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‘When CG Came Along, We Couldn’t Escape’
How Lilo & Stitch co-director Chris Sanders found a sweet spot between hand-drawn and CG animation for his new film, The Wild Robot.
It’s the story of a robot, Rozzum Unit 7134 (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), who finds herself lost in the middle of a forest and struggles to assimilate into the animal world, which rejects her. But the film is devastating precisely because it’s not cloying; its striking visual design merges computer animation with rough, almost Impressionistic hand-painted characters and backgrounds, and both the sharp screenplay and the irreverent voice performances avoid fuzzy clichés at every turn. And although The Wild Robot is based on a children’s book by Peter Brown, Sanders admits that it carried some surprising personal resonances even he wasn’t aware of at first — echoes that reach all the way back to the Disney movie that put him on the map in the first place.
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