Chris Sanders

It's about a boy who uses empathy and language in a society run by shouting brutes.

So cut to 2010, DreamWorks releases the animated film directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois.

And I remember reading the synopsis of this movie and thinking, "Hold on, they changed the dragons, they changed the central conflict of the universe, and they completely redesigned Toothless' entire species.

How is this even the same story? How did this not result in an absolute disaster?"

Mm-hmm.

Lovely and talented, and Chris Sanders would call me in the middle of the night with, uh, wacky ideas, and I'd be like, "It's well midnight.

I'm going to bed now." [laughs]

[laughs]

That, uh, personally, that is one of my favorite pieces of animation from Disney's second Golden Age.

Uh, and by the way, that entire sequence was storyboarded by Chris Sanders, and it was one of the very first things he worked on when he got hired by Disney Feature Animation back in 1987.

So long story short, the problem with The Rescuers Down Under, uh, you know, uh, not connecting with an audience in November of 1990, uh, they aren't because the movie itself isn't any good.

The prevailing theory, uh, back then anyway, was that the studio just hadn't done a good enough job of letting the audience know that this was a new Rescuers movie, that most people, when they heard the title of this animated feature, reportedly thought that, "I, I, I've seen that already, right?" Or more concerning was the theory that, uh, uh, Disney Studios had just made a sequel to a film that the public wasn't necessarily, uh, all that interested in seeing a sequel to, that they had seen the original Rescuers and were happy with the way the story ended, which is why there just wasn't all that much appetite out there for the further cinematic adventures of Bernard, Bernard and Bianca.

Look at The Wild Robot from 2024.

Directed by Chris Sanders for DreamWorks based on Peter Brown's illustrated novel.

This is a master class on how to adapt a slender, quiet book into a massive family blockbuster without losing its soul.

The book is about a robot named Roz who crashes on a deserted island and has to slowly learn how to integrate into the animal community to survive.

But today, we're gonna look at a really fascinating analytical source that highlights the massive, uh, tectonic shifts that occur when you contrast London's original incredibly cold naturalistic text with the 2020 live action feature.

The one directed by Chris Sanders?

Right.

And we are not just doing a superficial, you know, the book did this, the movie did that kind of comparison.

Now, what's kind of interesting is that, um, this has become one of, uh, DreamWorks Animation's weekends of choice.

I mean, for example, back in, uh, late September of 2024, this is the weekend that the Wild Robot came out, uh, the Chris Sanders film.

Uh, and that did 35 million at the, the North American box office.

Uh, whereas last, uh, th- this same weekend in 2025 is when the Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie came out, and, uh, that didn't do quite as well.

trust us it's gonna be great like and you know sure enough demon slayer yeah chainsaw man 600 million dollars at the box office each i believe which is insane yeah so i feel like you know you guys are now like at the forefront with this movie like proving like yo this animation style like hits obviously there's you know i mean

k-pop demon hunters yeah our good friends maggie and chris is like we were so we were in the middle of making

yeah in tandem we were working on these projects yeah

so we were we were cheering them on like yeah as soon as yeah