The Wild Robot

Adapted from Peter Brown’s 2016 novel. Chris Sanders says he wrote down Brown’s line that kindness could be a survival skill and kept it in the script. In house the look was called Bambi meets WALL-E. Sanders brought reference paintings and asked whether the film could really be that impressionistic; Tyrus Wong’s Bambi backgrounds and Studio Ghibli fed the island, Syd Mead the city, and Brown’s own illustrations the dream passages. Roz’s voice shifts in stages. Nyong’o and Sanders built it in three phases, and Sanders says that by the third act you are hearing Lupita Nyong’o herself. Nobody tells you the character has changed; your ear notices. Two departures from the book matter. Vontra was invented for the film and is not on the page. Where the book gives the island away by accident, here Roz switches her own transponder on, so the ending comes of a decision, not bad luck. It took three Oscar nominations and won none; the animated feature prize went to Flow. Worldwide it grossed 334.5 million dollars. A good fit if you want a family animation that shuts predator and prey into the same shelter and lets the backgrounds look hand painted. Not for very small children; Roz crushes a goose nest in the first minutes, and one egg survives.