In this special episode of The Robot Report Podcast, Steve Crowe and I talk to author and illustrator Peter Brown to discuss his children’s books series The Wild Robot.

Peter takes us through his creative writing process, the background research he did about robotics, and how he pulled the plot together for a robot named Roz that finds itself shipwrecked on an island filled with wild animals. He describes why he chose the specific characteristics of the robot in the story.

Peter also describes the experience of seeing his story adapted into an animated movie by DreamWorks. The Wild Robot movie, which is based on the first book in the series, has seen tremendous box office success. It earned more than $320 million worldwide and is on the top 100 list of the high-grossing animated films of all time.

Peter describes the process of working with movie director Chris Sanders to bring Roz to life on the big screen. 

To learn more about Peter go to: https://www.peterbrownstudio.com/

Below is a sample of our conversation with Peter Brown. To hear the conversation in its entirety, please listen to the podcast audio.

The Robot Report: For those who may not have seen the movie or not read the first book, the first book in the series deals with the adventures of a shipwrecked robot named ROZZUM 7134, Roz for short. And I know there are some tie-ins to a very famous play about 100 years ago that we can get into. The story starts when the robot is shipwrecked on a deserted island and then builds relationships with the local animals on this island while helping them navigate all sorts of different ordeals.

What has this whole experience been like for you? Is it true that DreamWorks, the studio behind the movie, optioned the film rights to The Wild Robot before the first book was even published in 2016? You’ve been living with this story for quite some time. What’s that been like for you?

Peter Brown: Well, it’s pretty surreal. I started tinkering with this idea about a robot learning to survive in the wilderness by studying and mimicking the animals that she comes across. The idea came to me in like 2008 or 2007. I drew a robot in a tree, which is what got the whole thing started.

I just love the idea of a robot climbing a tree. And I just started thinking, why would a robot be in a tree and how would a real robot react to the wilderness? What would wild animals think about a robot?

I’d been writing and illustrating picture books for years this was my first novel for kids which is a very different type of book so I had to kind of learn how to write a novel and you know, it was this long process and the book finally got published in 2016. DreamWorks has a team of people who are in the business of keeping an eye on the publishing industry to see what ideas, and books are out there that might be interesting for adaptation to film. And, somebody there got wind of this Wild Robot book, which I was still working on. So I got contacted out of the blue by a rep from DreamWorks who was very eager to see whatever I had.

I was pretty excited and I didn’t want to send them something unfinished. I told them, “Sorry, but you have to wait until I feel like this is up to my standard and up to the level of what I want it to be”. So they had to wait until I finished writing and illustrating the book. And then as soon as I was done, I sent it to them and they immediately made me an offer to get the film rights before the book was in stores. 

The first book was an instant bestseller and the sequels have all been bestsellers and the series is just selling like crazy around the world, translated into 30 languages or something, maybe more by now. It’s a pretty phenomenally successful book, which has been amazing in its own right. But then you add on top of that all the movie stuff. Eventually, they (Dreamworks) found a director. They went into production, and just a couple of months ago, the finished The Wild Robot movie came out. So it’s been a long journey and every step of the way, it’s just kind of gotten more exciting.

How did you come up with this initial design for Roz? How did you determine what she should look like, and what capabilities she should have?

Peter Brown: One of the very first things I had to do was figure out what she looks like because obviously her design will tell us what her capabilities are. And I was thinking about real science and engineering. I was reading a lot of books about the future of robotics and AI. I was watching documentaries and also reading and watching documentaries about the natural world, too, because that was what was fascinating to me was the sort of combination of what seemed like almost opposites.

Take a robot, put it in the most natural place you could imagine, like this sort of rugged Pacific Northwest wilderness, and see what happens. It’s like a thought experiment. But one of the key components was Roz’s design. 

I thought Roz should not look exactly like a person. There’s no point. That’s a lot of wasted effort if all her purpose is to do manual labor, more or less. There’s no need for all the extra bells and whistles, right? So let’s just streamline this robot. And I was thinking about that in terms of robotics and how in a lot of sci-fi movies and books, the robots look just like people.

It’s fascinating, but you must’ve been a robotics engineer in another lifetime? Because so many of these things that you just talked about, intentional design and how the robot moves and battery life, there are so many synergies to real-life robotics. And those are some of the fundamental challenges that real-life roboticists are trying to solve. Did you talk to any actual engineers for feedback on the design?

Peter Brown: It was mostly from reading and my own research. However, I read all sorts of stuff. I spent a lot of time reading science fiction, authors like Isaac Asimov do a really great job of delving into the kind of nuts and bolts of robotics. He has a book called “The Complete Robot“, which is a collection of short stories, which I’ve read repeatedly over and over again because each short story explores a different type of robot.

And so I got a lot of inspiration from him and he really helped. Those stories helped me figure out the right questions to ask. But I did meet with some engineers, my dad is an engineer. He worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He just retired. However, he introduced me to the robotics department at JPL.

And I got to tour that department, long before I was working on the wild robot. He had me in and gave me a tour of the Mars Rover program. And so I got to see the Rover prototypes up close. I got to see Rovers and the terrain that they mock-up to be like the lunar or Martian surface.

The story is full of heartwarming moments as well as humor. As a children’s book author, I’m curious about your approach to incorporating humor into your stories that don’t involve bodily functions?

Peter Brown: Well, there’s a little bit of that too, but a lot of the humor bubbled up naturally from the story. It’s a fish-out-of-water story. Roz is a robot who’s where she doesn’t belong and she’s time and again encountering stuff that she doesn’t know how to handle. It is as simple as walking away from the waves.

The story begins with her in a crate that washes onto the shore of the island. And she eventually pries herself out of this crate and she sees these waves coming and she doesn’t know she’s booting up. She started powering on for the very first time, looking at the world for the very first time. And these waves are tumbling towards her. And, you know, she sort of takes a step back, but doesn’t judge things properly. And all of a sudden, this wave crashes over her and slams her to the ground. And that’s sort of her introduction to the world. Then she has to climb the sea cliffs up, and climbing sea cliffs is a pretty tough thing to do for rock climbers, let alone for a robot who’s just waking up for the first time. And these moments end up being funny.

It’s hard to care about her because she seems an all-knowing, omnipotent, know, invincible character. And so I started thinking, well, what would she come pre-programmed with? She’s a factory-issued robot, like a laptop that you get, you know, delivered to your house. You have to install software for it to reach its full potential. I sort of thought, well, this robot probably needs software installed to reach her full potential. So what is the basic programming that she comes with? What if it doesn’t have all the information on the eating habits of geese? Maybe that’s believable. And so I had to sort of justify the gaps in Roz’s knowledge to make those scenes work for me.

What was it like to see Roz come to life on the big screen? What influence did you have  working with the team at DreamWorks to make that happen?

Peter Brown: Yes, well, I met regularly with the director, whose name is Chris Sanders, and the producer, who is Jeff Herman. And so we would meet on Zoom every couple of months. It takes like four years to make an animated film. So we had quite several meetings.

In the beginning, they were picking my brain, trying to understand why I made certain decisions, and asking questions about certain moments in the book and details. And then as the months went by. And their story started coming together. They would start running things by me and asking what I thought about this character design or this moment in the story.

I was never in the studio working on the movie but we had these Zoom calls pretty regularly so I got to see the evolution of the project over time which was pretty exciting. Yeah, they made some changes. I knew they were gonna make changes. The story needs to be streamlined. A movie seems like a big story but it’s a pretty short story you know.

It’s hard to cram a whole lot into an hour and a half. Compare that to a series on Netflix where maybe there are 10 one-hour episodes. You’ve got 10 hours to tell a story versus an hour and a half. And so I knew they were gonna be making lots of cuts and tweaking things. And so none of that surprised me. But they managed to keep the spirit of the story. The relationship between Roz and her son, Bright Bill, is the main component that drives the story. There’s a lot of emotional depth in the movie.