• Warning: Major spoilers for Chris Sanders’ film “The Wild Robot.”

• Sanders says working on “The Lion King” helped him create a shocking moment in “The Wild Robot.”

• “You deal with it in a certain way so you don’t throw punches,” the director told Business Insider.

Chris Sanders has a long history of incorporating serious themes into animated films for children. Before directing modern classics like Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, he was a senior storyboard artist at Disney Animation and helped develop iconic titles like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King”. (He received “Story By” credits for all three.)

When it came to creating another heartwarming yet tear-jerking animated classic, he took a cue from his work on The Lion King and the film’s most devastating moment.

Based on Peter Brown’s acclaimed book series, The Wild Robot is about a robot named ROZZUM 7134 (Lupita Nyong’o) – “Roz” for short – who sets out for the first time on an island populated only by humans wildlife. Programmed to meet the needs of humans, Roz sets out to see if any of the animals on the island need help.

As Roz struggles to adjust to the island, he accidentally falls into a goose nest and kills the mother. When only one of her eggs survives, Roz makes it her goal to raise the gosling until it is old enough to join the winter migration.

While the scene won’t traumatize a generation of children like the death of Bambi’s mother in “Bambi,” it’s still a shocking moment for a children’s film. But Sanders knew it had to be in the film because it’s a central plot point in Brown’s books.

“That’s the core of his story,” Sanders told Business Insider. Every good story needs stakes, even if it is intended for children. “Death is omnipresent on this island, because it must be a place with consequences.”

Part of this death is addressed through comedy. In one scene, a mother opossum, voiced by Catherine O’Hara, is relieved to learn that one of her babies has been eaten because she has too many (the scene ends with the baby turning out to be still alive) .

But after the mother goose’s death, Sanders knew he had to take a clear approach. So he used the death of Mufasa in The Lion King as a guide.

“I learned on ‘The Lion King’ that you can do something like that, but you handle it in a certain way so you don’t throw punches,” he said. Softening the blow will only hurt the effectiveness of the story later, but it’s a delicate dance: “You want this to be really powerful, but you do it carefully.”

“The Wild Robot” achieves this by making the actual death of the mother goose happen quickly – it lasts less than a minute on screen and the focus is more on Roz discovering and caring for the egg than on the death itself.

The scene sets the tone for a film that is an emotional journey and stands on the shoulders of the classic Disney titles that Sanders was involved in decades ago.

“The Wild Robot” is in theaters now.

Read the original article on Business Insider