How The Wild Robot Came To Life

The Wild Robot film’s global debut recently grossed $53.9 million at the box office in the opening weekend but without sophisticated data technology from NetApp, we wouldn’t enjoy hit movies such as this epic adventure by DreamWorks.

“People are going to really enjoy watching a robot learn to be wild,” said Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’O, the voice of the film’s central character – a humanoid computer called Roz. “This film has been made with loving hands.”

Just how many ‘loving hands’ went into making this film was evident to me three days before the film launched. It was then that, while sitting in the audience of NetApp’s INSIGHT 2024 event at MGM Grand in Las Vegas, I learned a thing or two about what goes into making CG (Computer Graphics) films.

Firstly, I came away realising that DreamWorks is in the business of data as much as it is part the world of entertainment, and without the type of sophisticated intelligent data infrastructure provided by NetApp; we wouldn’t benefit from the studio’s family favourite hits such as Shrek, Puss in Boots to How To Train Your Dragon. Not to mention the joy we receive from the sequels, tie-ins, and theme park rides they’ve all generated.

NetApp’s Executive Haiyan Song succinctly summed it up, by saying: “I guess much of us have marvelled at what’s up on the big screen but some of us have never really stopped to reflect on how much technology played a role on the movie creation and what type of data infrastructure you (DreamWorks) built and operate and how you (DreamWorks) manage this vast amount of data, file after file. It looks like the CG animation business is really a data business too?”

Haiyan posed the question while on the NetAPP stage during her interview with DreamWorks CTO Bill Ballew. “We are absolutely in the data business,” he promptly replied. “That’s why our partnership over the last 30 years has been so beneficial for us. Really different from live action films, everything you see on a CG animated film has to be created digitally.

“What that means is we must build, support and monitor and dynamically provision a large-scale high-performance compute environment. Fortunately, services like the autonomous ransomware prevention are built directly into that infrastructure. I get to sleep better at night knowing that I can trust the secure by design storage system that detects potential issues in real time. Of course, the real beauty in what NetApp has enabled for DreamWorks is the data storage is really the foundation and from there we’ve partnered in building on top of that foundation to bringing intelligence to our data infrastructure and to really seize on the advantages of services related to data visibility, management and optimization.”

Turns out that NetApp has supported DreamWorks for 30 years in a multitude of ways from production, backup disaster recovery to increasing its capabilities to provide scale and flexibility, allowing the film creators to dream bigger and create even more films to beguile our latest generation of kids, mums, dads and the grandparents.

“Over time each movie requires more collaboration, more speed, more innovation,” explains Bill from DreamWorks.

“That’s a challenge we deal with…the creative ambition from our filmmakers is constantly increasing to create something that is visually unique and to put more on the screen and so with that, though, we have something you’d be familiar with. We have business goals; we have increased production volume, tighter budgets and shorter schedules.”

So when you next go to the cinema, think about how technology that plays a crucial role in DreamWorks and the media and entertainment space to produce our rich cinematic experiences.

“For just one of our CG films, we create more than half a billion digital files and yes that’s one billion with a capital ‘B’. So we rely on the cutting edge technology NetApp provides to give us the scale that we need and to ensure the products we put into the market place like The Wild Robot’ are of the highest quality and fidelity and continue to resonate with our audience.”

What Did Rotten Tomatoes Say About The Wild Robot?

Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 98 per cent thumbs up. The epic adventure follows the journey of a robot–ROZZUM unit 7134, “Roz” for short — that is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and must learn to adapt to the harsh surroundings, gradually building relationships with the animals on the island and becoming the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling.