‘The Wild Robot’ Score Evoked Kris Bowers’ Worst Fears of Parenting – Sound & Screen Film
The Wild Robot is about an unlikely family of a robot and a goose. The music from the film reflects composer Kris Bowers’ own anxieties about being a new parent: He had a 6-month-old daughter when he began composing the score. A major theme plays midway through the film when the robot, Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), had taught Brightbill to fly and has to watch him fly away to migrate with a flock.
“Roz has been, as [writer-director] Chris [Sanders] often says, going towards this emotional cliff she doesn’t even recognize as she’s raising Brightbill,” Bowers said. “Roz and Brightbill are dealing with something that’s possibly irreparable. They may never see each other again. They may never speak again. In this moment, They’re not saying goodbye, they’re not saying I love you.”
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Bowers admitted he first wrote a piece of music imagining sending his newborn daughter off to college eventually. However, the music rang false because he was avoiding what the scene was really about.
“It made me think about the fact that I’m inevitably going to fail her,” Bowers said. “I’m going to make mistakes. No matter how hard I try, no matter how hard my wife and I try, in 2 1/2 years there are so many days we talk to each other, ‘I really failed as a parent today.’ That’s really painful to think about, but also this film deals with it in a way that makes it okay to think about or important to think about it.”
A multi-hyphenate as a director of short films as well, Bowers said he always gravitated towards music as a way of expressing his emotions.
“I remember having a moment playing piano and being angry with my parents,” Bowers said, acknowledging his parents were in the audience. “Deciding to play piano from that angry headache, 30 minutes later I was like I’m actually not that angry anymore. It’s really a coping mechanism honestly. That’s why I feel like I can express myself in films like this.”
The music of DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot incorporates the band Sandbox Percussion. Bowers learned about them from fellow composer Thomas Kotcheff, and thought their approach to making sounds would evoke the wilderness setting of the movie.
“Sandbox Percussion approaches it more like Foley,” Bowers said, referencing the sound effects art. “They’re playing oxygen tanks, metal pipes, wooden planks, teacups, glass bottles, all this kind of stuff. It created these percussion sets and it was about writing for them with this detail to have it be this almost ASMR texture that’s on top of the orchestra.”
Check out the panel video above.
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