‘The Wild Robot’ Draws Power from Where the Music Plays — and Where It Doesn’t

Composers don’t always get to work with a sound team during the mixing stage to balance how the sound and the score of a film will actually play. But when these teams’ work isn’t siloed away from each other, they can craft sequences that make their film sound even better in terms of music and effects. Such is the case with “The Wild Robot.” 

The playful, adventurous score by Kris Bowers finds the exact blend of wonder, adventure, melancholy, and (of course) wildness through a mix of orchestra, synths, and unconventional percussion — with Bowers able to pull off the trick of having his wilderness sound alive, animalistic, and natural without using instruments that would suggest a specific region or culture. The work Bowers did with the Sandbox Percussion ensemble was mixed differently, separate from the orchestra, and actually operated kind of in the same way that the sound design would. 

“[The percussion] kind of had their own sonic lane. It was kind of like this ASMR, close-mic sound,” Bowers told IndieWire. “There are a lot of moments where there’s a lot of activity in that sonic area that would primarily be taken by sound design so it’s really amazing that Leff [Lefferts, supervising sound editor], Randy [Thom, supervising sound editor], and Gary [Rizzo, re-recording mixer] were really open to have a moment where the story was taken evenly by us.” 

It’s usually the case that music and sound design take turns leading the dance, as it were, so that the audio amplifies whatever’s most important about the visuals and what’s happening to the characters. Music helps make the sequence of Brightbill (Kit Connor) learning how to fly feel like one singular emotional journey over the course of a montage, while the sound of flapping wings or physical sound effects amplifies specific gags or moments of tension.

Working together, Bowers and the sound team smoothed transitions by making the sounds as musical as the score was sound-heavy. “Leff was so amazing at choosing anything that had a melodic sensibility to it, sound-wise, and making sure that it was intentional with how that happened to the score,” Bowers said.  

When the score takes the lead — perhaps most notably during the migration where Brightbill finally separates from his foster mom/robot Roz (Lupita Nyong’o) — Bowers’ music powers the sequence in terms of its pacing and momentum and emotional scope, but also the weight of the scene. Bowers loves a good ostinato, too, that can develop over the course of a scene and make it feel full. 

‘The Wild Robot‘©DreamWorks/Courtesy Everett Collection

“ Chris [Sanders] first encouraged me to write away from the picture. Everything else I wrote is very picture-intensive. This one, you actually watch the music to take the pace of everything, and then they edit and animate it to the music,” Bowers said. “ Roz is running towards this emotional cliff, so it’s this huge swelling of emotion.”  

Even with letting the music drive the sequence, there are moments throughout where Bowers controls the pace by handing off to the sound design. When Bowers first saw the storyboards for the migration, he thought that Roz’s conversation with goose elder Longneck (Bill Nighy) at the beginning might be the place to tug at the audience’s heartstrings with the score. “ I was like, ‘Oh, that feels like a good place to score. And then, watching it in context, I was like, ‘That has to be sound design,’” Bowers said. “I just want to be surrounded in the reality of that space, sonically, and to allow them just to play it that way.” 

The score doesn’t have to be everywhere, especially when Bowers builds such powerful themes that ebb and flow alongside Roz’s hope for Brightbill and sadness at losing him. “Something I read when I was a kid talked about [the fact that] score needs to be like a great massage. You shouldn’t really be too mindful of where the hands come on and come off,” Bowers said. 

That is perhaps why a moment that the film wants viewers to be incredibly mindful — and incredibly distraught — lets all the music out of the image. When Brightbill breaks into the Rossum ship to rescue Roz, Bowers had written a cue for the moment he finds her powered down. Supervising sound editor Leff Lefferts told IndieWire that they’d be working with it for a while and Bowers’ work on it “was beautiful. I mean, every piece of music that Kris wrote was amazing, including this one.” 

‘The Wild Robot’©DreamWorks/Courtesy Everett Collection

But Sanders, Bowers, and the sound team had the instinct to take the cue out. “That [moment] was really interesting. We found it on the stage,” Bowers said. “We watched it, and we were all like, ‘I think this is going to be much more devastating because there’s no music at all.'” 

Lefferts agreed that once the music was gone and the sound as minimal and hollow as possible, “All of a sudden, your heart was just ripped in half because you’re left alone with Brightbill,” Lefferts said. “But it was too quiet. So then Randy disappeared and created a montage of the battle still going on — this all happened while we were mixing — and he brought stuff into me, and I’m filtering it and moving around to get this sense of deathly quiet in the worst possible way inside, but this battle is raging on.” 

Handoffs between music and sound make the moments where each takes the lead in the audio storytelling of “The Wild Robot” feel earned. Even in its silliest moments, like the Rossum Robotics jingle that Bowers had to write to play out of Roz’s speakers when she’s trying to connect with animals in the forest, Bowers’ work grounds the music and gives it the texture of sound design, while still weaving themes that feel universal. 

“It feels like this pursuit,” Bowers said. “It feels like things are coming to me, and I’m just trying to catch up to it.”