Chris Sanders On The Significance Of An Oscar Nom For ‘The Wild Robot’: “All The Reasons I Got Into Animation Are Contained Within This Film”

While most people woke up very early for the Oscar nomination announcements this morning, Chris Sanders watched the feed from Tokyo, Japan. As the last stop on his tour of premiering The Wild Robot, being nominated for Best Animated Feature was a perfect bookend to the trip.

“[On Monday] we were screening the film and introducing it to the very first audience here, and now to get this nomination has been amazing,” says Sanders. “Three nominations, it’s incredible.”

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In addition to Best Animated Feature, The Wild Robot is also nominated for both score and sound. “We all screamed when we heard that score was nominated, and so deservedly. The lack of dialogue meant that one of the biggest voices in this film is the music and that was going to be handled by Kris Bowers. He had a massive job, just the scale of it, but the nuance, the beauty, the sensitivity and the strength of what he did is nothing I’ve ever heard before.”

Being nominated is a great achievement on its own, but Sanders says the recognition for this movie in particular is so special. “From the beginning, this has been a completely different movie than I’ve ever worked on, and a completely different movie than DreamWorks has ever made before,” he says. “This is the kind of risk that a studio would normally only take on a short, but DreamWorks risked it on a feature, and that is absolutely extraordinary.”

That risk he’s talking about is actually a return to an old form, which is what excited Sanders most about the film in the first place. “When CG came along, we were obligated to depart from painted, handmade things. The Wild Robot is a return to all those wonderful things I fell in love with when I first saw animation, and all the reasons I got into animation are contained within this film.”

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