Director Chris Sanders explains why The Wild Robot has reduced adults into blubbering messes

There are still two months left of the year but where it stands, right now, the best film of 2024 may actually be a kids’ movie.

The Wild Robot is winning fans young and old, and if you go to any session at a cinema, as many have done in the past six weeks, you will have noticed audiences choking back the snot that comes from a cathartic weep session. Maybe it wasn’t even the man in the row behind, it was probably you.

The animated feature is set sometime in our future, centred on a helper robot named Roz whose only missions in life are to complete tasks. Fresh out of the box, Roz is shipwrecked on an island without any human inhabitants, only the animals that call it home.

When she accidentally crushes a goose and her nest, she discovers a lone egg left. It hatches, and Roz is the first thing the gosling sees, and it imprints on him that Roz is his mother. Roz is not programmed to raise the baby but she takes it on anyway, trying to teach Bright Bill to eat, swim and fly.

There are lots of warm-and-fuzzies, the heartrending story miming themes including parenting, kindness and why life is not a zero-sum game. The vivid visuals of a robot nuzzled up against a gosling is enough to make you go “aww” and that’s before it earnt those copious tears.

If you think the folks over at Pixar are wizards at reducing adults into blubbering messes, then you haven’t met Chris Sanders, who directed The Wild Robot.

Sanders is something of a legend in the animation world. He worked at Disney throughout the 1990s as a writer, contributing to Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and Mulan. Then he was given charge of his own film to create, write and direct, resulting in fan favourite Lilo & Stitch. He even provided Stitch’s chaotic growls.

When he left Disney, Sanders went over to Dreamworks, where he started the stirring How to Train Your Dragon franchise with frequent collaborator Dean DeBlois.

On The Wild Robot, Sanders put his full sorcerer powers to work, evoking emotional responses with beautiful frames, a rousing story and wonderful voice performances from Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor and Catherine O’Hara.

Sanders adapted the film from a beloved book by Peter Brown, which he said an “unusual level of relatability,” he told The Nightly.

“Whether you’re a parent or you’re going to become a parent, or you’re kid or you were a kid, we all see this story from our personal perspectives.

“I found the book and the story to be incredibly compelling and the idea of this robot being lost and having to deal with this situation, and adapt to survive.”

Roz is “pushed off script and has to improvise” as Sanders put it, which is something everyone understood, when the world throws something unexpected at you and the only option is to deal with it. To have that parable play out in this story about a robot and a gosling speaks to the resilience of people, even if it’s not always apparent. Without sounding too trite, it’s actually inspiring.

“As a human being, I don’t like change,” Sanders explained. “I tend to cling to certain things, and I think that I feel like my identity is locked up in these particular things that I’ve learnt culturally.

“(The movie counters that with) the idea that you can change and learn and become better, a more dimensional being, but you don’t become a better person, you’re still yourself. That’s an important idea that exists inside the story.”

Roz isn’t the only character who morphs. For Sanders, the character that stood out to him was Fink, the fox voiced by Pascal, whose role was expanded from the book. Fink is the being that explained to Roz that the philosophy of the island is survival, you do whatever you can to make sure you’re not someone else’s meal.

Over the course of the movie, Fink’s programming evolves as well, as Roz’s influence on former enemies, predators and prey, shows them that being part of a collective is even more advantageous.

“It’s the notion that kindness can be a survival skill,” Sanders said. “This is something that Peter mentioned to us in our very first phone conversation (…) and I jotted it down and thought that’s a really necessary thing to get on screen,

“The idea that Roz, in this gentle, fair way, changes so much of this environment around her.

“That particular idea, especially right now, is incredibly important to get out there because I think we have stress from varying directions these days. As the world becomes more complex and technological, we tend to want to run to a safe place and stay there and be defensive about that.

“The idea that Roz can reach out and just so gently change things, is a beautiful message and a beautiful story.”

The Wild Robot has been a huge hit around the world with a global box office a whisker shy of $US200 million. In Australia, it has remained in the top two since its release and has made $14.69 million.

“You work so hard on these movies and they take years to make,” Sanders said, chuffed. “We all felt that this was something special. We felt it all through the production, and I think everybody that worked on this just fell in love with it.”

The Wild Robot is available to rent or buy from October 29