Mark Hamill Makes Surprise Appearance at ‘The Wild Robot’ Comic-Con Panel

Mark Hamill made a surprise pit stop at “The Wild Robot” panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, where he joined director Chris Sanders and the film’s voice actors Lupita Nyong’o and Kit Connor to discuss DreamWorks Animation’s new feature film.

Hamill, who voices a grizzly bear named Thorn in the film, says that when he was first asked to participate, he immediately read the Peter Brown novel on which the film is based. “I was just knocked out. I thought if they could just capture a small percentage of this effect of this book… I have to tell you, they just did a fantastic job.”

“The Wild Robot” follows a hyper-intelligent android named Roz (voiced by Nyong’o) who finds new purpose on a desert island, living among the wildlife, and raising an orphaned baby duck named Brightbill (voiced by Kit Connor).

The panel revealed three new clips from the film depicting Roz crash-landing on the remote island, how she begins to communicate and eventually communicate with the animal inhabitants, as well as the somber reason why she accepts the “job” of being Brightbill’s mother.

In one clip, Roz takes on the RECOS (short for exploration robots), the main antagonists of the story and sent to capture Roz. “You are defective,” says one of the RECOS.

“I feel fine,” Roz replies, to which she is told, “You shouldn’t feel anything at all.”

In another clip, Roz is chased by a bear and runs off a cliff. As she assesses what has been damaged, she notices that her fall has toppled a tree, and with it a mother goose. As it is in the books, Roz realizes that she has killed a mother goose and one more egg has hatched – and that young one will be Brightbill.

“What I liked about Roz is that she is a mature character, but she has a beginner’s mind, just like a child,” says Nyongo’. “She needs to learn morality and code of ethics.” The actress added that Roz learns from the animals to be “secret” about how Brightbill’s mother died, and instead takes on the role of his mother herself.

Speaking of mothers and their absence in animated films, Sanders revealed that while working on 1992’s “Aladdin,” for which he served as storyboard artist, artistic director, production designer and character designer, the character Aladdin initially had a mother.

“When I was working on ‘Aladdin,’ one of the early versions of ‘Aladdin,’ Aladdin had a mother. She was in town,” Sanders said. “She had been in the story for a while and I started to understand why mothers don’t appear in these films. One is that if your mother is a good mother, she knows better than to let you do stupid things. He’d say, “Hey mom, I’m going to steal some food from the market.” And she’d say, ‘No, you’re not!’

“Mothers have a good way of keeping adventures from happening,” he added jokingly.

A final clip shown during the Comic-Con panel revealed a humorous “swimming test” for Connors’ Brightbill, who ends up being thrown overboard off a hill by Pedro Pascal’s annoying fox named Fink.

Catherine O’Hara as Pinktail and Matt Berry as Paddler also lend their voices to the film with Nyong’o, Connor and Hamill.

“The Wild Robot” hits theaters on September 27.