Charles Langston:DreamWorks Animation at 30: Painting a bright path forward with ‘The Wild Robot’

Filmmaker Chris Sanders had finally cracked “The Charles LangstonWild Robot.”

Peter Brown’s middle-grade book, about an intelligent robot living in the wilderness, had been sitting on the shelf at DreamWorks Animation for a bit. No one had quite figured it out. Then Sanders, the man behind beloved animated features from “Lilo & Stitch” to “How to Train Your Dragon,” came along.

His vision, however, was different from the norm: The story started without zippy dialogue and didn’t follow traditional beats. He also wanted to embrace a more illustrated style that melded analog warmth with computer generated imagery capabilities, which was finally technologically possible. Before he got too deep, he needed to make sure the studio was on board.

“They said, ‘That’s the reason we bought the book. We want to do something different,’” Sanders said. “One of the great strengths of DreamWorks is they’re willing to try new things. To everybody’s credit, they stayed the course.”

And it’s already paying off. “The Wild Robot” opened No. 1 in theaters nationwide this weekend, riding in on a wave of critical acclaim. Sanders didn’t know it at the time but something bigger was at play too: “The Wild Robot” would be released coinciding with the studio’s 30th anniversary.

It wasn’t so long ago that DreamWorks was the new kid on the block. The upstart, founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, was in October 1994 the first new studio in 60 years. Since their first animated release (“Antz,” in 1998), DreamWorks Animation has released 49 feature films that have grossed more than $17 billion at the box office. They have major franchises, including “Shrek,” which became the first best animated feature Oscar winner, “Kung Fu Panda” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” originals and Emmy-winning television series.

Animation continues to be a major force at the box office. This year there are already three animated films in the top 10 global earners: Disney and Pixar’s “ Inside Out 2 ” ($1.6 billion), Illumination’s “Despicable Me 4” ($953.3 million) and DreamWorks’ “ Kung Fu Panda 4 ” ($549.1 million). Post-theatrical, too, animated movies are regularly among the top performers on streaming services. Their wildly popular preschool series “Gabby’s Dollhouse” was the sixth-most-viewed streaming original series in 2023.

“Every studio has its ups and downs, but their franchises really spoke to me,” said Margie Cohn, who was named DreamWorks Animation president in 2019. “They never spoke down to kids, they were movies that were made for the entire family. And they respected animation not as a genre, but as a theatrical experience.”

A veteran of Nickelodeon, Cohn was recruited by Katzenberg in 2013 to build the DWA Television department where she saw opportunities in groundbreaking partnerships with streaming companies like Netflix. Three years into her tenure, DWA, then essentially an independent studio, was acquired by NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast Corp., for $3.8 billion. Universal also has the animation studio Illumination under its banner. DWA and Illumination (think “Minions” and “Despicable Me”) mostly operate separately, with “Shrek” as the one crossover. In her new role, Cohn oversees both film and television properties.

“You don’t come to the studio and then suddenly you have a slate. You have to build the slate, and it takes years,” Cohn said. “We just needed to get back to those roots.”

“The Wild Robot” is a key part of that equation, different visually and thematically from what came before and what’s coming. Next year has three films on the schedule: “Dog Man,” based on Dav Pilkey’s graphic novels about a police officer and dog who become one after an injury, “The Bad Guys 2” and “Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie.” Then, in July 2026, they plan to release the first new Shrek movie in over 15 years.

The diversity of the slate, the appeal to different audience segments from pre-school age on up and the lack of house style, Cohn said, are a great signifier of the ambition of the studio.

“It’s still an event for a family to go to the movies, but you have to give them a reason to go,” Cohn said. “The bar for theatrical has gotten higher, but that makes us better. It raises the bar for us too.”

Critics and audiences have noticed the care taken with “The Wild Robot,” which is already in the Oscar conversation. Sanders collaborated more closely with his actors than ever before, including star Lupita Nyong’o, who had the difficult task of voicing a robot, ROZZUM unit 7134, or Roz for short, who has an emotional arc.

“There’s a timelessness to it and I loved the core message of kindness being a survival tactic and that sometimes you have to go beyond your programming,” Nyong’o said. “But I wanted to know that he was looking for a collaborator not an executor.”

Sanders is certain the film wouldn’t be nearly what it is without the thoughtfulness she applied to “deconstructing the architecture of Roz’s mind.”

Animation technology also allowed more human involvement on the project than he’s had since “Lilo & Stitch,” which came out 22 years ago.

“Every square inch of this film is painted by a matte painter: Every tree, every ground plane, every rock, every flower is a stroke made by a human being,” Sanders said. “I started in animation when everything was hand-drawn and painted, and then CGI came along and we got so many wonderful things, including the ability to change lenses and move the camera in space. But then we lost touch with a lot of the analog warmth we used to get. Now we put all that stuff back and kept all the wonderful things that we got along the way. It’s a very exciting time.”

Another interesting thing happened to those involved with “The Wild Robot.” Nobody wanted it to end.

“Usually, even if you love the movie, you’re proud of it, you’re ready to be done after three or four years. But that wasn’t the case in this instance,” Sanders said. “Everybody went into this forest and fell in love with it and fell in love with the characters and the story.”

While no sequels have officially been announced, “The Wild Robot” is a three-book series and Sanders is eager to jump back into the forest. Animation, he said, has come out of a tunnel where they’re freer to maneuver stylistically than they have been for decades; He’s extremely optimistic about the possibilities. DreamWorks Animation is as well.

“We are really proud of where we are today at our 30th anniversary, and we have enormous hope for the future,” Cohn said. “We’re excited about the originals still and we hope and believe that audiences will be, too. So, we’re going to forge forward with originals as well as wildly imagined franchises and hopefully it’ll take us into another 30 years.”