Robots (2005)
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Robots Movie Review
Robots is a 2005 animated science fiction film directed by Chris Wedge and starring Ewan McGregor. It is one of Blue Sky Studio’s weaker flicks.
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“Well, good luck in the big city.
If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,
and if you can’t make it here, welcome to the club“
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Rodney, a genius inventor, wants to meet his inspiration, Bigweld, who is a master inventor. In order to do so, he travels to the city and finds himself dealing with a corporate honcho. This movie had a lot of potential. After all, it deals with some important themes such as corporate overlords, manipulation, false idols and unfair industry change.
However, it fails to develop any one of these themes properly, resulting in a major disappointment and lost potential for the studio. The storytelling is also very mediocre. Judging by the themes, premise and amazing world building, you would expect a truly animation classic, but you would be sorely mistaken as the film never realized on any of its promises properly.
The pacing is to blame for all of its shortcomings. After all, this is a movie that is so fast-paced and frenetic that it becomes infuriating to watch and incoherent to understand. This is the problem with many computer-animated flicks these days, but it is a particular shame when everything else presented itself to be a great movie, but the pace and action ruined it.
Robots also definitely needed stronger characterization for such a story to work properly. Rodney and Cappy are fine, Fender is pretty amusing and Bigweld is an important figure in what he presents, which is the dangers of idolizing and the disappointment that can happen when meeting your idols. However, all of these characters are not as deeply developed as I would have liked because of the fast pace while the supporting players are especially mediocre.
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Robots also has that downfall of way too famous cast doing an animated voice work instead of professionally trained voice actors. McGregor’s voice was especially difficult to shake off. I’ve never liked this and Blue Sky is one of the studios most problematic in this arena. The animation is fantastic, there is no denying that. The robots look great, the world is impeccably detailed and the attention to detail and colorful palette are fantastic. The score is also solid, but the direction, dialogue and script all needed to have been better.
