| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| Science-Fiction |
|
|
| Horror |
|
|
| Fantasy |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ROBOTS
Rating:  ½
USA. 2005.
Director – Chris Wedge, Screenplay – Lowell Ganz, David Lindsay-Adaire & Babaloo Mandel, Story – Lindsay-Adaire, Jim McClain & Ron Mita, Producers – John C. Donkin, Jerry Davis & William Joyce, Music – John Powell, Music Supervisor – Becky Mancuco-Winding, Animation Supervisors – James Bresnahan & Michael Thurmeier, Production Design – Joyce. Production Company – Blue Sky Studios.
Voices:
Ewan McGregor (Rodney Copperbottom), Robin Williams (Fender), Halle Berry (Cappy), Mel Brooks (Bigweld), Greg Kinnear (Phineas T. Ratchet), Jim Broadbent (Madame Gasket), Stanley Tucci (Herb Copperbottom), Jennifer Coolidge (Aunt Fanny), Amanda Bynes (Piper), Drew Carey (Crank), Harland Williams (Lug), Dianne Wiest (Mrs Copperbottom), Paul Giamatti (Tim), Dan Hedaya (Mr Gunk), Natasha Lyonne (Loretta Geargrinder)
Plot: In Rivet Town, Herb Copperbottom and his wife receive a kitset and put together a new son whom they call Rodney. After seeing the most important robot in the world, Bigweld the robot manufacturer, on tv, Rodney grows up believing in Bigweld’s offer for inventors everywhere to come to him with their innovations and dreams of making it as an inventor. Rodney constructs Wonderbot, a small flying machine to help his father, a lowly dishwasher who is wearing out, but is thrown out by his father’s boss when the nervous Wonderbot drops dishes. Rodney decides to set out to Robot City to make it as an inventor with Bigweld. But upon arriving, he finds that Bigweld’s corporation has been taken over by the ruthless executive Ratchet who has closed its doors to inventors, while Bigweld has become a recluse and sees nobody anymore. Ratchet announces his plan to phase out all spare parts and force all robots to upgrade or be scrapped. Rodney falls in with a group of rundown robots. His repair skills come in handy when the other robots prove desperate for fixing after finding there are no longer any spare parts. As Ratchet and his mother Madame Gasket, a scrap-metal dealer, intensify all efforts to stop them, Rodney sets out to find the reclusive Bigweld and get him to take back control of the company.
Fads seem to come and go in animation. Most recently it was talking fish – Help! I’m a Fish (2000), Pixar’s Finding Nemo (2003) and DreamWorks’ Shark Tale (2004). A couple of years ago it was talking prehistoric animals – Disney’s Dinosaur (2000), Ice Age (2002) and a whole lot of Land Before Time sequels – and then before that it was talking bugs – DreamWorks’ Antz (1998) and Pixar’s A Bug’s Life (1998). Around 2000 there was even a peculiar fad for Aztec animation with The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and The Road to El Dorado (2000). The newest trend on the horizon appears to be cute talking machines – with this and Pixar’s Cars (2006). We’ve had talking machines before – in animation there was the quite delightful The Brave Little Toaster (1987) and sequels, as well as live-action equivalents of the cute robot story such as Heartbeeps (1981) and Short Circuit (1986).
Robots is the second CGI-animated film from Blue Sky Studios and director Chris Wedge. A few years ago, Chris Wedge and Blue Sky appeared with the highly enjoyable and quite successful Ice Age (2002). Robots received a rather indifferent response upon its US premiere but it is a much more enjoyable film than that. There is an enormous degree of visual invention to the film – from the quite marvellous production design that creates the robots and city in appealingly vibrant and rust-hued detail to the bizarre robot characterizations packed all around the edges of the film. Chris Wedge has a great love of slapstick and nutty Rube Goldberg contraptions and keeps setting them up throughout the film – the madcap ride through the city’s transit system designed like a giant pinball game; Rodney and Fender dancing on spilt ball-bearings; Rodney being magnetized with iron filings and drawing every metal thing towards him as he struggles through the street; Bigweld’s giant-sized domino chain; and of course the climactic scenes in the foundry with the ramshackle rebuilt robots going into battle.
Wedge welcomely resists the tendencies that beset some of DreamWorks more recent animated efforts – Shrek 2 (2004) and Shark Tale being notable examples – of littering the film with lots of contemporary in-jokes and pop culture references. There’s the odd moment – a cute cameo from the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz (1939); Robin Williams breaking into Britney Spears numbers and an elaborate Fred Astaire pastiche Singin’ in the Oil; the robot that gets a new voicebox and immediately speaks in the voice of Darth Vader (a dubbed James Earl Jones) – but these are not nearly as intrusive as they were in say one of Robin Williams’s other animated outings, Disney’s Aladdin (1992). Wedge also manages to pull off another really annoying trend of modern fantasy – poop, fart and bodily waste jokes – with a considerable sense of humour. The funniest gag in the film is the underarm farts gag and the totally whacko throwaway gag with the lamppost. In fact there is a really quite sophisticated level of humour that runs through Robots with a number of gags that are likely to go completely over the children’s heads – like the scene where Rodney announces “Okay, who wants to be fixed?” and the robot dog nervously crosses its hands over its crotch.
The science-fictional pedant in one did keep wanting to make sense of the world that these characters lived in. I kept asking – who built the robots? why would robots do such human-anthropomorphic functions as develop sentimental familiarities towards parents, romantic feelings for one another, or feel sad about getting old? For that matter it is impossible to try and conceive why someone would construct an urban transit system that resembles a giant pinball machine. Rather Robots is a film where one sort of has to tune out any notion of it being a science-fiction film by virtue of it featuring robots and view it more as a talking animals fantasy that happens to feature robots. You have to regard it in much the same way that watching a film like Finding Nemo or Antz requires one to suspend disbelief when it comes to wondering how fish or insects can talk let alone exhibit human behaviour. Or perhaps see it more like tv’s The Flintstones (1960-6), which was really only a cute concept that was based on translating a contemporary middle-class behaviour into prehistoric times, substituting rocks and dinosaurs for stereos, dishwashers and cars etc, with Robots playing a similar game substituting robots for people. The filmmakers have managed to find a robot for every conceivable purpose – robot pigeons pecking in the street, robot lampposts, post boxes and street signals, even robot toilets. This does lead to some highly amusing interpolations – the opening scenes where the father and mother rhapsodise in joy at the coming delivery of the new baby, which then turns out to be a DIY construction kit, or how the father turns out to quite literally work as a dishwasher. Robots is really quite an appealing film. It is made with an enormous degree of visual inventivity, good-natured and intelligent humour and succeeds in winning on just about every single count.
Blue Sky Films subsequently went onto make the disappointing Ice Age 2 (2006) and then the successful Dr Seuss adaptation Horton Hears a Who! (2008).
Copyright Richard Scheib 2005
|