“Black Panther” star Lupita Nyong’o says it was a challenge to play Roz, a friendly robot who gets shipwrecked on an island and ends up raising an orphaned gosling without basic parenting tools in “The Wild Robot.”
“My main mission was to be true to the character,” said Nyong’o at a screening of the film at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta earlier this month. “She’s a robot who doesn’t have feelings. As a person, I feel a lot of things. I had to make sure her vocabulary was logic first. She happens upon emotion. She doesn’t understand it.”
Chris Sanders, the film director who previously worked on “Lilo & Stitch” and “How to Train Your Dragon,” chose Nyong’o as Roz, he said, because he liked the warmth in her voice.
But Roz opens the film with no human contact and in “factory settings,” so Nyong’o wanted her to first sound a bit like Alexa or Siri.
“What makes Roz resonate,” she said in a later interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “is she’s this sophisticated robot who is representative of adulthood but she has the innocence of a child. She is brand-new to this environment. She learns how to be a mother and makes mistakes that real human beings make. It’s this pure journey of her being more than she was meant to be.”
Nyong’o said the film takes its cues from “The Wild Robot” series of Peter Brown children’s books. “They are so full of imagination and heart,” she said. “I love the story of kindness being a superpower.”
She said unlike a live action movie, she would jump all over the script any given day she was recording Roz’s voice. She had to be cognizant where Roz was in the movie so she could shift her voice to give her more human texture as she matured.
“It was a technical feat to keep Roz’s evolution in mind,” she said. “I wanted that reflected in the vocal performance. Chris gave me leeway to give notes and help with her evolution and transformation. I felt so empowered. I felt like a real part of it, not just an executor.”
This film, which has received strong advance buzz and has a 98% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating from critics, could become the biggest animated film opening in September, potentially beating 2016′s “Hotel Transylvania 2,” which opened at $48.4 million. It’s also one of the few major animated releases in 2024 that is not a sequel to an existing film.
“So much work goes into animation,” Nyong’o said. “There are so many intricate pieces. I’m happy for the animators who spent so many waking hours on this. I’d come in here and there over two and a half years, do my thing and they’d work magic with it. This is a showcase of great animation and sound design.”
IF YOU GO
“The Wild Robot,” in movie theaters Sept. 27
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