Now available on Digital is the gorgeously animated, funny, and heartstrings pulling, The Wild Robot. I recently had the chance to sit down with author Peter Brown to hear how it felt collaborating with Chris Sanders and his team to bring his bestselling story to the big screen.
Author Peter Brown Interview
When you saw it all come out on the big screen, were there any moments in particular that you were thinking, wow, that’s exactly how I imagined this would look if it was real?
I think in kind of color and in detail and the books have illustrations, but for a lot of boring reasons, most novels are illustrated with black and white illustrations. So it was really fun for me first and foremost to see the full color, vivid detailed scenes that I had imagined and written about and illustrated simply come to life in these epic shots from the film. There were a lot of scenes that really struck me. I think the one that probably hit me the hardest was when Roz the robot first discovers Bright Bill the goose who at the time is still in an egg. She finds this goose egg…there’s one survivor. She picks up this egg and it’s quiet and it’s dark and it’s raining. Her eyes are glowing…and that scene is so powerful to me.
I love that it’s one of the most important moments in the book and in the movie. It just is such a beautifully animated scene, quiet, subtle, not a big action scene. That’s pretty simple, pretty quiet. I think that’s one of the first scenes in the movie where people who might have been expecting kind of a silly jokey movie [it] suddenly hits them like, whoa, there’s some emotions here. I’m feeling stuff I hadn’t expected to feel at a kid’s movie, right?
You have more books, more Roz and the film is doing obviously incredibly well. I know you cannot confirm nor deny, but if they greenlight the next one, are you all in for that?
Oh yeah, I’ll be excited. I hope, I mean, it’s a business, right? […] I’m optimistic. I think if there’s a good chance, they’ll make the sequel. I think that’d be awesome. And I know Chris and Jeff would like that to happen too. So, you know, I’m optimistic, but it is not official yet. People started thinking because of something Chris Sanders had said that the project had been greenlit, but it’s not actually true just yet. So we’ll hope, we’ll keep our fingers crossed and see what happens.
I asked Kris Bowers this question and I wanna put it to you as well. Your story really strikes me as a story about the people that encourage us and help us grow into being who we need to be and kind of push us down our paths to be our best selves. And I would love to hear who those people are for you.
Well, certainly my mom, my Roz. My mom was not like Roz at all, but my mom was very supportive of my creativity. It’s easy for people to dismiss a kid’s interest in the arts and maybe not think there’s a way to turn that into a profession, but my mom never really doubted me. […] When I wanted to apply to art college, she didn’t bat an eye at that. She was all in from the beginning. I think that really made a difference. I didn’t maybe fully appreciate it at the time, but looking back now, I realized that if she had wavered, I don’t know if I would have gone to an art school and studied illustration and I may never have written the wild robot.
Watch The Peter Brown Interview
The Wild Robot
Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), a helper robot, has been shipwrecked on an island instead of being delivered to her new home. She has been programmed to complete any task a human being could think of but here, where there are no people, what is a robot to do? In this case, Roz adapts, taking time to learn new language modules in order to communicate with the animals around her. The animals are wary of her but some see how she can be helpful. After an unforeseen accident, Roz becomes the adoptive mother of an orphaned gosling, Brightbill (Kit Connor). Raising him to adulthood becomes her main objective and thanks to some help from her new friends Pinktail (Catherine O’Hara) and Fink (Pedro Pascal), she just might succeed in this important parental task.
The Wild Robot is now available on Digital.
*this interview has been edited for length and clarity
