If you want to learn how to write for animated films, there is probably no better person to learn from than Chris Sanders.
He’s a veritable titan in the industry, with story credits on Disney classics like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King—yes, those classics—along with screenwriting credits on Mulan and Lilo & Stitch, not to mention modern hits like How to Train Your Dragon and The Croods.
His stories swell with emotion and feature conflict that’s at times surprising in its thorniness and complicated, grown-up themes; perhaps why his movies resonate across ages. The lonely protagonist who needs to find their place and gain their strength is a favorite in his repertoire, and his latest film, The Wild Robot, is a new take on this character.
Adapted from the book by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot is “Roz” (Lupita Nyong’o), who crash-lands on an island inhabited only by woodland creatures. When she stumbles upon an orphaned gosling, she and the fox Fink (Pedro Pascal) have to get him ready to fly south for his winter migration.
When we got the chance to speak with Sanders about his experience as a writer on this and other films, we of course jumped at the chance. We asked him what was different about writing for animation, handling thematic material for kids, and more.
The Wild Robot is now available to watch at home digitally from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment.
Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Spoilers for The Wild Robot below.
Final Draft: What do you think is one of the most important qualities you should develop in writing specifically for animation screenplays versus live-action features?
Chris Sanders: I think one of the biggest parameters that we are always dealing with is just length. We always try to land in an 85- to 95-minute zone. Not every story will fit in 85 minutes. I think ours goes into just the low nineties, but trying to hit that sweet spot as far as just the production is concerned is really critical because we only have so much time, and we have a certain budget that we have in the very beginning.
Being responsible to that is something that I take very, very seriously. I’ve always believed that some limitations, or limitations in general, can be a creative opportunity, if that makes sense.
And designing things from the script on is really important. You don’t want to write something that you can’t sustain on the screen. So just being aware of all that from the very, very beginning is critical, I think.
Final Draft: Would you say that those types of scripts are more descriptive, more visually based, because so much has to be intentional on the page?
Sanders: Absolutely. And this particular film was unusual in that there’s about 50% of the dialogue a film this size would normally have. The characters are very spare in what they’re talking about.
That was important to me because I didn’t want this film to feel crowded or rushed, especially given the situation with a robot who’s lost. There’s no real schedule. We do have a little bit of a ticking clock as far as Brightbill learning to fly by the time fall comes. But it’s not immense. It doesn’t really dominate.
I always knew that that was never going to be something I could push to the point where people were biting their nails thinking, “Oh my gosh, summer’s coming to an end. We’ve got to hurry.” Had I pushed that, it would’ve been artificial, and I think it would’ve thrown the whole film out of balance. So the trick was to keep things moving at a pace that felt right.
To answer your question more fully, I am such a believer in music always being one of the largest voices in these films, particularly animated films. We have a sequence in How to Train Your Dragon that is very reminiscent of the beautiful sequence in the cove from The Black Stallion, and we have this whole situation with Toothless and Hiccup that we designed from the get-go to be music and no dialogue.
We have several of those in The Wild Robot because I think so many of these situations transcend dialogue, and you don’t want to clutter it up with too much talk.
In those moments, I did my very, very best to put a lot of poetry into the visuals as I was describing them on the page. There’s one particular moment, actually, where on the page, it’s an emotionally resonant thing, but it can’t get on the screen verbatim, and that was the moment where the migration is beginning, and time has run out, and Brightbill has just heard some really critical things about his situation that he hadn’t thought of before. Namely that this whole incident with Roz didn’t kill his family. It saved him, and he’d never thought about that before.
So he has a lot of stuff he needs to say, but he has no time to do it. So he runs out of time, and the only thing he can come up with is to say, “I could use a boost.” It’s offering an olive branch to Roz.
And on the page, I wrote, “She knows he doesn’t.”
That was resonant because she’s reacting, and it meant a lot to her, but I couldn’t put that on screen. So instead, I talked to Kris Bowers and made him aware that when he says “I could use a boost,” it has a huge impact on Roz. He did this amazing drumbeat at that moment, so I was able to get that line on screen, but through Kris Bowers and music.
Final Draft: That is such a beautiful moment, and it’s such an economical way to get that emotion across, too, with subtext.
I also wanted to ask about theme. I’ve heard you talk in a couple of different places about how kindness is a power here, as well as the ability to change being important to these characters. When you’re writing for animation and, in a lot of cases, for younger audiences, what’s your approach to theme and getting it into your screenplay?
Sanders: Trying not to hit it too directly. There are times to say things very directly, and there are times to, I think, avoid them a little bit because I think if you hit things on the head too much, it can feel like you have an agenda and that you’ve got a checklist off screen that you’re trying to hit.
So I think the art of it is to feel your way through these moments and to make a judgment call as to whether you say something very directly or you want to avoid it to some degree.
There was a moment at the beginning of Mulan where she’s talking to her father, if you remember the scene, and they’re sitting next to this big tree full of flowers. I actually got a writing credit on that film, even though I never wrote any pages. I did my writing in the boarding phase. I was the head of story, and I actually freehand wrote that scene.
Her dad needs to tell her that he still believes in her, but he doesn’t do it directly. Instead, he talks about the blossoms around them, and he talks about how this one is late, but he’s sure that when it does blossom, it’ll be the most beautiful of all.
So he’s avoiding hitting that directly, and that makes it feel real and poetic and gentle, and it felt right. But there are places in this film where we do a little bit of both sometimes. So I think it’s kind of the art of it, and there’s no real formula to that.
I think that’s one of those things where you just have to be sensitive to the emotional wavelengths of the film to know when you want to just step on something directly or kind of move around it a little bit.
Final Draft: I love that about this film, and so many of your films, you allow the characters and the emotions to be so complicated. It’s not necessarily that you’re only writing for children or trying to write down to anybody.
Sanders: Absolutely. And I think if you’re being sincere about these things, to me, that’s critical. All the animated films that I fell in love with have a great sincerity to them. Charlie Brown Christmas, that little 20-minute or so Christmas special that has such incredible honesty and sincerity to it.
I guess it’s just in my nature to treat these things in a way very seriously. I think you have these fanciful worlds, but when the things that are going on within them are very, very believable, I think that you attach yourself to them in a way that’s very special.
Final Draft: Your experience in animation is so rich and so expansive. Is there something that you’ve learned as you’ve worked on all these different projects that you try to bring to each time you’re telling a story?
Sanders: Yeah, I try to keep the characters from falling into a two-dimensional place.
I think that sometimes with animation, there’s such a focus on humor, and that makes sense because I think I tend to go more emotional, and to balance these things out and keep a balance is critical. I work to have characters that have things that they can still reveal about themselves.
So two things, characters like Fink—that could be two-dimensional. He’s conniving and such, but he has a lot of damage on board, and revealing that damage over time made a dimensional character that I think makes you fall in love with him, or allows you the opportunity to really fall in love with him, because he has a lot going on.
But another thing that’s really critical to me is to not have the story end before the movie does. And that’s one of the issues I have with things like fairy tales. I’ve worked on some, and I love them, but a lot of times, you can pretty much see where this whole thing is heading from the very beginning. And at some point a hero and a villain are going to face off against each other. But I try to have a story more like Mulan, or Lilo & Stitch, or this film, where we have a story going on until the very last moment.
In Mulan, she defeats the Shan-Yu, but she still has to confront the emperor. And after the emperor has his moment with her, she still has to go home and answer to her dad. So there are still things going on, and there are things that will keep us compelled and involved. Same with Lilo & Stitch. He saves the day, but he has to get shipped home. And at the last moment, Lilo argues to keep him there.
We had an opportunity on that film. We were so responsible with our budget and with our script that I got a call from Tom Schumacher, the president of feature animation, and we were in the last weeks of production. He called me on the phone and said, “If I told you you had another minute, what would you do?” And I said, “I would show what happened to them after the movie ended. I’d have something before the credits that showed that they were okay.”
And he said, “You still have $2 million left. Go ahead and do that sequence.” Because animation is around a million dollars a minute, so $2 million. We had about two minutes of film left that we didn’t expect.
We were able to add that piece where you see Lilo and Stitch at Christmas, at Halloween, putting her on the bus for school. So just regular, everyday things that really were affirming and comforting that we got at the very last second.
With The Wild Robot, of course, we have a situation where she’s returning to where she began, but you need confirmation that she’s okay. And that Brightbill and her have maintained that connection. Up until the last frame of that film, things were still spooling narratively.
So again, I would just say, I don’t want the narrative to end before the movie does.