The Wild Robot director Chris Sanders explains why moms are missing in so many kids' movies
In a Q interview, Sanders talks about breaking convention in his latest animated film
When Chris Sanders set out to adapt Peter Brown's acclaimed children's book The Wild Robot, he threw a lot of modern animation conventions out the window.
Not only is the movie beautifully hand-painted instead of using CGI, but the story centres on a mother's journey, which is pretty unique in a genre that typically features absent parents. You may have noticed that many animated films are told from the eyes of an orphaned child. This is the case in Bambi, Aladdin and James and the Giant Peach, just to name a few.
As a veteran filmmaker who's been working in animation since the 1980s, Sanders has an answer for why moms are famously missing from children's narratives. In an interview with Q guest host Gill Deacon, he says he learned the answer while working on Aladdin.
"When I came to Aladdin, for a few months, he had a mom in the story," Sanders explains. "She was eventually and I think pretty quickly removed because the dynamic was off. And there's two really, really simple reasons. First, if your son is going off and stealing things at the market during the day, he's going to get in huge trouble when he comes home. The other thing was … you couldn't ever enjoy the story of Aladdin if his mom is back home terrified."
Breaking that convention, The Wild Robot follows an intelligent robot named Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o) who gets stranded on a deserted island following a shipwreck. Roz bonds with the island's animals and develops a parental bond with an orphaned gosling. The movie is up for three Oscars, including best animated feature.
While the world of The Wild Robot looks a bit scary and complicated, the story ends in a hopeful place. Sanders says it's incredibly important to him that kids feel that message when they leave the theatre.
"We can all change our programming, we have control over it," he says. "Roz gets this task and she literally doesn't have the programming to do it. At that moment, she has a choice: she either lets that gosling die or she scraps everything she has been literally taught and has to off-road it and start improvising…. There comes this moment, this epiphany where she tells all the animals on the island, 'This is your moment. You either change your programing or none of us are going to make it.' And they do. And it changes."
The full interview with Chris Sanders is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and follow wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Chris Sanders produced by Catherine Stockhausen.
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