“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 ...

Peter Brown’s middle-grade book, about an intelligent robot living in the wilderness, had been sitting on the shelf at DreamWorks Animation for a bit. No one had quite figured it out. Then Sanders, ...

“It’s pure cinema,” Guillermo del Toro tells me via email, “affecting and gorgeous, and because it’s animation, it is absolutely a creation and not a re-creation.” The revered Mexican director and ...