Coloradan Chris Sanders on the Wild Success of The Wild Robot

Though he spent much of his free time as a kid drawing and making movies with his father’s Super 8 camera, Chris Sanders never envisioned himself becoming an animator. “I liked animals. I was thinking about becoming a veterinarian,” Sanders says. “That was the only idea I could come up with.”

But when Sanders was a student at Arvada High School, his grandmother spotted an article in the Denver Post about Disney’s animation program at the California Institute of the Arts. “She told me, ‘Maybe you should apply here.’ I had never even considered animation as being something I could do,” Sanders says, “because, being in Denver, it just seemed so far away.”

Thanks to the help of his teachers, Sanders applied and was accepted into the program. “That changed everything,” he says. Sanders went on to work on iconic Disney movies like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King before writing Mulan and writing and directing Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon, The Croods, and The Call of the Wild.

Sanders’ most recent film, The Wild Robot, is an adaptation of Peter Brown’s beloved book of the same name, in which a service robot shipwrecks on an uninhabited island and, among other adventures, adopts an orphaned gosling. The Wild Robot became one of the most acclaimed films of 2024, with the New York Times gushing, “this is a work that cares most about two things: big feelings and great beauty.”

With The Wild Robot up for Best Animated Feature at the 97th Academy Awards (it’s Sanders’ fourth nomination in the category), Sanders spoke with 5280 ahead of the ceremony about the response to The Wild Robot, how he got into filmmaking, and his return to Lilo & Stitch.

Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

5280: Why do you think The Wild Robot has resonated so strongly with audiences and critics?
Chris Sanders: From the very beginning, this movie was different. The source material was this amazing book. All the things within the story were the kind of things I gravitate toward. I connected with it. Everybody on the crew connected with it. I knew the film had to look different, because the story was different. It had to have a sophistication, because it had to match the emotion and weight within the story.

Was that difficult to pull off?
It was the hardest film to make and the easiest film to make—all at the same time. We had to rewrite the [animation] software to make this film. But at the same time, we never had any conflicts. The themes of the film, which are about tolerance and love, they seemed to inhabit every corner of the production. Even though everybody was doing these monumentally difficult things, the act of making it was one of camaraderie and support and joy. I couldn’t wait for people to see what we had made. I’ve never anticipated the release of a film more than this one.

Did your childhood impact the look of the film?
Absolutely. Growing up in the ’70s, everything was about green spaces and being in tune with nature. Kids’ notebooks would have these illustrations of a forest being plowed down by an evil bulldozer. The impact humans had on nature was just a part of our day. Those themes within The Wild Robot were just the most natural thing in the world to be attuned to.

When did you first become interested in filmmaking?
I have a brother and a sister. I was the only one of the three who wanted to play with my dad’s Super 8 movie camera. I would buy film and make as many movies as I could. When I learned it had a single-frames feature, I started doing my own little animated scenes. My dad always encouraged me to draw, and I did my own little comics. I was very enamored of comic strips. That was my first love. But when I got to high school, I asked the art teacher, ‘Can you train me in cartooning? Because I want to do comic strips.’ I’ll never forget, the art teacher said, ‘Comics aren’t art.’ I decided then I didn’t want to take that class, so I never took art.

Disney is releasing a live-action remake of Lilo & Stitch in May—and you’re the voice of Stitch. What it’s been like to return to that character?
Dean Fleischer Camp, who is making the new film, emailed me one day asking if I’d do the voice. I’ve done Stitch’s voice for everything since the first film. I do it for toys. I do it for parades. I do it for ice shows. I go to the studio 10 times a year to do stuff. Sometimes when they do these remakes, they want to reimagine the entire property. In this case, Dean was very interested in me doing the real Stitch voice. It was fun. They were very, very late in production. I went into a studio five different times, and each of those times I was there for about four hours. The Stitch voice is hard to maintain for four hours. But I did my best.

Chris Sanders’ The Wild Robot is nominated for Best Animated Feature Film in the 97th Academy Awards, which begins at 5 p.m. on Sunday, March 2. Watch on ABC.