Review of Robots

Introduction

There was a time in the late nineties that Fox had washed their hands of animation. With the lack of success of films like Titan AE, they had decided to get out while they still had profit and they shut down their animation studio. That coincided with apparent death knell of traditional 2D animation in Hollywood, and it seemed that Fox would never touch animation again. Never is a strong word though, and all of a sudden, Pixar opened brand new horizons with the release of the wholly computer animated fantasy Toy Story. Box office tills were ringing like never before, and all of a sudden animation was big business again. While Disney were happy to rest on Pixar`s laurels for a while, with a second Toy Story as well as Monsters Inc., Dreamworks also got into the act with the phenomenally successful Shrek movies. Fox came to the digital party a little later with their venture into the Ice Age, and now their Blue Sky studios bring us Robots. Robots, Bugs, Toys, it seems they`re all ripe for a little pixellisation, but now more than ever, the presence of eye-candy doesn`t necessary guarantee a good story.

Rodney Copperbottom is an aspiring inventor. Brought up from an early age on the inspiring television programmes of Bigweld, a generous entrepreneur who opens his factory gates to new ideas, Rodney dreams of hitting the big time with his own inventions. When he creates Wonderbot, a versatile if nervous kitchen assistant, he decides to head to the big city to present his creation to Bigweld himself. But Bigweld`s company is under new management, as the greedy Ratchet has taken over. Ratchet is shutting down the factory`s spare parts business to go into expensive upgrades, and his plan is for the poor and broken down robots, unable to afford the expensive upgrades to fall into the avaricious claws of his mother, Madame Gasket and her scrap metal business. Rodney becomes a target when he puts his skills to use repairing the needy robots, so with his new friends, Fender, Crank, Piper, Diesel and Lug, he decides to find the missing Bigweld and get him to put things right again.

Video

An image sourced from a digital source, presented on a digital medium. I don`t think I should be looking for flaws in the 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer (there aren`t any), and merely take this time to marvel at the imagination and design of the characters and the world that they inhabit. It all follows a retro-fifties style, made to look like the `world of the future` that so many fairs and exhibitions used to tout. There are plenty of Bakelite looking characters with go faster fins and shiny painted surfaces. The look that Ratchet`s vision wants to unleash is a futuristic chrome and bright steel finish, while our heroes favour the primary and pastel colours, and curved surfaces of many a Cadillac. The world design is just as ingenious as the characters, a delight for the eyes in the presentation of in jokes and those oddly familiar design elements.

Audio

This is one of those discs that restricts you from changing audio or subtitle tracks on the fly, which is bloody annoying if you want to sample a bit of commentary or if you missed a bit of dialogue and want to see what was said. Robots has a perfectly acceptable DD 5.1 surround track in English and the dialogue is clear throughout. The effects are nicely balanced around the speakers and immerse the viewer in the film, yet I felt a little underwhelmed by it, as if it wasn`t quite punchy enough.

Features

It`s time for some cute animated menus featuring lots of robot mayhem. Well not quite, as this disc autoplays with a Robots specific `turn off your mobile` warning before going straight into the movie.

Once you press the menu button on your remote, you`ll find the menu screen, with convenient if annoying assistance from Wonderbot. You`ll find trailers for Strawberry Shortcake, Bratz and Ice Age 2 as well as those animated hedgehogs doing their version of a Green Cross Code advert.

Under the special features, you`ll find one of those technical commentaries with the animation crew coming forward to discuss how they brought their vision to the screen. There`s plenty of talk about renders, passes, composites and so on, wonderful if you are interested in the intricacies of digital animation, but for the layman it`s all a bit dry.

Aunt Fan`s Tour Of Booty is a 5-minute short in which the prominent posteriored character takes us on a tour of the station in her own anarchic arsed style.

The Voices Of Robots lasts 8 minutes and has plenty of soundbites from the cast of actors that lend their tonsils to the film.

A music video featuring Sarah Connor singing Hero Wanted has the singer inserted into the world of the Robots. I gave up on it when I realised the Terminator wasn`t showing up.

Discontinued Parts means deleted or extended scenes on this disc, three in total lasting some 7 minutes. They are all in various stages of completion, ranging from storyboards to animatics to completed animation.

Meet The Bots takes you to a menu screen featuring 11 of the characters. Choose one and you`re taken to a page of text biography with the option of looking at a set of design sketches, or a rotating 3D model of the same.

There is some light-hearted fun in the Robot Arcade, where you can put a dancing robot through its paces, subjecting it to a selection of dance styles, as well as play a memory game with some of Fender`s photographs.

Finally there is a sneak peak of Ice Age 2, with a familiar teaser trailer and a 3-minute long behind the scenes look at the movie.

All the extra features are subtitled, including the commentary.

Conclusion

Robots follows a recent trend in animated movies, that of re-versioning them for a target audience. It defeats the purpose of a director`s original vision when you find local `talent` delivering voices that were originally supplied by American actors, merely for an added `cuteness` factor. The UK DVD has the same UK theatrical version of the movie that replaces Natasha Lyonne with Cat Deeley. You`ll also find vocal cameos from Eamonn Holmes, Vernon `Ollyoaks` Kay, Terry Wogan and Chris `Self-appointed Saviour Of Radio 1` Moyles. My joy is unconstrained. More significantly, one of the characters gets a name change in the British version, as Aunt Fanny becomes Aunt Fan. Someone in the US lacking a sense of irony discovered that in the UK, `fanny` is slang for female genitalia instead of the posterior, and felt that British audiences would be too busy making up their own punchlines to watch the film. This person had obviously never heard of Fanny Craddock. This also means that one of the jokes is practically mauled into incomprehensibility in the UK version. If the Americans have such a low opinion of our sense of humour, one wonders how they ever managed to elect two Presidents named Bush for all the sniggering in the polling booths.

The story is pretty mundane, despite all the flashy visuals and fast paced action. It`s an ode to self-empowerment, with Rodney Copperbottom born into a low-income family, but being told by his loving father that if he puts his mind to it, he can accomplish anything. The motivational television programmes that he has been watching, with Bigweld extolling the virtues of hard work and ambitious dreams help this. As most young heroes are apt to do, he travels to the big city to achieve his dreams, only to find that the city of his dreams isn`t all that it is cracked up to be. A greedy corporate type has deposed his hero and the average working robot is suffering under the new regime, unable to afford the new upgrades and unable to find the cheap spare parts that they need. Rodney decides to fulfil his destiny and save his hero Bigweld and depose the villainous Ratchet. Fortunately, he finds the help of a band of unlikely comedy sidekicks in his adventures. It`s the sort of run of the mill tale that gets wheeled out again and again in these movies, and it`s replayed here to clockwork precision. There`s a bit of a social comment in the battle of must buy consumerism versus good old fashioned fix it and make do values, but given the sort of marketing and merchandising this sort of film receives, it all seems a little ironic.

These films wouldn`t be complete without humour, and this film is full of jokes for all ages, with sight gags, witticisms, and in jokes thrown in at a relentless pace, enough to require more than one viewing to get them all. Once again Robin Williams is wheeled out to unleash his anarchic talents, this time with the character of Fender, and there`s no doubting that he adds much to the humour of the film. I did get the feeling that his anarchy overshadowed the other performances to a degree. Ewan McGregor`s Rodney certainly came off second best to him, and Halle Berry is practically unnoticeable as Rodney`s love interest Cappie. Greg Kinnear`s Ratchet makes a suitably villainous nemesis for Rodney, but it did seem that the supporting characters got short shrift in doling out the humour and personality. There is no denying that Robots is funny, and filled with comedy moments, but all this did tend to diminish the story somewhat, and the film seems a collection of funny moments rather than a coherent narrative. Of course there is the requisite fart gag of the sort that I appreciate so much.

Robots looks divine, it`s filled with ingenuity and the world is fascinating to watch. Children of all ages will love the humour, and its ninety minutes of mayhem will appeal to all and offend none. The story however is hackneyed and saccharine, and the characters lack that spark of individuality that would put Robots in that lofty position occupied by the best of Pixar studios. The disc has a nice if mundane set of extra features, and of course the presentation is flawless. Robots is eye candy so sweet that your eyeteeth will get tooth decay. All this dessert is great fun, but you end up hankering for the main course after a while.