Christopher Michael Sanders (born March 12, 1962) is an American filmmaker, animator, and voice actor. His credits include Lilo & Stitch (2002) and How to Train Your Dragon (2010), both of which he co-wrote and directed with Dean DeBlois; The Croods (2013) with Kirk DeMicco; and The Wild Robot (2024), receiving nominations for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for all of them. In 2020, he made his live-action directorial debut with the adventure-drama The Call of the Wild. He created the character Stitch in 1985, wrote the film's story, and voiced Stitch in most of his media appearances.

As of 2025, he is working on sequels to The Wild Robot for DreamWorks and the live-action Lilo & Stitch for Walt Disney Studios.

Christopher Michael Sanders was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on March 12, 1962.

He had been interested in comic strips and filmmaking from an early age. He also had an obsession with animation growing up as a kid. He was the only one of three siblings in his family to borrow his father's Super 8 film camera and, with encouragement from his father towards his drawing interests, make his own comics. He later got interested in animation upon learning about the camera's single-frame feature.

He went to Arvada High School in Arvada, Colorado. He initially wanted to take art classes at the school but was dissuaded when he asked the art teacher to teach him cartooning, only for the teacher to reply, "Comics aren't art." Sanders later attended the California Institute of the Arts, graduating in 1984.

Sanders began his career as a character designer for Jim Henson's Muppet Babies. He then served as lead storyboard artist for Walt Disney Animation Studios, and was a storyboard artist, artistic director, production designer, and character designer on the company's films Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and Mulan.

In 1985, Sanders created a character named "Stitch" for an unsuccessful children's book pitch. When Sanders was the head storyboard artist for Disney Feature Animation, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner decided that, in the wake of a number of high-profile and large-budget Disney animated features during the mid-1990s, the studio might try its hand at a smaller and less expensive film. Sanders was approached by Thomas Schumacher to pitch that idea, and Sanders reused the "Stitch" character he came up with. The storyline required a remote, non-urban location, so Sanders chose Kauaʻi as the location. Stitch became the central character of the 2002 film Lilo & Stitch, which Sanders co-directed and co-wrote with Dean DeBlois. Sanders would also end up voicing the character he created for the film. The film's commercial and critical success spawned a franchise with three sequel films and three television series, with Sanders reprising his role of Stitch throughout the original 2002–06 run of the franchise (Sanders did not reprise his role for the English dub of the anime Stitch! or the English-language-produced Chinese animated series Stitch & Ai, with Ben Diskin taking over the role for both series), as well in several later Disney crossover works such as Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Kinect: Disneyland Adventures, and the Disney Infinity series.

In the late 1980s, Sanders created an allegorical picture book entitled The Big Bear Aircraft Company, with the subheading "A book for the big retreat" clarifying that it was created for a Disney offsite event. The Big Bear Aircraft Company is a thinly disguised version of Disney itself, and the book is critical of the creative process at the company, which prioritized "big ideas, figuring they will be big successes" and noted that if proposed aircraft (i.e., movie ideas) "don't look the same as the ones [that were] built before, [the boss, Big Bear] gets uncomfortable." After handing each idea pitched by the "visual engineer" to a writer who "likes airplanes" but "has actually never worked on one before, and couldn't tell you for sure what makes one fly", the story states the assigned writer "is guaranteed of making the same mistakes every time. He will make his airplane look like everyone he's seen before ..." In the end, the head of the company, Big Bear, gets an airplane that is "a lot like last year's; not very inspiring and not very memorable. But people bought it before, and they'll probably buy it again. By playing it safe, he's insured his company's survival." However, since it is not the only aircraft company, these policies are destined to leave the company vulnerable to more imaginative competitors "with its wings of good reputation all shot off." The story concludes that Big Bear should instead give the visual engineers "the two things they need to do their job: Bear's trust and time" to allow smaller, more innovative ideas to flourish. Years later, to explain his motivation regarding the piece, Sanders wrote about his concern over "the ever-growing complexity of our films, and what I saw as an emerging pattern they were all cut from", citing the example that during the story development for Mulan, one of the major concerns was the manner of the villain's death rather than the idea that the villain had to die at all. This in turn motivated him to develop Lilo & Stitch, which he summarized as "a story about a villain who becomes a hero."