There’s something special about DreamWorks Animation‘s The Wild Robot, which earned three Oscar nominations for Animated Feature, Sound and Original Score.
“I knew from the moment I read the book that we had to move in a completely new direction in order to faithfully get this narrative up on the screen,” writer-director Chris Sanders says during a panel for Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees.
One of the more unique aspects of the film is the lack of dialogue, which allowed for more reliance on sound design and score. Even in the beginning of the film, only the main character Roz, voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, has dialogue.
“One of my big nitpicks about American animation is that it tends to rely too much on dialogue, and this movie has quite a bit less dialogue [than] typical,” says supervising sound designer Randy Thom. “The great thing about that is that it allows the movie to be more cinematic than it would otherwise, and it allows space for Kris Bowers and for sound design, to really shine and to help tell the story.”
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“The beginning was a bit scary in terms of how much responsibility would be on the music, but it also felt very exciting because it let me know that the score could have a lot of melodies,” adds Bowers, the film’s composer. As oftentimes melodies can get in the way of a character’s dialogue, The Wild Robot presented an opportunity for Bowers to create melodic themes that grow with the characters over the film.
In one key scene, when Roz jumps from a ship while the forest is alight with magenta fire, shows off how the painterly style matches the soundscape.
“All movies have a sound style, just like they have a visual style, and this scene is like a great microcosm of the whole movie in a sense,” says Thom. “And the sound style, both in terms of music and sound design, grow directly out of Chris Sanders’ design of the film.”
“Our inspiration was Bambi, which, that was a landmark moment in that film, and I think in cinema, when they did their animated forest fire,” says Sanders. “So, we moved towards a more magenta look, just to freshen it up … and people reacted really positively to that. Overall, the painterly style is on full display and to full effect in this sequence.”
“I love that you can go see this film and see something you have literally never seen before,” he adds.
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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