The Wild Robot is being hailed as the next E.T. For Lupita Nyong’o, it was relief to have cameras off

In roles as dramatically diverse as vulnerable, brutalised Patsey in 12 Years a Slave, and fiercely idealistic warrior Nakia in Black Panther, actor Lupita Nyong’o admits she has always played a game of hide and seek with herself.

“I can be very self-critical when it is my image up there,” the 41-year-old Kenyan-Mexican actor says. “Your ego gets so much more involved.”

It explains perhaps why Nyong’o is as well-known for roles that give her permission to dance while she hides in the shadows: as the voice of the Seeonee Indian wolf matriarch Raksha in The Jungle Book, or the Takodana space bar proprietor (and Force-sensitive former smuggler) Maz Kanata in the Star Wars franchise.

“It’s a relief to not have to watch myself,” Nyong’o says, as we sit down to discuss her new project, the richly textured animated film The Wild Robot, from director Chris Sanders, the man behind Lilo & Stitch (2002) and How to Train Your Dragon (2010).

“I am marvelling at so many other people’s hands that have gone into making this thing what it is,” Nyong’o says. “And I have really enjoyed not being physically present.”

Which is not to imply that The Wild Robot is artistically uncomplicated. Quite the opposite. It will be the last truly in-house animated DreamWorks film to be produced – the studio has confirmed it will now start using outside contractors – and it meshes the styles of Disney’s animated classic films and the works of Japanese manga animator (and Studio Ghibli founder) Hayao Miyazaki.

It is, in fact, wonderfully complex. It taps into the realm of famous film robots, such as C-3PO, R2-D2, originally designed by the legendary concept artist Ralph McQuarrie, and bubble-legged Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, the offspring of MGM production designer Buddy Gillespie and art director Arthur Lonergan.

There are grand nods to American futurist Syd Mead, whose industrial style steered his designs for the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner. There is even an artistic curtsy to Bambi, the only animated motion picture set in a more complex forest ecosystem.

And then, to ice the cake, The Wild Robot has an outstanding cast: Nyong’o, and Pedro Pascal as Fink the fox, and Star Wars legend Mark Hamill as Thorn the bear. At its first screening this week in Toronto, Deadline film reviewer Pete Hammond praised its “humour, action [and] heart”, comparing it to Steven Spielberg’s masterwork E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

But as with many such grand collaborations, it started very simply, with a conversation between Sanders and Nyong’o. “He spoke about how he wanted a painterly feeling to the project, and he wanted it to feel nostalgic,” she says. “It’s about technology, it’s about advancement, and it’s set in the future, but he wanted it to somehow be a recall to the past as well.”

In the lead-up to making the film – Nyong’o refers to it as “the courtship process, before I signed on” – Sanders shared some of the preliminary artwork of the film. And it was there that a real connection was made, Nyong’o says.

The Wild Robot, based on Peter Brown’s book of the same name, is the story of the robot – ROZZUM unit 7134, or Roz for short – which becomes shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Roz must adapt to the harsh surroundings, but in so doing becomes the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling, a parent-and-child relationship that proves transformative for both.

Back in April, the three-time Oscar-nominated Sanders took footage from the film on the road to CinemaCon in Las Vegas, one of Hollywood’s more overtly colourful gatherings, but one with a very solid purpose: to sell films to America’s cinema operators.

And in a business overpopulated with costume superheroes and action blockbusters, all with sexy taglines, A-list casts and back-of-the-cereal-box plots, an outrageously artistic and deeply thoughtful animated essay on the nature of existence is always going to be a hard sell. Sanders’ uncompromising pitch? “It is Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest”.

For Nyong’o – the daughter of an academic family who left Kenya because of political unrest, and with a passion for both urban heritage conservation, and political advocacy – the fusion of imagination, art and animation was too irresistible.

And a film, based on a book, diving into the nature of human nature, felt close to home. In 2019, Nyong’o wrote a children’s book, Sulwe, about a five-year-old Kenyan girl who struggles to understand why her complexion is darker than the rest of her family.

Nyong’o’s book, which became a New York Times number-one bestseller, was illustrated by Vashti Harrison, a professional collaboration Nyong’o says gave her an easy way into approaching a personal collaboration with Sanders on The Wild Robot.

“Growing up, I was uncomfortable in my dark skin,” Nyong’o told Variety in 2021. “I rarely saw anyone who looked like me in the aspirational pages of books and magazines, or even on TV. It was a long journey for me to arrive at self-love.”

Pouring her emotions into Sulwe, Nyong’o wanted to work with the book’s illustrator Harrison, but the publisher had insisted on brokering the relationship. “I just felt like I wasn’t OK with that,” Nyong’o says. “I felt like I needed to meet her and for her to get a sense of me and for me to get a sense of her. And so I did. I did the unconventional thing and had a lunch with her.”

The lunch turned out to be transformative. “I hadn’t developed a language, a vocabulary to communicate what I felt was right for the art,” Nyong’o says. “Art is an exploration. So in giving notes or talking about my feelings, a lot can be conveyed in the uncertainty.

“And I found that Vashti was able to metabolise me into her art in a more immediate and textured way than when it was just a bunch of notes in an email,” Nyong’o adds.

The same relationship was critical to making The Wild Robot work, Nyong’o says. “I had been very cautious when signing on because The Wild Robot was very much at the beginning of its process, and it was hard for me to see what they were saying,” she says.

“So it was about having long conversations with Chris that I could feel him in a way that could then inspire how I would show up to the work and deliver something that was useful to them.”

And don’t, whatever you do, make the mistake of assuming a voice performance is any less demanding than a physical one. In the sound booth, Nyong’o had to wrestle with her own limitations versus Roz’s strengths: “When Roz is running, she is not an animate object, she’s not a living being, so she wouldn’t be out of breath,” Nyong’o says. “So how do I convey running without panting? And so that was an interesting conversation to have.

“In the booth, I can take on whatever shape I need in order to be able to sustain the breath in a way that will work when we finally see it. So to see then it fully embodied by the robot and witness how that choice we made very carefully in the booth is paying off is so exciting.”

In fact, what audiences likely misunderstand, Nyong’o says, is just how physical voice work can get. “The liberty in voice work is that ultimately nobody’s going to be watching,” she says. “You don’t have to perform realistically, so you can contort your body in whatever way will make your voice the most robust, the most three-dimensional and full.

“So playing Roz was actually a very physical endeavour for me. We started her off with a voice that was very bright – programmed optimism, I’d call it – and then as she adapts to this wild environment, she grows more nuanced in her tone and becomes more what we would call, I guess, human.”

That sentiment taps into the core of the film as an artistic work. When Sanders, who began his career as a hand-drawn animator, set out to bring it to the screen, he felt the most substantial element in the alchemy was rendering as seemingly un-computer generated (CG) as possible.

“From the very beginning, I was concerned that people wouldn’t see this movie the correct way if you treated it like a normal CG film,” Sanders told Variety earlier this year. “It’s a deceptively sweet and simple book, but with incredibly complex things going on emotionally, and we wanted that to be reflected in the visuals.”

The result is a computer-generated masterwork that looks as though it blends hand-drawn animation and paint brushstrokes. In an era where 3D animation seems to be the dominant art form, it renders in two dimensions something that is profoundly greater than the sum of its parts.

“Reaching back to old techniques and spending the time to generate artwork [which looks like it originates from] the era of the human hand … when someone spends time doing something, we value it subconsciously because we understand how precious time is,” Nyong’o adds.

“We’re eager to feel, and there’s something about texture and tangibility that is more, what’s the word … immersive? We subconsciously register when things are flat and we naturally respond viscerally to things with texture. We’re in search of a soul.”

The Wild Robot is in cinemas now.

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