Dirs. Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha
Made by the same people who made Ice Age, Robots moves from prehistoric animals to a world of robots and other sentient machines. The animated film tells the tale of Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor), a young hopeful inventor from Rivet Town who longs to make it as an inventor in Robot City and to meet Big Weld (a joyous Mel Brooks), head honcho of an eponymous firm and Rodney’s idol.
A young person off to see a benevolent dictator who meets misfits along the way: how much more like the Wizard of Oz can the plot get? (Indeed, the Tin Man, perhaps the prototypical mechanical actor, makes a cameo in the film.) But as might be expected, the path of true invention never did run smooth: Big Weld has been absent from the helm of his firm, and in his absence, the villainous Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), egged on by his megalomaniacal mother Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), has taken over the running of Big Weld industries. Ratchet introduces - for shame! - the profit motive, thereby condemning to obsolescence the millions of robots who can’t afford upgrades. Rodney thus has to team up with a ragtag bunch of misfit robots to save the day. Robots, inevitably, highlights the overarching importance of a firm’s role as corporate citizen over its duty to shareholders. Or something like that - clearly in a post-Enron world rapacious corporations are the villains of choice, but it’s surely a weird thing to posit that the corporation is the sole source and cure for all the world’s ailments.
But enough about undertones: where Robots clearly stands out is on the surface - it’s a beauty of a movie, and I only wish I could have seen it in IMAX. My chief complaint about the look of 3-D animated films has thus far been their overall sheen, which I find a bit dehumanising, but the shininess works to good effect in a film about machines. In Robots, skyscrapers gleam and the robots move with a certain mechanical grace, and the entire cityscape looks like some throwback to 50s sci-fi envisionings of the future. Indeed, the film is loaded with virtuoso visual displays - Rodney’s ride into the city, in particular, is a Rube Goldbergian tour de force, leaving one literally dizzy from the view.
However, Robots, while pleasing, lacks the oomph that makes other animated films great. The film’s insertion of the now-mandatory pop-cultural references for the adults (Fender goes “Singing in the Oil”; a visual reference to old Busby Berkeley movies) are entertaining enough, as is Robin Williams’ trotting out of his stream-of-consciousness schtick again as Fender, the pieced-together sidekick1. But with all that other comedic talent on board - Jennifer Coolidge as Aunt Fanny, a bot who has a load to take off her enormous rear, Broadbent, and Brooks - one would expect more zing in the jokes, at least to make up for the fact that the film’s plot itself is standard “follow your heart” boilerplate. And Halle Berry is wasted as Cappy, Rodney’s romantic interest - the couple don’t get much time to interface.
Perhaps the best portion of Robots is its beginning, which is loaded with sly jokes about the assembly of Rodney (his dad missed the delivery, but hey, the fun part is making the baby), but ultimately, given that the film starts off with so much potential energy, it seems to need a bit of a charge.
1Thought: Dory in Finding Nemo was a great sidekick if only because she departed from the chatty slick-talking character that too many of these animated films have (Donkey in Shrek, for instance).