Certainly good – it just lacks that little something 'extra'

Flagrant-Baronessa

While Disney and its child Pixar Studios focus on family morals and heartfelt messages in their films (Finding Nemo) and Dreamworks focus on meticulous animation (Shrek I & II), Blue Skye Studios (Ice Age) shifts their focus onto humor – big doses of humor. There is a kind of rewarding simplicity in an approach like that, and it translates well in its animated features, Ice Age most of all. In their most recent installment Robots (2005), some of the humour is lost and instead replaced by wide-ranging gallery of big shot actors like Mel Brooks, Robin Williams, Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent and Drew Carey to name a few. The result is a good, albeit forgettable film.

We follow Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) – a young, idealist robot – who migrates to big Robot City in hopes to become an inventor to save his father from getting scrapped. When he reaches the city, he is met by a new management of the manufacture company in town that has stopped making spare parts, focusing on costly "upgrades", relegating the average bot like Rodney's father to reduced scrap at the chop-factory. Rodney decides to help.

Plot outline aside, it is clear from the detailed setting of the film that Blue Skye has done something really cool here – they have created a mechanical world solely of robots and suffice to say that it sucks you in. It indulges in the meticulous mechanism that this world offers – such as Robots doing the Robot-dance (one of the most strikingly hilarious moments in the film), all the while commenting on the materialism of our own world through the manufacture factory device. It's about consumerism and companies constantly on the edge, pushing for new material concept and leaving 'dated' material behind, thereby pinning the people (or robots) somewhere in between and wondering in which direction to go.

What else is commendable is that Robots rarely suffers the pitfalls of sentimental cheese á la Disney/Pixar studios when the characters have their heartfelt moments. There are in fact very few of these because the film is simply too busy navigating the fun world of robots, swooping fast-paced down to extreme technological devices and chase-scenes such as the roller-coaster ride that takes Rodney to Robot City. It's having fun, and it makes no pretense about it. The animation greatly distinguishes itself from Dreamworks where it's fluent, sleek and beautiful (Shrek I & II) – here it is rusty, awkward and mechanical and it all fits perfectly.

However, what it most enjoyable about the film is not its environment or animation, but its surprising number of GOOD sing-and-dance numbers. Who would have thought that Robin Williams (whose comedic presence comes through his character) spoofing a Britney Spears song could be so funny? Other than Britney, the film is evenly peppered with pop-cultures references. The beloved dodo bird from Ice Age gets a blatant homage at one point. Star Wars: Attack of the Clones at another point, when Fender (Robin Williams) does his best C-3PO impression at a hellish chop-factory similar to the one in the Star Wars movie ("Machines making machines."). In this way, there is certainly a lot that adults can enjoy and laugh at, leaving the fart jokes for the kids.

I am pressed to find something that I DIDN'T like about the film. Ultimately, it just does not come close to the comedic brilliance of Ice Age. It lacks the heart of Disney. It lacks the beautiful animation of Dreamworks. So the very things that made it a good film in the first place also makes it forgettable.

7 out of 10

score 7/10

Flagrant-Baronessa 27 September 2006

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1484584/