her,” he said. “Peter talks about her running really fast, and about her strength, but we also added a lot of stuff that made her more cinematic, and more fun to look at.”
In the end, Huh hopes that the design he came up with, and that the DreamWorks team refined, speaks to moviegoers — and shoppers. “To be honest with you, when I designed it, and when I look at the final version of Roz, I hope people buy a lot of toys,” he said.
“Even when Roz isn’t doing a lot, I’m still empathizing heavily with her, and I think it’s because of the look of the head that Hyun created,” Sanders said. “She looks a little bit astonished, and a little confused, almost constantly, and I think you really feel for her. You kind of want to give her a hug and tell her it’s going to be OK.”
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