From ‘Lilo & Stitch’ to ‘The Wild Robot’: Director Chris Sanders on what he’s learned after decades as a top animator and filmmaker
The Gold Standard is a Gold Derby series where we speak to legendary figures in Hollywood who take us through their award-worthy greatest hits. Below, four-time Oscar nominee Chris Sanders talks about his incredible animation career, including current Best Animated Feature nominee The Wild Robot.
The Early Years
Sanders started working at Disney in 1987 in the visual development department but got his big break when he was asked to work on storyboards for the 1990s animated film Rescuers Down Under. From there, He worked on some of the greatest Disney animated movies ever, including Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Mulan, which he cowrote.
More from GoldDerby
As a kid watching these Disney specials, they would show how animation worked. The part that was always the most mysterious was when they passed the door that said “Story.” So when I got to Disney Animation, the only job available was with the visual development. I worked in that department for many months before being asked if I wanted to try storyboarding.
I only knew storyboarding from Saturday morning cartoons; that’s where I started. I had a job for three years at Marvel Productions. Storyboarding in TV is really intense and very structured. The drawings are tiny, and they’re on these pre-printed pages that have little squares. Of course, in feature animation, it’s entirely different. But I didn’t understand that. And so I turned them down and said, “No, no, I can’t storyboard.” The producer for Rescuers Down Under came back to me because I had done these visual development sketches for how the mice would send this radio signal from Australia to New York — I went to the library to look at the globe to see what time of day would it be if they sent the signal at 10 in the morning in Australia? Would it be night or day? As I looked at the globe, I couldn’t help but notice all these spots between Australia and New York. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be more interesting if they had to bounce the signal from place to place?” So I drew this wrecked airplane in a jungle, and the mice hot-wired the radio. And when the producer asked me to storyboard, I said, no, I was thinking about Saturday morning cartoons-style. But he returned to me and said, “Could you just do all the drawings that come in between the ones you did?’ And I said, “Oh, I can do that.” So I got a story pad with paper. I got excited. I put on some music. I found a great piece of music. I thought that would illustrate the whole thing. It was a wordless sequence that was all music. And once I got all the drawings done, I showed them. I showed the drawings by flipping through them. And he said, “Hey, could you put these up on a storyboard so we can see them all at once?’ And I said, “Oh, yeah, I can do that.” I did that. And then he said, “Could you, would you take a stick and point at them and show them to our story crew and the directors?” And I said, “Sure, I can do that.” So I put the music on but was pitching and didn’t realize it. He tricked me into boarding.
I worked in the story department with Ed Gombert, Joe Rantz, Brenda Chapman, and Roger Allers, the greatest storytellers ever. I worked on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Mulan and learned how to shape a story.
Lilo & Stitch
Sanders created the character of Stich in 1985 as part of a failed pitch for a children’s book. After working on Mulan, he sought to develop a breakthrough figure in popular culture.
Mulan is a very popular character. She’s a great character. But there was just something about her that I knew she wouldn’t be as pervasive as the characters in The Lion King. So when I started Lilo and Stitch, one of the things that I did have on my mind was to create a pervasive character. I wanted to be out there all the time. So after I finished Mulan. I was still in Florida, and Tom Schumacher [the one-time lead of Disney feature animation and current lead of Disney Theatrical] came out to visit. He asked if there was anything I wanted to direct, and I remembered Stitch.
Sanders has voiced Stich since the 2002 film — including reprising the role for the live-action version of Lilo and Stitch coming to theaters this summer from filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp.
I can’t tell you how many times a day I see people with Stitch on them, and it just makes me so happy. And do you know what my friend once said to me? He said, “You never know who you’re standing next to.” And many times, I look past somebody who’s festooned with Stitch. So I think, should I identify myself? Once in a while, I will. If I vibe out, it wouldn’t be weird.
The success of Lilo & Stitch gave Sanders and co-director Dean DeBlois their first-ever Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature.
It was a surreal experience. It was an out-of-body experience because when I was a kid, my grandmother never missed an Oscars broadcast. So, an enduring memory of mine is always sitting in the living room and watching the Oscars with my grandmother. So, at that point, I was so disappointed that she wasn’t alive to see that. But I thought, “Oh my gosh. No matter what, I’ll at least be there in the audience when whatever happens.” And I’ve not had the best luck with the other movies that were out simultaneously with my nominations. That year was Hiyao Miyazaki and Spirited Away. So, I didn’t bother writing an acceptance speech. And then, when The Croods came out, we were up against Frozen. Another speech I didn’t bother to write.
How to Train Your Dragon
With How to Train Your Dragon, Sanders and Dean DeBlois came on later. It was Sanders’ first brush with CG animation rather than hand-drawn and gave him several great lessons.
That was our crash course in all things CG. I was at DreamWorks developing The Croods and was asked to take over on How to Train Your Dragon. They were switching directions. So I jumped onto that production mid-production. So, a lot of the models had already been built. The characters have largely been built, etc. So it was good because I didn’t have to start initially. I did get a crash course. They explained everything about CG to me and Dean, and we went from there. The only character we built from scratch was Toothless, who we would revise. There was an issue with the original design, and we thought for this film and this story to work, we will have to change the Toothless design, which we did. So, I got to watch that one from start to finish. It was a rush job, but the artist did a brilliant design job.
How to Train Your Dragon is one of the most successful animated films ever, spawning its own franchise and upcoming live-action reboot. The film also featured an enviable voice cast of top talent, including Gerard Butler, Jay Baruchel, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, and Craig Ferguson.
It’s very typical in animation to record people by themselves. The reason is it’s a very long process, and people are working on other films while we’re doing our bit. They may do two or three films while we’re doing one. So we recorded most of the voices, and then we had this opportunity to be in New York and get the three lead characters together in two days, and we jumped at the chance. Dean and I always wanted that kind of interaction. It was OK with us that if they talked over each other, that would happen, like being on an actual set. One of the things that I learned from Tom Schumacher on Lilo and Stitch was that if you have the opportunity to get someone who has done Broadway or is on Broadway, it’s an excellent idea. I never even understood why. But there is something about working on the stage, maybe the projection and its scale; it’s suitable for animation. One of the things I learned is to let people know they could push it. We will leave this session without your head; go with your voice. We do make recordings. We have a lipstick camera running during the recording because the animators can take cues from the actor, but predominantly, we leave it just the voice. And so risk going too far, risk going too broad, and if it does, for some reason, cross the line, I’ll pull you back. But it’s OK to push it, and you rarely really have to pull anybody back because I think broadness is very good for what we’re doing.
The Croods
Next for Sanders was The Croods, an animated film about a family of cave people facing adverse conditions. The blockbuster hit, another franchise starter, earned Sanders his third Best Animated Feature nomination at the Oscars and allowed him to use storytelling tactics he learned while making Lilo and Stitch to help the film connect with viewers.
One of the things I learned was to set the parameters right away. At the beginning of How to Train Your Dragon, we start by saying, “This is Berk. This is who I am. This is what’s going on.” I repeated that on The Croods because it was very important that mortality had to be a reality to the audience. Because without that risk being palpable and present, the story wouldn’t work. If these guys were like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, and they fell off a cliff and just bounced back up, then there would be no stakes, and there would be no risk. So right away, we said to the audience, “We had neighbors, but they’re gone.” We did it with comedy, but we showed all the neighbors who were not making it. And I found out in our very first test screening that stuck. The first question we asked the audience was about the world, and they said, “Oh, it’s dangerous because all these neighbors didn’t do so well.”
And I remember how well that stuck with the audience. I’m gonna go way back to Howard Ashman. He said, “If I want the audience to remember something, I say it thrice quickly. In The Little Mermaid, Ursula tells Ariel, “You got three days. Got it three days. Now by midnight or by sunset on the third day.” So three, three, three. She said it, and people remembered. That was useful for Lilo and Stitch because in the scene where the social worker visits, Nani chases Lilo as soon as he leaves. She screams. Nani chases her. She grabs her. Lilo bites her, and then she runs up to her room. They have this big fight. Many people said at our first test screening, “I don’t like how Lilo’s mom interacts with her.’ And I was like, “Oh my gosh, they didn’t register that’s not her mom.” So, I rewrote the scene after the fight where she enters Lilo’s room. Three times in quick succession, she says that they’re sisters. She says, “We shouldn’t have argued.” And she says, “We’re sisters. It’s our job.” And then she starts to say something, and Lilo says, “I like you better as a sister than a mom.” And then Nani says, “You like me better as a sister than a rat, right?” So sister, sister, sister. And nobody ever gave us that note again.
The Wild Robot
After making his live-action debut with The Call of the Wild, Sanders returned to animation for The Wild Robot, his first animated film as a solo director after co-directing credits on the previous features. It earned Sanders his fourth Best Animated Feature nomination.
I had to take everything very seriously, not that I wouldn’t. But I think there is a particular safety net with a co-director. When you have another person there that can catch things, but now it was all me. I was so nervous about finishing it that I never moved into my office. If you had walked into my office in the third year of production, it would look like I’d moved in just yesterday. I only had two or three boxes. I never really unpacked. I was always ready to be thrown out because I was not confident. I knew I was going to do my best. And again, I think I pulled it off because I was calling on everything I’d learned for 40 years in this whole thing. I called on every little bit to ensure I didn’t miss anything. And I definitely could not have pulled this off had I not had the triumphs, mistakes, and learning curve I had.
You get a toolbox. Eventually, you start calling on it. Animation is egitimate directing. It’s legitimate storytelling. People sometimes don’t realize how much work goes into stories in these feature films. We have worked on them for years, trying to make them simple. Because simplicity is their strength, it’s not to the point where the movies are impoverished, but make sure everything is clear, flows, and has good timing. The Wild Robot, the adaptation of Peter Brown’s book, was very important that I clear out enough space so the film feels like it is unspooling slowly. I didn’t want it to feel like it was on a schedule. Roz the robot has this deadline of getting her gosling off the island by the fall. But it’s months. It’s not like rushing for a train or anything like that. So we’re never going to get that crazy urgency. I employed a lot of things that I learned on Mulan and How to Train Your Dragon, such as looking at things structurally before I allowed myself to have character fun. Sometimes, you can skip the structure and get into the fun bit, and then you realize I should’ve fixed this later. There will always be back and forth. But attending to the structure will help you out. It will allow more fun later if you’ve got a strong structure that is as simple as possible.
Best of GoldDerby
Sign up for Gold Derby's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
