Yahoo Lifestyle Oscars: Why the Sound Nod for ‘The Wild Robot’ Is Such an Unusual Nomination
It’s not completely unusual to see animated contenders in the Academy Awards sound race — Guillermo del Toro’s 2022 retelling of “Pinocchio” was the last to make the short list, and Pixar’s 2020 film “Soul” was the last to be nominated. But it’s been two decades since Pixar’s 2004 hit “The Incredibles” became the only fully-animated movie to win the category (then called sound editing). This year, DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot” has collected a trio of Oscar noms, including one for sound, as well as best animated feature and best original score (for composer Kris Bowers).
“The Wild Robot” supervising sound designer Randy Thom was the supervising sound editor, designer and rerecording mixer on “The Incredibles,” for which he won one of his two Oscars.
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“The basic challenge in animation is that you have to create the whole sonic world of the film from scratch,” explains Thom, who is nominated for “The Wild Robot” alongside Brian Chumney, Gary A. Rizzo and Leff Lefferts. But he admits that technology has brought it more closely to live action. “In most contemporary live action films, you wind up having to create a lot of it from scratch anyway, because a lot of it is computer graphics, but it’s certainly true of animation.”
Still, he admits that for various reasons, the “animation crafts tend to be kind of off the radar for most Academy voters” though, for instance, “animation editors just do miracles on a daily basis, and they often have more to do with shaping the film than the live action editor does and similar with sound.”
“The Wild Robot” is animation veteran Chris Sander’s adaptation Peter Brown’s book about a sentient robot stranded on a remote island. Sound work involved creating the sonic world of the island, including the creatures that reside there, along with sounds such as waves and wind.
Early on, Thom and Sanders (“Lilo and Stitch”) began to discuss the specifics of the sound of Roz, the central robot. “Both Chris and I wanted to avoid some of what have become sort of cliches of robot sounds,” Thom explains, adding that that includes a sort of “servo motor sound” often associate with robots. “There are lots of films who have used that kind of sound very well, but we didn’t want to duplicate that.”
He started the process by listening to and recording things like pneumatic and hydraulic systems, which proved useful. “It occurred to me that, in a way, those sounds are a little like breathing. I started doing experiments, just kind of breathing into the microphone, inhaling and exhaling in sync with Roz’s movements. And it worked. You still buy it as a movement sound, especially if you process it in a certain way,” he says. “That turned out to be a really interesting and useful coincidence, that the sound of human breath synchronized with her movements would be believable as robot movements, and in a subtle way, reinforce this idea that she’s kind of alive and organic in some sense.”
Roz is voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, who purposely sounds more electronic at the start of the film, to support her story. “For the first few things that she utters, she sounds like a more or less conventional robot,” says Thom. “But Lupita’s performance as Roz, [which] quickly becomes more and more like a human and like an entity with a soul, was so good and so moving that processing her voice was really getting in the way. The solution that we eventually found was that we needed to fairly quickly transition out of those electronic kinds of sounds for her voice or electronic processing of her voice, and really just go with Lupita ‘s performance. And Lupita did her own, if you will, robot processing early on of her voice just naturally into the microphone, and then not very deep into the film, you begin to just hear Lupita as Lupita.”
Incidentally, Thom has a history of contributing his voice to his work. In this case, he’s credited as the voice of the evil RECO reconnaissance robots.
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