When Peter Brown was still in the midst of writing The Wild Robot, the first novel in his middle grade trilogy, published in 2016 from Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, he got a phone call. The Art Center College of Design graduate who had once dreamed of potentially working in animation but pivoted to working in children’s literature, had DreamWorks on the line.

“I was trying to play [it] cool and not get too excited, because I realized there was a good chance that the movie might not actually happen,” Brown told PW. “It was a funny little dance I was doing in my own head, trying to let myself enjoy the moment, but not wanting to go too far because it might not actually work out.”

Brown has since put those fears to rest. The Wild Robot will hit theaters on September 27 as a 1 hour 42 minute DreamWorks animated movie. The film pulls from the Wild Robot trilogy opener and follows Roz, a robot who finds herself stranded on an island and begins to bond with the wildlife residents. When she forms a special connection to a young gosling, Roz starts to question her programming and what is best for her and the island when her past comes calling.

At the helm of the project is three-time Oscar nominee Chris Sanders, who served as the project’s director and writer. Upon hearing that the writer-director behind animated hits such as Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon would be taking the reins, Brown felt confident [in trusting his story in someone else’s care. “When they hired Chris, I was like, ‘We're in good hands here.’ I had maybe been a little nervous, but once he signed on, I was like, ‘Okay, this is going to be a good movie.’”

Sanders was drawn to The Wild Robot while visiting the DreamWorks Animation studio in Los Angeles while looking for his next project. When studio president Margie Cohn and her team described the concept of The Wild Robot to him, it caught his attention, but it was actually a reminder from someone closer to home that pulled Sanders in.

“When I mentioned this [idea] to my daughter, she reminded me that she had read the book—and showed me her copy.” Sanders said, “It was at that moment I remembered seeing the book in the house, but I’d never opened it up. It became a very full-circle moment for me.”

The film adaptation boasts a star-studded cast: Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Roz, Golden Globe nominee Pedro Pascal as fox Fink, Emmy winner Catherine O’Hara as opossum Pinktail, Kit Connor as gosling Brightbill, and Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu as Vontra.

“It was a real treat to see the cast come together to hear what they were doing,” Brown said of the voice acting performances. Pascal in the role of Fink the fox stood out for the author. “He delivered some lines that had me laughing out loud,” Brown said. “Everybody does a great job, but his character is particularly funny. He's really the comic relief in this movie, and so Pascal got to have a lot of fun, and just nailed it.”

This film marks the first of Brown’s works to be adapted, and he considers the book and film to be in conversation. “My book inspired this movie, but not every scene in the book is in the movie,” Brown said. “I was curious about which scenes make it, which scenes don’t. What are the changes? What are the differences going to be?”

Sanders told PW, “In some instances, I trimmed characters back, and in others I added plot, all in service of delivering the core of Peter’s story to the screen intact. We needed space so that key moments could breathe and have room to resonate.”

Stylistically, Sanders’s approach to the animation was to take “a sophisticated look so that our audience would see this story in the right way. It could easily play too young if we stuck to what had become a well-worn CG style that we’d all been gravitationally held to by the limits of technology,” he explained. “We needed to go further for The Wild Robot, into unexplored visual territory.”

Even with the film taking on its own direction under DreamWorks, Sanders said he and his team were “always looking to Peter’s themes as our North Star. ​​First and foremost, we wanted the film version of Roz to be authentic to Peter’s vision,” he said. “We consider our film a love letter to the book.”


Ahead of seeing the film for the first time, Brown considered how its creation ultimately feels serendipitous. “I think back to who I was as a teenager,” he said. “If you had told me when I was dreaming about working at Disney or Pixar or DreamWorks, that 20 years or 25 years later, they’d be making a feature film based on one of my stories, I would have lost my mind. It feels like it's all come full circle."