The director of "Lilo & Stitch" and "How to Train Your Dragon" has returned with a wild new tale
"The Wild Robot" director Chris Sanders was feeling a little lost himself.
In 2020, he ventured into live-action filmmaking with "The Call of the Wild," an ambitious, imperfect adaptation of Jack London's 1903 novel. Sanders got to work with Janusz Kaminski, Steven Spielberg's regular cinematographer, and it allowed him to direct Harrison Ford as a grizzled frontiersman. But the film opened a few weeks before the pandemic shut down movie theaters.
For the first time in his career, Sanders had delivered a disappointment.
Then DreamWorks Animation, the studio where the filmmaker had made "How to Train Your Dragon" and "The Croods," wooed him back.