The Wild Robot (Kris Bowers)


Released in September of 2024, "The Wild Robot" will be DreamWorks' last film fully animated in-house. Written and directed by Chris Sanders, adapted from the recent series of books by Peter Brown, the film tells the story of Roz, a service robot that is accidentally marooned on an island, and must learn to co-exist with the island's animal inhabitants and find her own purpose with no humans around to give her any 'mission' in life. The director and animation team wanted to keep a storybook feel, and although built in a modern 3D CGI style, the end result maintains a hand-painted, highly textural finish that makes the film feel like concept paintings come to life. Ultimately, the story is a colorful and heart-warming story about the powers of kindness over distrust, building community, and motherhood, which performed well at the box office and received good critical reviews. 

Joining the project was American composer Kris Bowers. Bowers, in his mid-30's, has only been in the film scoring scene for a little under a decade, but his career has taken off wildly, having scored over a dozen films, and numerous TV shows, including "Dear White People" and "Bridgerton". This film marks his first venture into animated territory, and he succeeds admirably, composing one of his biggest and most accessible scores to date. The score features playful and colorful orchestrations, which begin in a much more textural and percussive way, but coalesce around a powerful main theme over the course of the movie, cementing the familial bond between Roz and her adopted goose, Brightbill, and fox friend, Fink, as well as a heroic theme for Roz It all builds to a powerful conclusion with some thunderous action and a heart-warming conclusion that will bring you to tears.


This was one of those last-minute additions to the site, not one that I'd necessarily had on my must-do list, but some projects are able to come together more quickly than others. The soundtrack album was released digitally by Back Lot Music, and a vinyl release by Waxwork Records is slated for a December release. The album cover for the score release is fine (perhaps a better variant than the main poster it utilized which just features a plain blue sky), but I didn't love the text placement, and it felt a bit uninspired. So I'm offering a total of fourteen new covers here. 

I won't narrate every single cover, as many of them were fairly straight-forward to assemble. Though most still required some degree of work--the usual job of painting out text when fully textless versions weren't available, and/or combining multiple different formats of the poster or wallpaper to create the widest canvas, as needed. For the film's title logo, I opted to make my own customization. The main design features the text in a sort of pyramid shape (technically four lines of text with the included DreamWorks logo), which is quite a hard shape to fit into most album cover compositions. The official album cover used a version where the title was placed all into one line, which doesn't look very elegant to my eyes, so I instead went with a two-line version, which fits much more cleanly into the space available in most of the images. On some of the images, I added some brush textures and paint splatters over the 'Kris Bowers' or 'OMPS' color to echo the title treatment. 

For Cover 13, I used the artwork used on the upcoming vinyl release, which again features the same character art of the official album, but here with a newly painted, moodier background that is quite beautiful. Again, I wasn't a fan of the text placement, so I had to start by manually painting out the title and credits entirely. I then zoomed into the image just a bit to remove some of that dead space created at the top of the image by shifting the text around, and also slightly centering the image a slight bit more to the right, the balance just felt a tad better that way. 

While all the previous posters are sourced from official marketing posters and imagery, the final image, Cover 14, features one piece of fan art, a stunning digital painting by Sanjay Vijayaverl. Although there hasn't been much fan art so far created for this film, this one is just breathtaking and totally matches the quality of the official imagery. Even though the unique shape of the design created a bit of a challenge for adding the title and text, compositionally, but it was too beautiful to pass up. 

Hope you enjoy the collection, and let me know your favorites!


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