ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - When Lupita Nyong’o was first offered a role voicing a robot in an animated film, she wasn’t immediately sold on the concept.
Perhaps best known for playing Nakia in Marvel’s Black Panther franchise, Nyong’o wasn’t a stranger to voice acting. But she had never led an animated movie and wasn’t sure if she was meant to be Roz in “The Wild Robot.”
“It was a slow burn,” she said. “They offered me the role and I was like, hmm?”
But then Nyong’o read the best-selling children’s book by Peter Brown that the movie is based on and found herself taken by the world and its characters.
“The Wild Robot” follows Roz, a robot who finds herself on a deserted island. As Roz builds relationships with the island’s wild animals, she strays away from her original programming and becomes a mother figure to a gosling.
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When it comes to voice acting, Nyong’o said she was inspired by the AI voices of Alexa and Siri, as well as the popular text-to-speech automated voices on TikTok and Instagram.
“All you have is your voice, so you have to find ways to convey so much more. So the limitations are kind of liberating,” she said. “When we allow ourselves, we are very adaptable, and especially when we just allow ourselves to be influenced by the world around us.”
With a $35 million opening weekend at the box office, “The Wild Robot” is being hailed as the best animated movie of the year. And Nyong’o agrees, saying animators bring something special to the film.
“I lend my voice, we all lend our voices. But the performance is really in the hand of the animators and what they did, the innovations they achieved, in order to create this look,” she said. “It’s very textural. You feel the human hands that have touched every single frame.”
More than anything, “The Wild Robot” is about growth, Nyong’o said.
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“Oftentimes, we grow up in an environment that reflects us. And when we leave that environment, it can be very jarring. And there’s a lot of growth that has to happen, and a lot of change that has to happen,” she said. “But we’re capable of being more than whatever we were expected to be.”
“The Wild Robot” is in theaters now.
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