“I was inspired by AI voices like Alexa and Siri,” Lupita Nyong’o joked during her session for The Wild Robot this morning at Deadline’s Contenders London.
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In the animated film, which is an adaptation of Peter Brown’s award-winning bestseller of the same name, Nyong’o plays a robot called ROZZUM unit 7134 — “Roz” for short — who is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and must learn to adapt to the harsh surroundings, gradually building relationships with the animals on the island and becoming the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.
“Alexa, Siri, and, you know, those voices on TikTok and Instagram that are so positive and nothing’s ever wrong. That sort of can-do attitude. That was the starting point for Roz and her journey to self-actualization and evolution of self-expression.”
From DreamWorks Animation, The Wild Robot was directed by three-time Oscar nominee Chris Sanders — the writer-director of DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods , and Disney’s Lilo & Stitch — and is produced by Jeff Hermann (DreamWorks Animation’s The Boss Baby 2: Family Business ; co-producer, Kung Fu Panda franchise). Sanders also penned the screenplay.
Discussing the adaptation, Sanders told the crowd in London that he decided early on to center the theme of “kindness” in the film after a discussion with Brown.
“The thing that was on Brown’s mind, the guiding principle, was the idea that kindness could be a survival skill,” Sanders said. “I immediately jotted that down and thought, ‘Okay, we need to get that up on screen, for sure.’”
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Sanders and Nyong’o were joined on stage by the film’s composer Kris Bowers, who said working with Sanders on the film was a unique experience that fulfilled the dreams of composing that he had as a child.
“I remember watching interviews with John Williams and Steven Spielberg and seeing them right next to the piano as John was working on his theme and talking about it and how everything was going to play,” he explained. “It’s something that’s vanishingly rare in film music experiences.”
Bowers added, “It was amazing to get really detailed with orchestration and all those things so that the music continued to evolve in every moment.”
The Wild Robot also features the voices of Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Stephanie Hsu and Bill Nighy. Universal/DreamWorks Animation launched the film earlier this month. The film topped $100M globally last weekend.
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