A beautiful union between form and theme drives The Wild Robot. Filmmaker Chris Sanders’ latest could be one of the best-looking 3D animated films of the year, full of gorgeous 2D background textures contrasting with the titular metallic main character. Those visual flourishes—the sort of thing that the Spider-Verse films have become well-known for—transform alongside the character as she gains self-determination, discovering how to exist outside the boundaries of the human world for which she was programmed.

Sanders, who frequently co-directs with Dean DeBlois—namely on How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch, with Sanders even voicing Stitch in the latter—adapts the children’s book of the same name by Peter Brown for this solo outing. The Wild Robot follows a helper robot named ROZZUM, aka Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who is stranded on an island populated only by wild animals. She tries to find a way home, but while floundering through the wildlife, she crushes a bird’s nest along with a mother and her eggs—all except one. Lacking purpose in her life, Roz chooses to remain on the island to help raise the surviving chick, teaching it to fly for the migration.

Letterboxd already agree that the film stands among the year’s finest animated work, adorning it a 4.1 average rating at the time of writing. Maxine calls it “the most vibrant and immersive animation this year,” while Kevin claims that “the folks over at DreamWorks Animation have something truly magical on their hands.” W1nn1p3g is, like us, thrilled to see Sanders back in charge: “Chris Sanders yet again proves he’s one of the best to ever do it in the animation space.”

At this year’s Annecy Festival, when I meet Sanders, he is busy sketching away with a ballpoint pen. Asking him about it, I get a brief rundown on the timeless majesty of the Bic pen (“the perfect middle ground between a pencil and a full-on ink brush”), an invention which “was perfect by its first version.” This sets the tone for a conversation brimming with excited and ionate detail about the bold production design for The Wild Robot and the realization of Roz’s character journey through evolving voice performance, animation and textures—which began with the “sophisticated” yet “throwback” images and textures of Peter Brown’s book.

The more time she spends there, the more she begins to look like she belongs. The evolution of her surface is the only element that we allowed to look completely CG. Everything else has a painted surface. We deliberately left her looking like a CG creature when she first emerges from the box, because she doesn’t belong there. But as she gets damaged, we gradually replace her surface with a more and more painted one. So by the third act, she has a 100 percent painted surface, just like every other object in the film.

I have to credit Lupita Nyong’o for being incredibly inventive in really finding the voice for Roz. We didn’t want to strictly have her start out “robotic” and then become more human. It’s a bit more subtle than that. One of the things we realized is that Roz can’t be inaccessible emotionally. In order for her to connect with the audience, she has to show some emotions at the very beginning. Rather than going the simple route of presenting her as a stiff robotic creature, she took her cues from different sorts of human personalities that are more analytical, and less available emotionally. Then she’s arriving at a place where she’s much more available, relaxed and expressive, and literally changing how her wording works from beginning to end, which makes a much more interesting character.

How did you approach the meeting point between these painted textures and the constantly transforming CG character?
We have the technological side with the look, and Lupita’s contribution as the voice, then we have the animated side of the whole thing, the way she moves. Jakob [Hjort Jensen, head of character animation] had his animators take their cues from silent film actors, like Buster Keaton. If you look at the way Roz moves, she has this humorous and very endearing timid quality. She’s very tepid about how she does things. By the end of the film, she’s much more relaxed in her movements, and more bold.

The opening of the film struck me in how much of it was told silently. It’s unusual for a DreamWorks film. It almost felt like a short. Was there ever a short version of the film kicking around in your head, or even one told entirely like this?
We always produce some animation as a way to explore the character, but not a short film in itself. We do have some animation that is just pure movement experiments that we never used in the film. We were looking for a robot that could always surprise us, we wanted unusual movement. She can turn her torso but keep her head in one place, things like that which were just fun to watch. [We filmed her] literally opening different doors or showing different tools or finding new ways to move so that we always found her interesting and surprising.

If How to Train Your Dragon has textures around geometry, I take it The Wild Robot works with a 2D background?
There’s no geometry inside them. That is a huge leap forward. They’re all matte painted. It’s with a stylus, but those are paintings by human beings. Under the trees, there’s no cylinders, there’s no cones. One of the things we really struggled with, as an art form, is to make a tree. You have geometry, you have leaves, and you populate the tree with those leaves. Those leaves are variants but they’re largely the same, and you’re working so hard to disguise the fact that they’re all the same leaves on that tree. In The Wild Robot, it’s brushstrokes. It’s not even painted leaves. It’s a real painting. If you get in really close to a painting, it might not be leaves. It’s just brushstrokes simulating the vibes of the outside surface of the tree. That’s the huge difference between this film and anything that came before it.

Instead of the disguise, it’s a different kind of illusion.
Absolutely, so we had different versions of Roz for example: we have a foreground painted Roz and a midground, and a wide-shot distant version of Roz which is very simple in the way she’s painted, with big broad brushstrokes, and when she gets closer we use smaller brushstrokes and more detail. Same with the mountains, the trees and the skies—all matte painted, no geometry.

I was looking at a particular shot in the film, it’s one in the trailer, where Roz is standing on a log above a waterfall, and if you really look at the trees and the bushes, they’re not all there. There’s a lack of detail and that’s good, because you don’t wanna be distracted. But the overall effect, I think, is more real than if we had been chasing photorealism.

What did you find satisfying working with this new toolbox?
Emotionally, it changed everything about this film. It’s a story about a piece of high technology lost in the wilderness, so one of the reasons that I set course for a more painterly style in the background was to get the maximum contrast between those things. [The artists] achieved that goal more successfully than I ever could have dreamed that they would.

As technology has progressed, there’s been an impetus to see just how much detail with which things can be rendered—but now we’re going in the opposite direction, to see what details can be removed to make things more expressive.
Nobody wanted photorealism, but the ever-increasing detail was what we all had to do to try to achieve more believability. Early on, everything looked very computer-y, if you will. I’ll use the fur on an animal as an example: getting ever-more detailed fur that reacted to the wind and the movement of the character, it wasn’t because we were trying to get closer to reality, it was just trying to relieve it of looking like a computer was involved.