ROBOTS

By: Abbie Bernstein
Review Date: Friday, March 11, 2005

Director Chris Wedge and his Blue Sky Studios team have followed up their 2002 hit ICE AGE with ROBOTS, a fantasy that is at once extraordinarily imaginative in visual terms and surprisingly flat in terms of character and narrative. The filmmakers get so caught up in exploring their details of a world populated entirely by robots that the script by David Lindsay-Abaire and Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, from a story by Ron Mita & Jim McClain and Lindsay-Abaire, never gets around to putting the pedal to the metal when it comes to pacing.

In an amusing prologue, we see Mr. and Mr. Copperbottom (voiced by Stanley Tucci and Dianne Wiest) "making a baby," which in the robot universe means actually assembling the little fellow. Inspired while growing up by watching Mr. Bigweld (voiced by Mel Brooks) on TV, young Rodney (Ewan McGregor) wants to be an inventor and eventually leaves the small town for the big city, where he hopes to present himself to the corporate bigwig. Alas, what Rodney doesn't know is that Bigweld Industries has been co-opted by the villainous Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), whose aim is to force all robots to either buy hideously expensive upgrades or else wind up rendered useless and consigned to Madame Gasket's (voiced by Jim Broadbent) chop shop. Thanks to his talents for fixing things in this universe, the things happen to be people Rodney finds himself at the head of a revolution.

Theoretically, putting a novel flair on the likable underdog in life-and-death conflict with a sinister villain scenario ought to be very exciting. Madame Gasket is certainly an impressive, demonic-looking foe, and her domain looks impressively like an all-metal-and-flames version of Hell itself. Wedge, co-director Chris Saldanha and Co. have crafted a world that borrows about equally from illustrations of L. Frank Baum's Tick-Tock Man in the OZ series, futuristic visions from the turn of the century through the present and real-life appliances of the '30s through the '50s. The animation is seamless and inventive, with sly little touches that allow many of the robotic characters to somewhat resemble the actors giving them voice (for a blue and white robot, Rodney does bear an astonishing likeness to McGregor).


However, the pacing is dismayingly slow. We get who the characters are in one click, yet scenes go on and on, driving home the archetypes without any nuances in personality or dialogue. The effect winds up being kind of clinical intellectually, we're intrigued by what we'll be shown next, but we feel next to nothing.

This may not matter much to prospective viewers who are fascinated by the look of ROBOTS, but it's a shame that some of the vast invention displayed in the look of the piece couldn't have spilled over into the characters and plot.