The Wild Robot is undoubtedly one of the top animated films of the year and is one of the favorites to take home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature next March.
Starring Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Catherine O’Hara, Kit Connor Ving Rhames and more, it was the film’s writer and director is Chris Sanders.
It “follows the journey of a robot—ROZZUM unit 7134, ‘Roz’ for short — that 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.”
The film recently screened at the 2024 SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where the composer for the film’s score, Kris Bowers, was on hand as a guest for a live taping of Make It Universal and Rotten Tomatoes’ Seen on the Screen. The Wild Robot is the first animated film for the Oscar winner and Emmy and Grammy nominee.
While at the festival, Bowers also sat down with Blavity’s Shadow and Act to chat about the film, as well as his rapid ascent to being one of the most acclaimed composers.
The word of mouth on this film is so strong as it continues to pick up steam for awards season. From King Richard, to Bridgerton, to Respect and many more…so many projects for you. Essentially, after Green Book, you’ve been so booked and busy. At this point, if there is ever a lull in projects that Kris Bowers is attached to, then something is going wrong [laughs]. So at this stage of your career right now, what about a project makes you want to be a part of it?
It is really about whether or not it triggers a visceral emotion in me, and if it’s something that the story or the script or the cut that they have of it, if I watch it and I feel like I’m feeling emotions involuntarily, then that makes me really excited. Or if I can tell that it’s going to be something that’s just really important. Most of the time those things go hand in hand, but even when I’m not necessarily sure if it’s going to translate in the final version–because I’m just reading a script and I’m not able to see the full vision if I know that it’s going to be about Aretha Franklin or Billie Holiday or these figures that are so important to me and important to culture– I feel like then it’s also a pretty quick yes as well.
You’ve done a lot of films that are heavily music-based, but the music in this film, from start to finish, is such an integral part of the project. What was it like taking this on, and given the fact that it is an animated film, it seems as if the music and animation goes hand in hand, right?
Chris Sanders wanted to approach it in that more traditional way, both visually, but also in terms of that relationship between music and animation, where he was unafraid of having the music be this character in the film and having it be something that’s predominantly telling you how to feel emotionally. He talked in our first meeting about the idea of having sequences with little to no dialogue. And throughout the course of working on it, he would actually take out some of the dialogue based on his recognition that the music was conveying the feelings he wanted it to convey.
So for me, it was just exciting [for] two reasons. One, the films and the film scores that made me fall in love with what music can do in film were largely for animation and largely the ones that had these very strong melodies and were very present and very intentional and detailed with the way that the composer developed those melodies throughout the course of the film. I remember being able to listen to those melodies and just hum them to myself and feel all these feelings. Having the opportunity to write a score that demands that type of presence and that type of melodic, thematic information was really exciting. Also, just the level of detail that it requires to write something that rides that line and being supportive while at the same time being one of the things that’s most active in the moment other than what you’re seeing was an exciting challenge.
This film is very earthy, its very scenic and it has primarily forest-y scenes. How do you think the atmosphere influenced the sound of this film? It’s seems as if it would be kind of different in that aspect, knowing you’d have to blend wilderness into the scope.
Something I thought of from the very beginning, was how I curious how I could approach having the score have that wild sound to it and not have it be something that felt like something I had heard before. The first thing that comes to mind when you think of wilderness is ethnic flutes and things that, to me, are tropes, but they also would be distracting in that I would just be curious like where are we, what culture is that flute from or what are we saying in terms of location or culture? My idea of approaching it from this percussive point of view was inspired by having something that felt wild, but slightly unplaceable. Then I found this percussion ensemble, Sandbox Percussion, that approaches percussion more like sound design, where they’re playing. They could literally grab things in this room and make a little drum set out of it.
They were playing tuned wood slats, and logs, and metal pipes and all kinds of stuff that I then was able to look at as inspiration and then compose from that place. So I kind of created these layers where it was the predominant core of it is orchestra and wanting that sweeping, melodic emotional feel to it and this adventurous sound, but then on top of that, there’s some synth work that’s representing Roz and the futuristic aspects that are also very much melded into the way that the orchestra’s working. Then there’s another layer of almost like ASMR percussion [for like] idea was animals going through the forest, or Roz being hit by trees, or animals scratching at her and wanting that tactile sound to also exist. So [it was] finding a way for those three elements to coexist in this intricate way.
It’s interesting you mention how it can be trope-ish with films that explore the wilderness– and the fact that this film has this setting..and its also about a robot…those two things coming together would make it so a lot of things would be done differently.
Something I thought about very early on is that there’s a different type of high intelligence in nature. The thing about Roz is she’s the most advanced piece of technology, but at the same time, we’re still trying to find ways to create the things that we find magical about nature, like some of the shapes that are in nature and some of the textures that are in nature are still just so baffling to us. A lot of my decision to write music that was just as intricate on the organic side as the intricate stuff on the synthetic side was inspired by this idea of this environment being its own version of intelligence, especially since it’s also informing Roz and Roz is learning so much from it. So it’s like creating this equal playing field of intricacy so that it’s not like Roz is this futuristic or this incredibly intelligent thing in this basic environment. It’s like, no, both of these things have this incredible intelligence.
A major theme in the film is family and motherhood. How did your interpretation of the central relationship in this film influence the music here?
I’m in this interesting position in my life where I’m in between generations. My daughter was six months old when I started the project, and at the same time, I’m still very much like my parents’ son in terms of our relationship. There’s so many times where I was thinking about my parents’ sacrifices and my mom’s sacrifices. My mom was like the breadwinner in our family and worked all the time and really pushed herself to an extent that I only appreciate now as an adult [and] trying to do a similar thing for my family. And as a kid, you just kind of expect those things and to recognize that they both somehow put everything that they were dealing with personally, financially and emotionally aside to make sure that I had as pleasant of a life as I possibly could at that age.
Then there were so many times in these early days of parenthood that were super inspiring on the project. I worked on the project for almost two years. And so there was the first couple of years of my daughter’s life, and I saw my wife and myself so much in Roz, this idea of learning how to become a parent and learning how to push fast, especially for me, the programming of being patient with this little creature or trying to figure out how to communicate when we can’t communicate in the same way and in a clear way. A lot of that process writing that main theme, which my first iteration of it was for the migration sequence, thinking about the complexities of parenthood were directly responsible for me coming to that theme, I wrote a version of it first that took a more naive view of parenthood and this idea of having this perfect relationship that’s going to be pleasant and happy for the rest of our lives.
And talking to Chris about that sequence, it just opened something else up in me to realize that at this early stage of parenthood, I didn’t want to imagine the difficult parts. I didn’t want to imagine failing my daughter. I didn’t want to think about how even in these first two years, there’s so many times where I have fallen short of what I want to be as a parent or what I want to be in terms of a role model or an example of what you should be in the world and all that kind of stuff. So recognizing that inevitably, no matter how much I do try to be the best version of myself and the best parent I can possibly be, I look at my relationship with my parents and I think about mine with my daughter. Inevitably [there’s] going to be things that we have to figure out how to get through that she’s going to have to accept about me, that I’m have to accept about her, that we are going to have to forgive one another for– those complex things. And that idea of getting to a point where, as Roz and Brightbill, having that migration moment where you’re saying goodbye and maybe not going to see each other ever again, to get to a point where you’re dealing with so much baggage and so much complexity is a very emotional thing to think about as an early parent that directly influenced how I approached this score.
