The Wild Robot

Today on Art of the Cut, we’re talking with Dreamworks veteran editor Mary Blee about the film, “The Wild Robot.”

Mary’s editing career began as an assistant editor on the 1991 animated film “Beauty and the Beast.” She’s worked in sound editing and VFX editing. Did additional editing on “Kung Fu Panda” and was an associate editor on “How to Train Your Dragon” and “The Croods.” She was Second Editor on “The Boss Baby” and also worked on subsequent “How To Train Your Dragon,” “Croods” and “Boss Baby” films.

Mary, thank you so much for being on Art of the Cut. It’s lovely to have you. My wife and I watched the film yesterday and I know she got all the “mom feels” out of the movie.

That’s fantastic. [Director] Chris Sanders was very interested in doing a movie that featured a mom. He’s worked on a lot of classic animation. He himself has pointed out that in many of these classic animated movies, the mom is not featured and he posits that it’s perhaps because, for instance, in the example of Aladdin, that there was originally a mom character, but no mom is going to allow their kid to run and steal things from the markets.

She’s gonna intervene, but it was important to have that character do that without anyone intervening, so they cut the mom character in that movie. So it set Chris up for feeling that void and looking for a movie that featured a mom character. So when The Wild Robot came along, he was interested right from the start.

Talk to us about the opening process of editing storyboards. You’re just cutting with simple pen and ink drawings and you  don’t have the “big name” actors’ voices.

The storyboard process is a huge part of making animated films and our process of working on a feature is usually about three years in length. We will be in storyboards for almost a year and a half to two years of that three year time.

Maybe we’ll be getting animation tests. The head of character animation will be hired and exploring what the characters will be doing and coming up with different ideas for their movement on the side. Meanwhile, the story is actually being figured out in the storyboard process.

There is a really well-worked-on script whenever we start. In this case the script was derived from Peter Brown’s book, “The Wild Robot,” which is a very popular book with emergent readers and beloved in classrooms and is often read by entire third, fourth, and fifth grade classes.

It’s made out of a lot of small chapters with easy-to-consume bits of information. It has an amazing story about Roz - this robot that ends up on an uninhabited island with all of the different animals and her interaction with the environment.

The very first script reflected the 80 original chapters pretty closely. That was Chris’s starting point. Once that script was done it, then it goes into the storyboard process. 

The individual scenes are given to storyboard artists. How they “launch” the storyboard artists is dependent on the director. Some give a lot of instructions or some basic instructions of “here’s the intent that I have for the scene, here are the pages that you’re working off.” Maybe they’ll have a discussion of some basic ideas.

Chris likes to put really wide parameters for the artist ‘cause he wants the artist to bring something to it - something that he hasn’t thought of yet. Then the storyboard artists will go off and - using the pages as a guide - draw individual drawings that beat out all the different beats of the scene, tell the story, cover the dialogue.

Director Chris Sanders

For instance, in the opening of our movie, Roz lands on the beach. She gets powered up by some otters. She has a very minor amount of dialogue - which is her startup dialogue, saying who she is and what she has to offer. She interacts with the otters.

She’s hit by a wave and is pushed up against a very steep cliff of basalt on the rocky, sandy shore of this island. She needs to escape the beach. That would be the basics of what a story artist is working from. But within that they’re coming up with the cinematography, the acting for the characters as they say their lines or have their interactions.

For instance, with Roz and the otters what is that interaction like? How does she move? How does she think? How does she interact? Who is she? That’s the story artist’s job: to interpret the script and what he or she has talked with Chris Sanders about.

Once they have a full pass of that sequence, it comes to editorial and usually we’ll have a verbal pitch from the story artists and they will talk through each and every one of those individual drawings that they’ve drawn.

In this case of Roz landing on the beach, they were well-drawn by numerous artists over the course of time, but the first pass - I think - was Lorna Cook. She talks through the various story panels and that’s my starting point as an editor.

Then we import the boards into the Avid and start cutting. I personally like to get the boards cut into a selects-reel at one length, so they’re all 48 frames strung out in one big line. I don’t want any difference in timing. I kind of want a blank slate, then I start to add my interpretation of how each board and each beat should be.

As I’m timing out each of those boards, there’s a lot of interpretation that can come from. It’s basically setting the groundwork - which will be a year and a half from now - for what the pacing and timing for the acting will be. That’s also setting the pacing and timing for when previs comes in and blocks out the sequence - creating this blueprint for the animators. We do that for every single sequence in the script.

Editor Mary Blee

I’ve done a little bit of animation editing myself. You’re talking about the pacing and the rhythm, but that means something a bit different for an animation editor than for a live action editor because for a live action editor the pace and rhythm are determined by the length of a clip in the timeline, but for an animation editor, one “clip” or shot could be 30 storyboards or more, each with their own length. So it’s not just the length of the individual storyboard, but the pace of the length of how many storyboards make up a shot, too.

Exactly. You are basically making the timing of the shot. The pace that the shot unfolds is not given to you, for example, how fast Roz stands up out of that box. If you were shooting that in live action, you would get the clip, and Roz would stand up out of the box at a certain pace. She would look at the otters with a certain pace she would blink or whatever her acting would be determined in that shot as it was shot.

In this case, I have to decide how fast I want Roz to stand up because she is just barely starting up. All her gears are getting going. She’s brand new. Chris Sanders actually brought in a drone that he had purchased and set it up on my floor and turned it on and he said, “It’s gonna be something like this.” And this drone took forever to start up.

Its gears are whirring and all these sounds are happening and little things are turning and it’s starting to expand out of the box. I thought, “Oh! Okay. I get it. I see what you’re going for here.” So there’s a lot of those kind of explanations of: “This is the ballpark of what I’m looking for.”

Then I’m just riffing off of that and deciding exactly how long I think these things should be. Especially as far as comedy is concerned, there’s a comedic moment with Roz and the otters.

To me it’s a deadpan moment of the otters trying to process what this thing in front of me is, so I have to allow it to sit, blink, and then slowly move its child out of the way from what seems to be a monster.

All that timing is done in the editing room and then shown to the director so Chris Sanders could have feedback as far as my pacing and timing is concerned.

So, that’s cutting the visuals, but there’s no sound with those storyboards. The dialogue and “production sound” that a live action editor would have to work with aren’t there. You have to create that yourself as well as add other sound effects and possibly add some temp music. So how does that process happen?

I like to do passes. Everyone does it differently. I tend to cut all the boards silently at first because it makes sense to make the actions LOOK correct: how she’s standing, how she’s interacting. I find that easier to make it funny also.

So I cut a little silent film first and I know where the dialogue goes ‘cause it will be indicated on the boards by the story artists - “somewhere around here we intend to have this line be.” The first pass of dialogue is not Lupita Nyong’o.

I joke that it’s our “Dreamworks Players.” It’s folks around the studio who have some acting skill, who scratch dialogue for the actors. There are some pretty decent actors at Dreamworks!

I find that the scratch dialogue’s always pretty great to work with. I then go to where the story artist had indicated where the dialogue should be, and in my very first pass I’ll put the dialogue exactly where they indicated, but I often do a second or third pass before I show it to the director where I start skooching it around if it doesn’t feel correct.

The timing is one thing in your mind, but in practice it’s often something different. So I try to have that flexibility of: “I think it might be a little funnier if this line is here or if it’s split over two shots.” Or maybe I feel like I want the line of dialogue to not be on the character delivering the dialogue, but I think it’s gonna be funnier to have the dialogue over the otters as she’s delivering it.

So I do a pass putting in the dialogue second, then once I have that and I feel like I’ve refined the cut to a place where I feel pretty good about it, that’s when I start adding in sound effects. We have a very large sound effects library, and I’m screening these movies a lot, so we have to do a pretty elaborate sound effects pass because it needs to play in a theater just as well as if you’d had the final sound effects playing.

Avid timeline for Reel 5 only. (about 20 minutes near the end of the film). Notice the track labeling and organization. 

Once I have that, then I put in the music. In this case, we didn’t put any music in. We had one pass where I put music in and took it out pretty quickly. One of the things that Chris Sanders really wanted is that he did not want wall-to-wall music, which sometimes has a tendency to make its way into animated features. He didn’t want that.

He really wanted to make sure that there were a space where you focused on the sound effects and in particular making sure that the island became a character. We both agreed that opening the movie in this way - with no music - and focusing on the sound effects would be very, very effective, making sure that the island and the wildness and the difficulty that it takes to survive in the wild is put front and center, right out of the gate.

Also to contrast the sound of nature and the sound of naturalness and the, the belongingness of the animals and things on that island and how Roz did not belong: how Roz sounded different and how the two sounds coming together felt like they didn’t belong together. It was important to establish that really quickly right out of the gate, so consequently the decision was made to have no music in that first scene.

What about the process of revising that scene?

The first person I play it back for is the director. Actually, our producer was there quite a bit. We have a long discussion about some of the choices I’ve made. I try to have multiple cuts almost every single time I show him something.

I have a cut of the storyboard artist’s original intent because I know that that was Chris’s starting point and I want to make sure that he had that available to him. Then I usually have one or two other edits. In this case I had one with music and one without music. I also had some different timings for the joke with the otters.

Also on this sequence, how it ended up was a little bit different;: there were a lot more comedic beats of her getting on the box. She fell outta the box and we did a pass where there was way more dialogue than we ended up with. I show whatever versions I have to Chris and then we have a discussion of what is working and what is not. 

Once, I asked Chris how we would define “editorial.” Chris said that he thinks that editorial is a forum. It’s a place to challenge the story. He has so many ideas and intentions when he’s writing the script - when he is visualizing the story himself - but when something is on a piece of paper it’s different than when you’re actually watching it on the screen, so editorial is the place of actualization: “We’ve talked about all this stuff, but now that it’s right in front of you, is it working?” He likes to be challenged in that way in editorial. 

Once we’ve gone through a couple passes, other people come in the room. Mostly it’s myself; Chris Sanders; Heidi Gilbert, our head of story; and Jeff Hermann, our producer. We’re kind of the core four people who were sitting in that room either complimenting what we saw on the screen or saying, “This is not quite working. We’re not understanding where Roz’s head is at.”

In the case of this sequence, she was talking too much. We’re over explaining what’s going on in her head and we need to see how little dialogue we can have in this sequence and just experience it the way she is experiencing it: She doesn’t know what’s going on, she can’t speak the language of the animals, so there’s no one to talk to.

She doesn’t understand what nature even is. She’s never interacted with it. So when this wave hits her out of nowhere - and that was a choice that we came up with, probably in the second or third version. It was boarded originally so that you saw the wave coming.

We decided that maybe it should just come outta nowhere, so it’s like a sucker punch that just hits her. Before she even knows what’s going on, she’s being tumbled into this beautiful wave shot that Chris had envisioned and flung onto the shore. Now she’s aware that there’s danger, which is a really quick way to express the innocence and the naivete of her character. In that one moment on the beach with the wave, you express those notions and start to define who she is.

So there are a lot of iterations and Heidi Gilbert is interacting and we’re all thinking of different beats and different ideas. She can turn to the story artist and say, “We now have these new ideas. We need this wave to sucker punch her, so we need new boards.” Then we go through the same process again.

It could have easily been that the Mama otter pushing her baby out of the way was in the original storyboards, but that’s the kind of beat that often gets added later.

And in this case when the blueprint of the storyboards goes to previs then pre-vis does a whole other pass - putting it in 3D space - and 3D space opens up whole new possibilities of what you can do. So we get coverage the same way you get coverage in live action of all these new shots in 3D space. There’s a point where certain things are easier to visualize in previs.

The wave would’ve been so hard to storyboard, I would think.

Actually Heidi Gilbert storyboarded that and she did an amazing job. She did a technique where she combined her hand-drawn version of Rob with a wave effect that she found and kind of made. She did a really good job of actualizing that idea.

Chris had shown us a lot of sample footage of surfers underneath waves and the wave going over, so he was very clear about the shot he wanted. In that particular case, what the previs folks added was sort of the width and breadth at the beach.

There’s kind of a three-quarter angle of her being slammed against the cliff. We didn’t have that in storyboards and the pullout from the eye was actually a Chris Sanders idea from the very beginning but previs was able to actualize that movement.

The other thing that previs did an amazing job at was her climbing to the top of the mountain, the camera circling around her to show that she’s alone on an island. It was a necessary shot that we had to have to make sure that the audience was aware - and she was aware - that she is on an island, there’s no one on it. There’s not a city or a harbor she could walk to. She’s truly alone. So that shot was, was very important. Previs created that shot for us.

No offense to the previs artists of course, but don’t you find that when you switch from the storyboard pass to the previs pass (sometimes called the “layout pass”), you lose a lot of the emotion?

That’s where imagination really takes hold. The storyboard artists are really working hard to create the emotion in the storyboards, so when it goes from the storyboards to previs, even if the full breadth of expressions that would’ve been on Roz’s face - and that’s a whole ’nother conversation of how she is expressive - but, for example, Fink the Fox character - the expressiveness on his face - and how a joke would play.

He kind of pulls up the corner of his mouth to smile, so I have a cheeky little smile that I’m allowing space for. When I’m looking at the previs, I often go back and forth (between the storyboard track and the previs track) making sure I don’t lose the time that is gonna be necessary for the animator to do some version of Fink’s cheeky little grin, or whatnot. So it’s making sure that the time is always represented, even if it’s not fully represented in the previs. 

I really have to compliment our previs artists. They actually do an amazing job with the rigs that they have. 

A "rig" refers to the controls that the animator or previs artist have that allow control over the character's movements. Previs artists have less sophisticated rigs and much less time to work than the animators

In this particular case, a lot of time and effort was spent with the previs artists to represent the best that they can, the expressiveness and the acting that was required because this movie is such a character piece. The previs represented the acting really well and was a really good blueprint for the animators.

The animators have really incredible tools to take the acting and emotion to the next level, but I do feel like our previs was very indicative of where it ended up going. We did a lot of passes of the previs in particular to create a really good blueprint for the animators.

Previs has gotten exponentially better in the last few years. Let’s talk on a macro level - stepping back to the storyboard process. So you’ve finished an approved version of every scene and you’ve assembled those scenes together into a movie and you get to watch it now at its full length. What are some of the things that happen at that point?

Once we have a first pass, we really start to lean into Chris’s definition of editorial as a forum. So we will play the entirety of the movie for the executives at Dreamworks, but also an audience of Dreamworkers. There is no better way of seeing if your movie’s working or not than having a live audience reacting.

We all are present during these screenings and you can feel it in the room pretty quickly: if something’s working, if something’s not working. Also we have notions. These screenings happen periodically and we always have a laundry list of things we already want to do next as we’re watching the screening.

So we walk in with a to-do list for the next screening. We get a lot of feedback after these screenings and we read through every single note given by every single person. We sit in a conference room with the notes spread out in front of us and a sequence list of the movie.

First we talk about macro goals: what are the major things that we need to work on? One of the things that we worked on from the beginning of the process almost through to the end of the process was Roz’s arc. That was a huge challenge. She is a character who just does not have a mouth.

She does not have a brow. So some of the major emotive components of a human face are not there, so having her emote, and how you wanted to see her arc develop is challenging right from the get-go.

On top of that - when we think of a voice of a robot - there are tropes that we go to immediately: A. robot. that. talks. like. this. Or there’s the Siri-type voice. Those are not super emotional voices. So how are we going to see Roz’s arc?

How do we work with her dialogue to make her basically be able to complete an arc: make us care about her as a character, make us care about her journey. And for that first first screening we did not have Lupita in it. It was just scratch.

So that became a headline for us right out of the gate. We have to care about this character. We need to come up with some ideas of how to show this arc, how to show her change. So we look at all the sequences that we have to work with.

We have a big bulletin board and we’re pinning up three by five cards. Pretty quickly we thought: we need a starting point and an ending point and they need to be crystal clear. This is where casting Lupita really was a game-changer.

She came in to record the first time and for the first half an hour, 45 minutes of her record session it was just Lupita and Chris talking because she’s very involved in the process. She had the same questions we did: “How am I supposed to do this?

I need to be able to connect with this character. Am. I. Talking. Like. This?” The starting point for her voice was “engineered optimism.” That what they started calling it, which was a Siri type idea. She is programmed to have a task and complete a task, but someone’s programmed this entity to do this. She’s not self-actualized.

This has been pre-determined for her. This chipper demeanor is not really who she is: it’s who her programmers think she should be.

As she starts to develop a relationship with Brightbill that starts to change, so that’s that second stage of her voice - the transitional stage. Through multiple record sessions, Lupita and Chris came up with notions such as adding contractions.

At the beginning of the movie, she would say, “I cannot” and by the middle she’s saying “I can’t.” Very subtle changes in her voice where you can feel the emotion seeping in slowly into her voice. Then, the ending point is what Chris called “full Lupita.”

She has a warm, nurturing quality to her voice, which is the natural Lupita voice. And Chris is also rewriting the dialogue to support this and is incorporating Lupita’s suggestions. All of us are coming together and coming up with ideas. 

Meanwhile, the animators are carrying animation tests, which are developing her movements. She moves like a Rubik’s cube. Once we had that concept, we decided that she can adapt. She can mimic a crab. It’s the unemotional adaptation of following the crab up the cliff to save her physical form in the first sequence.

But by the end of the movie, she’s emotionally adapted to be able to have a real relationship with another creature. So that’s the end point to all these screenings that we have and the feedback that we get. We identify important story issues and try to solve them.

Did the process of those screenings cause you to cut any scenes?

Structurally this movie changed a lot. Part of that was because we started with Peter Brown’s book which had all these short chapters. Each chapter had one main idea that worked perfectly for the book, but in our first screening, it became pretty evident that it created a bit of an episodic feel: Here’s a moment in life here and then here’s the moment in life.

Characters would come in and then leave - which worked for the book - but in the movie it felt too convenient that a character would pop up, give Roz a piece of information that she needed, and then pop out. We weren’t feeling that we were developing relationships with any of these characters because they would pop in and pop out.

That was problematic pretty quickly. Also - the way the book is structured - you do not meet Brightbill quickly. Roz’s relationship with this orphan gosling is the driver of the entire movie. That was one of my first notes that I gave in one of these meetings was: “We gotta move that up earlier.

We gotta get to meeting BrightBill as fast as we can.” Once we know who Roz is and once we know what this environment means to her, we need to meet BrightBill immediately. Have her find that egg." In the earliest versions of the edit, we met Fink the fox before we meet Brightbill. 

On top of everything, we had a challenge of Roz understanding the animals’ language. That was another structural challenge. She needs to be able to talk to Fink once Fink’s there. So there was a huge challenge of how do we make all this work? In the very first version of the movie, it wasn’t quite there yet.

Roz finding the egg needed to be moved earlier. We had many, many versions of how to show Roz decipher the animal language. At one point it included showing a bar on the screen saying “10%.” Viewers weren’t understanding how Roz was learning the animal language so there was this bar showing: “I now know 50% of the animal language.”

We were getting notes saying, “When does Roz learn the animal language?” I’d think, “There’s a bar on the screen! How are people not getting this?” But it’s because we were trying to do it at the same time that we were also trying to do so many other things so we weren’t “putting a frame around it.”

There’s a scene much later in the movie called The Winter Storm in which there’s a time lapse. It started with six boards from John Puglisi, one of our story artists. He had put that time lapse in. It wasn’t in the script. He put it in because there’s a lot of animals on the island and he thought that we don’t have time to save every single one, so he made this time lapse sequence.

When we saw it in editorial, we thought it was great, so we elaborated on it. As we do often with storyboards, we’ll cut out parts of storyboards and put ’em in new storyboards. We kludge things together and make our own. If we really wanna get elaborate, we go into Photoshop.

But usually at that point we’ll ask the story artists to draw something new, but in the Avid we can use all the Avid tools to manufacture something that we don’t have. So we made more of that time lapse than John had originally boarded ‘cause we really liked it.

Then once Raymond Zibach in production design and Chris Sanders and Jeff Budsberg, our visual effects supervisor got in there, they loved the idea too and expanded on it: “We can make this into a real set piece!”

So they started elaborating on that, then once we got their work in it came out beautifully. It’s got a mixture of real time and time lapse in it.

The second we saw that we thought, “Wwait a minute! This could solve our language problem!” In editorial we manufactured a demo of a time lapse for Roz deciphering the languages. Once we had that, we showed it to Chris and said, “What do you think of this?

This is a way we can put a frame around it. We can make it really cool. It can be a neat thing to watch and we can like use time lapses as a signature throughout the entire movie.” It ended up sticking and it was literally the first time that audiences finally understood that section of the movie.

I remember that sequence. It’s very easy to understand. There is no bar, right? It’s kind of a Matrix-y understanding of language. She hears a sound and then it becomes letters and maybe it becomes a word. Then it becomes a sentence. Roz has to have that understanding of language before she meets Brightbill because she needs someone to tell her how to be a mother.

Yes. She needs to adapt to the island, so she needs language even though she’s rejected by the island. That was also important. That’s also within the first two sequences: the notion that she’s a monster. We had to have that.

She had to hear that. So we needed the language deciphered by the time that she really started to interact with the majority of the animals of the island. She needed to be rejected and defined by them as an outsider. And Brightbill is an outsider because he is a runt.

He wasn’t meant to survive. And Fink is an outsider. He’s not well liked. He’s self-serving. It was necessary that this little outsider “found family” would be somewhat insular. It’s important so that they can bond and we can learn to love them, but also important that when Brightbill starts to try to interact with the other geese, we know that he hasn’t been interacting with them because they are these outsiders living in their own little bubble.

It’s a reminder that even though Brightbill has found a family with Roz and Fink, that he still doesn’t fit into the larger society.

There’s a scene where raccoons attack and kind of “inhabit” Roz. They’re taking her apart and she’s gotta “recover” herself.

That was created for a little bit of comedy, but also to show a contrast between that scene and the next, which is the bear attack on Roz. That sequence was almost the first sequence that we edited in the movie. When we start these processes - or at least on this one - we have something called an art reel or filmmaker pitch, which is a way to show the studio this is what’s gonna happen with this movie.

In that filmmaker pitch we show a lot of art, but also Chris explains his notions of what he wants to do with the movie in general. It was great that we got to make it because it sort of defined how I was gonna interact with Chris. 

He wrote a little script of what he felt the movie should incorporate. So we got some early artwork and he gave me the script and said, “Go make something.” One of the things that he talked about is the contrast between the natural world and the technological world.

He talks a lot about the arts: the classic animation art done by Tyrus Wong (conceptual designer, “Bambi”) and folks like that to create that concept. He also wanted this painterly style throughout the entire movie harkening back to classic animation where the art of painting is reflected in the art of the movie. He wanted to have a documentary style for the camera.

The cinema style would be like a documentary where it would be handheld - finding the subject - not all these locked off perfect shots. And from a tone standpoint, he wanted the dramatic stakes of the movie to be real. He wanted comedy that wasn’t afraid to be a little edgy.

He wanted moments with no music, so the sound effects could make the island a character. He wanted moments with no dialogue where the music could take the lead and the acting could tell the story. He also wanted to emphasize that we should embrace real emotion.

We should feel for these characters and be engaged in these characters and relate to these characters that - even though it’s a robot and a gosling - we would be able to find many reflections of our lives in what these characters were going through.

He just wanted to make sure that it was just a fresh version of that. Even though it’s harkening back to classic animation that it’s rooted in the now. It’s fresh, it’s different, it evokes the emotions you feel when you watch great art but still is cinematic and modern.

So this filmmaker pitch had all of this incorporated in it. It was probably about four minutes. So I had a really good idea when I was cutting The Accident (the scene with the raccoons), which would’ve been the one of the first sequences that came to me, what he was going for.

Chris gives you parameters like: “This is kind of what I’m trying to achieve.” But then he turns to his department heads and he gives a wide birth to try and experiment because we all know where we’re going. We’re all trying to achieve this vision that he’s laid out.

There’s no guy more excited about other people’s ideas. He can do so many of these things himself, but he loves it when someone surprises him. The raccoons and the bear chase and finding the egg is all one scene. I knew that the raccoons can be very mischievous and very problematic and kind of cheeky and sort of funny.

Trash pandas.

Trash pandas. Yes, trash pandas. Exactly. We wanted to lean into that and make it a little frenetic, a little outta control with the camera. There’s so much going on and we’d lull the audience into kind of chuckling at these funny, self-serving raccoons.

They’re trying to survive and Roz is convenient ‘cause she’s got a lot of nice, shiny, and maybe helpful things. They have no respect for her. They’re just doing what they do.

But that set up specifically contrasts with what’s to come. So we’re trying to take your eye off the ball a little bit, to get comfortable with “This is what the tone is.” But then when she runs into the bear it’s real and it’s scary and the threat is that it could be the end of her.

That was important to have that little comedic moment right next to something very, very serious. We focus on the sound effects a lot in this area. The bear’s voice is very threatening, scary. That’s another place where you have a screening and people react with, “Oh my gosh! This is scary! Is this gonna be okay?”

Chris didn’t wanna shy away from that ever. He really wanted to emphasize that sometimes there’s things in life that are pretty scary and pretty real. And even though this is a story that would appeal to an audience of all ages, he had faith in the audience and faith in - if there were kids in the audience - that these are feelings that kids have.

Sometimes they’re scared, sometimes they have things that are terrifying that they face, that they think that they can’t overcome and the bear represents that. So when it attacks her, we had a really beautiful version from John Puglisi - the story artist who boarded it for the first time -  of the bear chase. It was really a home run.

But once we got into the 3D space of previs, it changed quite a bit because they could really lean into these documentary style shots where the camera is kind of racing to find the subject and a lot of shakiness. That was meant to disorient and put us in Roz’s shoes. It’s terrifying.

When it first comes outta the cave, she doesn’t run ‘cause she doesn’t know that she should be afraid of it. It’s only until it reaches out and tries to take her out that it’s like, “Oh wait a minute! This is real. I’ve gotta get outta here!” So when she runs away, we have that documentary style.

We put some intense, frantic temp music in it. Then when she tumbles down the cliff and lands at the bottom, we purposefully stopped. When I was pacing out that very first version, I made it pretty frantic all the way through the chase, but the second she lands at the bottom of the cliff, I slowed everything down.

When you’re cutting to a character that doesn’t have a face, it takes a lot of faith that one day an animator is going to bring that to life in a way that is gonna be very engaging. Animation did come up with many ways to make her very engaging, including her “running lights.”

They also came up with this pantomime style of acting with little head turns. She actually moves quite a bit when she’s acting. So when I was pacing it out for the first time with the boards, I just know I’m gonna be engaged with her, so I wanna make sure that I give shots with her face as much time as I would if it was a cut to a human face and just have faith that the animation is gonna carry it.

So we slowed it down tremendously and took out all the music purposefully to have the loneliness of her on that jutting out point on the cliff and the rain hitting her surface. That sound that you hear just made her feel very lonely and very at a loss.

So when she turns and discovers that she’s created a tragedy by accident, you feel the loss and you feel the sadness and you feel bad for her that she doesn’t even really understand what she’s done.

Then it changes her life. I like ending sequences with a question. So ending with her not doing anything with egg right away was purposeful. It’s meant to be kind of a cliffhanger. What is she gonna do?

Those are three big tonal shifts in that “scene” where you go from the humor of the raccoons to the terror of the beat to the sadness.

What was so great about that sequence is it encapsulated everything that Chris was trying to do, all in one sequence. We were saying, “This is what this movie’s gonna be. This all can be juxtaposed right next to each other ‘cause this is life.”

That’s one of the big things that we tried to. We tried to show in this movie that this is life. Life is ups and downs and you have moments of great joy and sometimes they’re butted up against great tragedy and there are life and death stakes every single day. This movie was not gonna shy away from those things.

I knew I was in for a different kind of movie when the mother possum is talking to Roz with her kids nearby and the possum mom says, “You learn these things as the mother of seven children…” Then there’s a flurry of deadly sounds, and she says, “Well, six.” I thought, “They’re gonna go there? Alright!”

Pinktail: we struggled with her character a little bit. When she started out in the very first versions, she didn’t have a family.

WHAT?

It was just her. She was an actress, as makes sense for a possum. She was the one who gave Roz the task of raising Brightbill. Roz’s arc was that her motto that she always completes her task was devised specifically as a starting point for her because obviously with parenting there is no completion. It goes on forever whether you like it or not.

Pinktail is a wonderful example of the challenges of that. Chris and I looked it up: Possums can have two to three litters a year, so she’s got a lot of kids.

There’s a point in motherhood where the magic’s a little bit not as magical. She’s doing her job. She loves her kids, but there are some challenges with being parent. I love my kids very much and they’re the most amazing things in my life, but I’m human. I get tired. I think Pinktail is reflective of that.

My wife definitely could relate to Pinktail… I can’t imagine this movie without Pinktail having children!

That was a big change. I think someone gave the note early on of, “How does Pintail know these things about motherhood to talk to Roz about?” Chris very quickly said, “Well, she has a family.”

Then we need to see them.

That one moment in that one session, that was the beginning. Going back to the storyboard process, Chris rewrote that scene and added the children in it, then gave it to the story artist and Catherine Rader said, “These kids should be bothering her the whole time. And there should be a lot of them.” Then Catherine just ran with that.

She had them crawling all over, but they didn’t talk when Pinktail was giving her dialogue. It struck me as odd, so in our sound effects library there are little snippets of really little kids talking. So I started having them respond whenever Pinktail said something.

They would all say, “Yeah!” Then there’s always that little kid who wants to be as on it as the bigger kids, but is too little, so responds a feet later, so I threw that in ‘cause I thought it was funny to have them all say, “Yeah!” Then a little voice …“yeah!”

These are the things that we can just discover by messing around. Once we had one version of that we sat in the editing room saying, “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if they said this or that?” There was a note about their death obsessiveness because…

Possums play dead! That was one of my favorite comedic moments was all the kids deciding how they were gonna die: “I got sepsis!” “Meningitis takes longer!”

Great stuff! When Chris came in with that, we were just dying. We just thought it was so funny. He had written so many alts of ways to die. It was so difficult to cut them down. I cut it so many different ways and we all sat together asking, “What’s funnier? Is sepsis funnier? Is meningitis funnier?” He hit it outta the park on the first try. I think the “meningitis takes a while” sort of set the tone.

It’s very funny that you literally had to kill your babies!

After that we were all trying to figure out, “Gosh! Where can we put these kids in?” So we added them in when Brightbill learns to swim. There were so many great lines. We would just record random lines with these kids, and Chris was just shouting stuff out at them in the record sessions. Like, “Just say this! Just say this!”

So we get this pile of dialogue in editorial and I just started messing around with it, trying to make myself laugh. I was trying to explain to somebody about my philosophy of cutting and I decided that I’m a method editor. I want to make myself laugh or make myself cry and that’s the little secret that editors have. We are the first ones in our little room laughing or crying or getting angry at the screen.

Empaths.

Yeah. It’s a privilege to be able to do that. We definitely were messing around with those kids constantly to see how we could make them funny.

Composer Kris Bowers

The music was great in this film. Could you tell us a little bit about the composer, Kris Bowers?

Chris Sanders felt that music was gonna carry certain sequences, like the migration. The migration is a sequence that changed a little bit. Chris Sanders boarded the first version of it. The general idea of it is almost exactly the same as Chris boarded.

What we added into it was this idea of something is left unsaid… something is unfinished… and that weighs on people. I put a lot of time into timing that out because we’ve all had those moments where we wanna say something to somebody and our emotions are so big, but we just can’t say it for some reason.

We’ve all seen those rom-coms where you’re almost screaming at the screen, “Just tell her you love her!” So we talked about the fact that this is our rom-com moment. This is the moment where you really want the couple to get together. You really want Roz and Brightbill to get together. 

Since there were gonna be big silences in there, Chris Sanders knew that he really needed a really great piece of music to support the emotion that was gonna be very big in that moment. Kris Bowers came on and that was the first sequence he worked on for Chris Sanders.

Let’s go straight to it! Talk about iteration: he did many iterations of that music for that sequence because it was so important. It was really the emotional center point of the movie. He composed a really beautiful piece of music that I remember him playing in an edit and we all thought it was so beautiful.

Chris Sanders thought it was beautiful, but then Sanders said, “This is a really beautiful piece of music, but I think we need to have a real layer of bittersweetness in it. The train’s leaving the station. Time pressure is on. It’s like your kid going to college.

If you don’t say something, you might never get to say it again. And, and they don’t say it to each other. So we need to make sure that the music reflects that bittersweetness that is really pronounced in the scene.” So Kris Bowers went back and did quite a few iterations to come up with the incredible piece of music that is there now, so it shows you that the iterative-ness is not just in editorial.

It’s happening in every single department. I think he nailed it. There are so many pieces of beautiful music that he did in this movie that I feel like the music is a character just as much as the island is a character. That was intentional on Chris Sanders part.

Obviously because you’re with your director so long, the ability to collaborate between the editor and the director is so important. Can you talk to us a little bit about that collaborative process between you and Chris?

It is one of the best parts of the job. One of the wonderful things about it - and being an editor in animation in particular - is the relationship with the director, but also with all the different department heads. Editorial is the hub of production and everything comes through us, so we end up having very strong relationships with the head of story, the head of previs, the head of animation.

We really need to understand their jobs so that we can comment on things ‘cause we’re there to be a support system for the director: A creative force that helps have the movie come together.

All these disparate parts and these different things happening in different places, and we need to understand what’s going on in all those different departments all the time so that when we are with the director, we are educated in what everyone’s doing, educated in what is possible.

So the relationship with the editor and director is very strong because we are the glue that are gluing all these departments together. For the director, he’s running from department to department being shown a bunch of stuff with a bunch of new ideas.

But it’s really in editorial where all these disparate things come together and all these new ideas. We are the department of actualization, because you can have all these ideas, but are they gonna work? Chris really wants to give all the ideas a shot, so they often come in to our department and I have to figure out with him ways to make it work.

These are all great ideas, but it can turn into a soup of nothing pretty quickly if you aren’t remembering what are the key points that we’re trying to do. So editorial is a really important force in that: that we’re helping to make sure that the story is staying on track all the time through all these different iterations, all these different ideas, all these different inputs from different departments.

The director really relies on us for that. To your point, we sit in a room together for hours and hours on end pitching ideas back and forth to each other. I’ll often have a thought of something important that needs to happen with the character.

For example making the argument that I felt it was important that we really empathized with Brightbill, not thinking that he’s just complaining. His family was not intended to be her. Her actions changed the course of his life and it’s important that he expresses the frustration of not being told that. She keeps that from him.

Also, he feels that he doesn’t belong - that he’s an outsider - and it’s because of her that he can never fit in. So I’ll often give these impassioned speeches about something and then it’ll get really quiet in my room and I’ll think, “Oh gosh! Did he check out?”

Then I look over my shoulder and I’ll see him drawing. There is no more satisfying thing in the world than having Chris start drawing after you’ve said something! You wanna fly home on a cloud!

He can suddenly visualize and create these beautiful drawings of the thing that you were trying to express. His language is visual, which is interesting ‘cause he’s such a wonderful writer, but there are moments where he really does express himself visually and he is spends a lot of time in my room drawing and drawing and drawing. 

There is a moment and at the end of the movie where Roz is saving Brightbill. He started drawing and really drew a quintessential movie moment in that second. He thought of it and in that second he drew it. I thought, “My gosh! This is so indicative of the idea that a child is a physical part of you!” He found a way to visualize that!

He talks about “movie moments.” He always uses that term: “Oh, this is a movie moment!” I think what he means by that is that it’s a moment in a film that sticks with you long after you walk out the theater. You’ll just be getting your coffee at the local corner store and it’ll pop into your head.

Those moments speak to an audience in a way that’s hard to even explain. They are a magic combination of visuals and emotion and music and dialogue or no dialogue that touch us at our core. Chris is hardwired to create those moments and instinctually knows what they are and every single one of his movies have them.

I’ve now worked on three movies with Chris and I have learned over the years to stop and listen super carefully when Chris has a movie moment instinct because I am pretty sure I’m gonna hear an idea that people will talk about for years and years and years after watching the finished film. “Forbidden Friendship” in “How to Train Your Dragon” is one of them.

And in “The Croods” Greg drawing his family on the cave is another one of them. These ideas come out of seemingly almost nowhere. He just suddenly says them. That is truly a gift to be a part of and see someone do. For me to say something that would help stimulate those kind of moments is really very special, and I’m so grateful to have a chance to be a part of that.

That is a beautiful place to end this interview. Mary, thank you so much for talking to us. It’s been a pleasure having you on Art of the Cut.

Thank you so much for having me.