Kris Bowers reveals the ‘bittersweet idea’ that inspired his emotional score for ‘The Wild Robot’
“It’s always so amazing to have the work be recognized,” shares Kris Bowers about his Golden Globe nomination for his score for “The Wild Robot.” The acknowledgement is especially meaningful for him because “everyone that worked on the film made their art from such a deeply personal place and such a place of love and excitement and curiosity.” “We really created a familial bond making this film,” reflects the composer. His score has since gone on to earn a Critics Choice nomination as well. Watch our complete video interview above.
Bowers was brought onto the animated film early by Universal Pictures because the team “knew that music was going to be such a big character” in the movie. The composer was introduced to the story about the robot Roz through the source material, saying, “I was immediately taken by Peter Brown’s novel because I had just become a dad.” His work on crafting the music took off once he had the opportunity to see “a full version of the film that was still storyboard animatics,” going off of the “black-and-white pencil sketches” to write.
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“The Wild Robot” centers on Roz (Lupita Nyong’o), who crash lands on a wild island and begins to build relationships with the animals there, especially a young gosling Brightbill (Kit Connor), who she helps to raise. The movie afforded Bowers the chance to do things he hasn’t yet done as a film composer, despite his accomplished filmography including “Green Book, “King Richard,” and “The Color Purple,” and TV series such as “When They See Us,” “Mrs. America,” and “Bridgerton.” Since this story has less dialogue than most of the movies he’s done, the music “is carrying a lot of the emotional weight in the storytelling,” so he needed “the orchestral writing to be really intentional and have these subtle evolutions.” Stylistically, he married his lush melodies and themes with “really unorthodox percussion” and a “suite of synths.”
One of the recurring words that inspired the creative team is the adjective “wild” from the title, and it is one that influenced Bowers’ writing, too. When he first started thinking about the film, he says he had “an idea of there being synths and it being really modern in that way,” but that had to change when he realized “Roz is really this singular futuristic being that’s going into this world of wilderness.” That notion changed his approach, so he accentuated the “natural layer” of the music in the score and leaned “into the organic qualities.” Most importantly, he says the score “had to represent the warmth of this story and the warmth of who Roz becomes in this story, and the idea of kindness and kindness as a survival skill.”
SEE Oscars: ‘Kiss The Sky’ from ‘The Wild Robot’ takes flight and now leads Best Song odds
One of the standout musical sequences in the film is the cue “I Could Use a Boost,” which accompanies the sequence of the film in which Roz is helping Brightbill train for his first winter migration. It was the second piece of music Bowers wrote for the film and took nearly three months to complete. “I connected to it so much because I just became a dad,” explains the composer, elaborating, “Giving someone all of these life skills and tools to eventually just leave you one day is a pretty sad and scary, bittersweet idea, and my daughter was really young at the time.” He initially pictured himself dropping her off at college as inspiration to write it, but director Chris Sanders said he needed to go in a slightly different direction because the dynamic between characters in this moment is “rife with tension.” To pull it off, the Globe nominee had to picture himself and his daughter “in the future in a much different way, in a way that I didn’t really want to imagine.” He shares, “That emotional place led me to write the beginnings of the theme.”
While “The Wild Robot” has a familial story at its core, it also features many incredible action sequences. Bowers says the key to composing those fast-paced moments is to approach them “as one whole piece, even if they are separate cues.” He describes his role in scoring these scenes as “almost like painting a mural, focusing on one little moment and then stepping back to look at the whole and then going back to the moment.”
One of Bowers’ favorite moments in the film is the montage of Roz and Brightbill preparing for his migration, which features the song “Kiss The Sky” performed by Maren Morris. The entire sequence is longer than the song itself, so the composer asked the songwriters if they would give him “the stems of the tracks” so he could seamlessly integrate the song into his scoring. He says they were “so generous to give me all of the different tracks so I could work with my music editor to cut together what I wanted that song to be,” emphasizing that the process “really embodied so much of the collaborative approach” to making the film. It “felt like a really amazing thing to sit back and watch at the end,” shares the musician.
Bowers is an Academy Award winner for “The Last Repair Shop,” receiving another nom for “A Concerto Is a Conversation.” He is a four-time Primetime Emmy nominee for “When They See Us,” “Mrs. America,” and “Bridgerton,” and has three Grammy nominations.
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