365 Films A Year!

Viewed August 12, 2006

Robots is Blue Sky Studios’ follow-up to their 2002 breakthrough film Ice Age. It doesn’t quite live up to the earlier film, but is entertaining, certainly looks good and will please younger audiences.

Robots is a bit more of a formulaic movie than either Ice Age or Ice Age: The Meltdown. It follows a young robot, Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan Macgregor) as he travels to the big city in hopes of finding work with Bigweld (Mel Brooks), the robot responsible for most of the innovations in the world. Along the way, he meets and befriends several older model robots (”outmodes”), who are finding life difficult as Bigweld’s replacement, Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) stops supplying parts, instead pushing expensive “upgrades”.

The performances are mostly good, although I though MacGregor was more convincing in Valiant than he is here. He doesn’t quite connect with the other characters as well as he might. This might be because there are so many of them. It’s as if the filmmakers had so many ideas, they couldn’t bring themselves to throw any of them away, instead cramming them all in.

Of the supporting cast, Mel Brooks is probably the strongest; very funny when he’s supposed to be, but with just enough toughness to make him believeable as someone who could build Bigweld’s empire. Greg Kinnear is okay, but he lacks the strong voice that a good villain needs. He’s at his best when he’s whimpering around his mother. He’s just not menacing enough when he’s in villain mode. Amanda Bynes, Robin Williams, Halle Berry, Drew Carrey, Stanley Tucci, Dianne Wiest, Dan Hedaya and many others fill out the rest. They all do well enough with what they are given, but with so many characters in the film that it is difficult for any but a few to stand out. Paul Giamatti is pretty funny as a sarcastic gate guard, but two other standouts (Jim Broadbent as Ratchet’s mother Madame Gasket and Jennifer Coolidge as Aunt Fanny) are actually so grotesque that they detracted from my enjoyment of the film.

What there’s no denying is that the look of the film is great. Blue Sky again shows why they are the only computer animation company that compares favorably with Pixar. The robots all have a weight and solidity to them that makes them jump out at you. You get the sense that these machines could actually be built (well, most of them, anyway). They do seem to be a bit enamored of their own handiwork, though. There are several sequences (including the entrance into Robot City) that simply go on too long. And since Robots has a running time of under ninety minutes, it just illustrates how thin the plot really is.

Still, I had fun watching it for the most part and it certainly looks good. It’s the weak entry so far from Blue Sky, but shows that even a weaker idea can still have plenty going for it when talented people are behind it. Robots may not be one you need to have in your collection, but it’s certainly worth a viewing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 15th, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under 2005, Animation, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.