PROGRAMMING THE ILLUSION OF LIFE INTO THE WILD ROBOT

By TREVOR HOGG

Images courtesy of DreamWorks Animation and Universal Pictures.

What happens when a precisely programmed robot has to survive the randomness of nature? That is the premise that allowed author Peter Brown to bring a fresh perspective to the ‘fish-out-of-water’ scenario that captured the attention of filmmaker Chris Sanders and DreamWorks Animation. Given the technological innovations that were achieved with The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, the timing proved to be right to adapt The Wild Robot in a manner that made distinguishing the concept art from the final frame remarkably difficult.

“When I read the book for the first time, I was struck by how deep the emotional wavelengths were, and I became concerned that if the look of the film wasn’t sophisticated enough, people would see it as too young because of the predominance of animals and the forest setting,” explains director/writer Chris Sanders. “We’ve always talked about Hayao Miyazaki’s forests, which are beautiful, sophisticated, immersive and have depth. We wanted that same feeling for our film.”

Achieving that desired visual sophistication meant avoiding the coldness associated with CG animation. “I’m absolutely thrilled about the analog feel that we were able to revive,” Sanders notes. “It’s one of the things that I’ve missed the most about traditional animation. The proximity of the humans who created it makes the look resonate. When you have hand-painted backgrounds, the artist’s hand is evident; there’s a warmth and presence that you get. When we moved into full CG films, we immediately got these wonderful gifts, like being able to move the camera in space and change lenses. However, we also lost that analog warmth and things got cold for a while.” The painterly approach made for an interesting discovery. “A traditionally done CG tree is a structure that has millions of leaves stuck to it, and we’re fighting to make those leaves not look repetitive. Now we’re able to have someone paint a tree digitally. They can relax the look and make it more impressionistic. The weird and interesting thing is, it looks more realistic to my eye,” Sanders remarks.

CG animation was not entirely avoided as a visual aesthetic, in particular when illustrating the character arc of the island-stranded ROZZUM Unit 7134 robot, which goes by the nickname ‘Roz.’ “From the first frame of the movie to the last frame, Roz is dirtier and growing things on her,” notes Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff Budsberg. “But if you look at the aesthetic of how we render and composite her, there is a drastic difference. Roz is much looser. You’ll see brushstroke highlights and shadow detail removed just like a painter would. We slowly introduce those things over the course of the movie. When the robots are trying to get her back, it becomes a jarring juxtaposition; she now fits with the world around her while the robots have that more CG look to them.” Something new to DreamWorks is authoring color in the DCI-P3 color space rather than SRGB. Budsberg explains, “It allows us a wider gamut of available hues because we wanted to feel more like the pigments that you have available as a painter. It allows us to hit way more saturated things than we’ve been able to do at DreamWorks before. The same with the greens. They’re so much richer in hue. Maybe to the audience, it’s imperceptible, but the visceral experience is so much more impactful.”

Elevating the themes of The Wild Robot is the shape language. “We’ve always loved the potential that Roz was going to be a certain fish out of water, and that influenced the design,” notes Production Designer Raymond Zibach. “The simple circular clean, the way that we know a lot of our technology from the iPhone to the Roomba, everything is simple shapes, whereas nature is jagged or pretty with flowers, but everything is asymmetrical.” The trio of Nico Marlet, Borja Montoro and Genevieve Tsai were responsible for the character designs. “All three of them were studying animals and doing the almost classic Disney approach, like when they studied deer for Bambi. Our style landed somewhere in-between a realistic drawing and a slightly pushed style. You can see that in the character, Fink. How big his tail is to how pointy his face is. Those things are born out of an observation that Nico made on all of his fox drawings. We have quite a few species. I heard somebody say 60, but it’s because we have quite a few birds, so maybe that’s why it ended up being that many,” Zibach says.

“It’s limiting not to have a mouth, but that’s red meat for us as animators because that’s when we start to imagine and emphasize pantomime. We looked at Buster Keaton, who has very little facial expression, but his body language conveys all of the emotions, as well as other masters of pantomime and comedy, Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati. There is definitely comedy in this film, but all of it is grounded in some form of reality.”

—Jakob Jensen, Head of Character Animation

While the watercolor paintings Tyrus Wong did for Bambi influenced the depiction of the island, a famous industrial designer was the inspiration for the technologically advanced world of the humans and robots. “Syd Mead is the father of future design from humans and robots. “Syd Mead is the father of future design from the 1960s through the 1980s,” Zibach observes. “The stuff before Blade Runner was optimistic. We wanted to bring that sense to our human version of the future, which to the humans is optimistic. However, for the animals, it’s not a great place for them. That ended up being such a great fit.” As for the robots, Ritche Sacilioc [Art Director] did the final designs for Roz, RICOs and Vontra. “Ritchie designed most of the future world except for a neighborhood that I did. Ritchie loves futurism, and you can see it reflected in all of those designs because he also helped matte painting do all of the cityscapes. I couldn’t be happier because I always wanted to work on a sci-fi movie in animation, and this is my first one. We got to blow the doors off to do cool stuff.”

Tools were made to accommodate the need for wind to blow through the vegetation. “In Doodle, where you can draw whatever foliage assets that you want, we have Grasshopper, which can build rigs to deform these plants on demand, and you can build more physical rigs of geometry that don’t connect or flowers that are floating,” Budsberg explains. “We can build different rigs at various wind speeds, or you can do hero-generated geometry.” Water was tricky because it could not look like a fluid simulation. “It’s one thing to make the water, but how do you make the water look like a painter painted it? It’s not good enough to make physically accurate water. You have to take a step back to be able to dissect it: How would Hayao Miyazaki paint this or draw that splash? How would a Hudson River painter detail out this river? You have to forget what you know about computer-generated water and rethink how you would approach some of those problems. You want to make sure that you feel the brushstrokes in that river. Look at the waterfall shot where the water starts to hit the sunlight; you feel that the brushstrokes of those ripples are whipping through the river. There’s a little Miyazaki-style churn of the water that is drawn. Then the splashes are almost like splatter paint. It’s an impressionistic version of water that allows the audience to make it their own. You don’t want to see every single micro ripple or detail,” Budsberg remarks.

A conscious decision was made not to give Roz any facial articulation to avoid her appearing ‘cartoony.’ “It’s limiting not to have a mouth, but that’s red meat for us as animators because that’s when we start to imagine and emphasize pantomime,” states Jakob Jensen, Head of Character Animation. “We looked at Buster Keaton, who has very little facial expression, but his body language conveys all of the emotions, as well as other masters of pantomime and comedy, Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati. There is comedy in this film, but all of it is grounded in some form of reality.”

It was also important to incorporate nuances that revealed a lot about the characters and added to their believability. “One of our Chief Supervising Animators, Fabio Lignini, was the supervisor of Roz chiefly, but also was with me from the beginning in developing the animal stuff. He did so much wonderful work that was so inventive and grounded in observations of how otters behave. We would show the story department, ‘This is what we’re thinking.’ That would then make them pivot from doing a lot of anthropomorphic hand-acting of certain creatures that was not the direction Chris Sanders or our animation department felt that it should go in. By seeing what we were doing, they adapted their storyboards, because you have to stage your shot. How do otters swim? There is so much fun stuff to draw from nature, so why not use that?”

Locomotion had to be understood to the degree that it became second nature to the animator. “The animal starts walking and trots over here, or maybe gallops and then stops,” Jensen explains. “For that to become second nature for an animator, you have to study hard, and you’ll see shots where it’s amazing how the team did it because you never pay attention to it. You just believe it. That was my first pitch to Chris Sanders as to how far I saw the animation approach and style. I wanted the animation to disappear into the story and for no one to concentrate on the fact that we are watching animation. We’re just watching the story and characters.” Crowds were problematic. Jensen comments, “Sometimes, we have an immense number of characters who couldn’t only be handled by the crowds department. We threw stuff to each other all of the time. But in order to even have a session in our Premo software that would allow for more than five to 10 characters in the shot, they had to come up with all kinds of solutions to have a low-resolution version of the character that could be viewed while animating all of the other characters because there are a ton of moments when they all interact with each other.”

Animation tends to have quick cuts which was not appropriate for The Wild Robot. “From the start, it became evident that we needed time [to determine] how to express that in a way when you don’t have a final image to say, ‘See this is gorgeous and you’re going to want to be here,’” notes Editor Mary Blee. “We were using tricks and tools like taking development art and using After Effects to put characters in it moving, or getting things on layers to say, ‘She is walking through the forest. You guys are going to be interested one day, but it’s hard to see right now.’ There was a lot of invention to get across the flavor, tone and pace of the movie. We had a couple of previs shots, one in particular where Roz stands on top of the mountain and sees the entirety of the island. Chris Stover [Head of Cinematography Previz/Layout], with help from art, made that up out of nothing before we had a sequence.” Boris FX was utilized to create temporary effects. “The first sequence I cut was Roz being chased by a bear, falling down a mountain and discovering that she has destroyed a goose nest and there is only an egg left. We needed to show that her computer systems were failing, so we made a fake HUD and started adding effects to depict it fritzing out and an alarm going off. That sequence was amazing because it encapsulated what the movie was going to be, which was a combination of action, stress, excitement, devastation, sadness and silence. All that happens within two and a half minutes,” Blee says.

Illustrating scenes involving crowds was a major task for the previs team. “We have a lot of naturalistic crowds whether it was all of the animals in the lodge, the migration scenes, flying flocks of birds and the forest fire with all of the animals running,” Stover notes. “For the geese, it was fairly simple. It was like a sea of birds. When you are looking at moments like the lodge, it was impactful for the audience to understand that there were a lot of animals that were going to be affected if Roz didn’t step in and help the island over this harsh winter.” Each of the three ‘oners’ were complex to execute. Stover explains, “Those types of shots were often tricky because I don’t want anybody to ever look at it and go, ‘That’s a single shot. It’s really cool.’ What we want to do is allow you to be with that character for an extended period of time in a way that would ground you to that character’s challenges, as well as the cinematic moment that we’re trying to achieve in the storytelling.” Throughout the story, various camera styles were adopted. “At the beginning, we’re on a jib arm and it feels controlled. It wasn’t until we created the shot where the otters jump into the water and pop up that we then realized we are now in the island’s point of view. The wildness of the island became a loose camera style. The acting was going to drive the camerawork. When Vontra tries to lure Roz onto the ship, we use this flowy camera style. We let the action move in a much more dynamic way. The camera feels deliberate in its choices. That sensibility of being deliberate versus the sensibility of reactionary camerawork was the contrast that we had to play with throughout the film.”

To create the illusion of spontaneity, close attention was paid to the background characters. “At one point, a pair of dragonflies are behind Roz,” Sanders states. “I never sat down and said, ‘I must have dragonflies.’ This was something that was built in as people were working on it. It was perfectly placed and was so well thought through because it looked believable. Things fly in; they’re asymmetrical, off to the side and dart out. It feels like the dragonflies flew through a shot that we were shooting with a camera on that day.”

Jensen is partial to the character of Fink. “That was one of the first characters that we developed that was supervised by Dan Wagner [Animation Supervisor], who is a legend. I liked animating him because it’s difficult to do a fox. They don’t quite move like dogs or cats. It’s not even an in-between. It’s something interesting.” Even moments of silence were carefully considered, such as during the migration scene where Brightbill is at odds with his surrogate mother Roz before he flies away with a flock of geese, which was aided by a shifted line of dialogue that reinforces the idea that things are not good between them.

“If we have done our job, there is storytelling in the silence,” Blee observes. “It’s not just a pause or beat. It’s the weight of what we’ve all had in our lives when we needed to say something to somebody, but we can’t. It’s awkward and difficult, and there are too many emotions. Hundreds of storyboards were drawn to try to get that moment right over time. Because we don’t want it to sit there and use exposition to have people just talk to explain, ‘You’re supposed to be feeling this right now.’ No. It’s a lot of work to make it so you don’t have to say anything but the audience understands what’s happening.”