One of Robin Williams' finer performances since Aladdin and some generally lively animation almost comes close to covering up what is otherwise a painfully transparent story. Almost. The good news? The characters are likable enough and the humor is modestly amusing. If you thought fart jokes were getting to be too much, well Aunt Fanny makes them seem new again. She's almost a laugh riot just by herself. The bad news? Well the movie's messages are hammered into our heads over and over again from the opening sequence. And I mean come on. You can tell who the bad guy is a mile away and what's going to happen to him. It's as if the movie wasn't even trying hard to make things challenging. Watch this movie only for the comedy and some fine "domino effect" animation.

Rodney Copperbottom (played by the always likeable Ewan McGregor) has big dreams that take him to where else? Robot City. Rodney wants to meet up with big name industrialist Bigweld to become an inventor. Unfortunately, Ratchet and his mama have taken over the company with a new ad campaign selling robot parts with the slogan, "Why be you, when you could be new?" Along the way, Rodney meets up with the Robin Williams voiced zany character (yep, the same stale character he always plays) who always falls apart. Rodney doesn't get his dream job, but he finds plenty of work fixing up robots that can't afford the high end robot parts being peddled by Ratchet. This makes Ratchet angry...

The visuals in the movie are stunning, especially for an engineering guy like me. The mechanical details are fun to watch and as I child I would have loved a working Robot City playset. The transit system that flings pods across town with precision is particularly cool, and makes me want to play a round of Mousetrap. As for laughs, this film is a bit lacking. It starts of fine with some cute and literal "baby-making" jokes, but when we get to Robot City, the humor becomes a little less sophisticated. How funny you find the jokes depends on how funny you think Robin Williams' Fender is. One particularly annoying scene in this film involves Fender dancing to Hit Me Baby, One More Time. These kind of unfunny pop culture "gags" that come out of nowhere make me cringe and feel embarrassed to even be watching the movie. Much funnier is Rodney's little sidekick invention, the large bottomed Aunt Fanny, and the voice impersonator bot. Pretty forgettable are Fender's sister Piper and Halle Berry's Cappy (the obligatory, though barely there love interest).

Timeless classic this is not, but a fun visual feast it surely is. Robots came out in March 2005 from the same folks as Ice Age. It did fairly well at the box office earning almost $130 million, but it did not perform as well as many of the critter-based CG films. Still, I give it props for using the medium for something new. Mostly on its designs and animation, not for its forgettable characters I grant Robots a B-.

As you may have noticed, the industry is awash in CG animated films right now. While I have no objection to there being more animation out in the world, in recent years my expectations about animated films have begun to fall due to more mediocore money-grubbing productions being produced.

So it was perhaps because of my low expectations that Robots came as such a surprise to me. It is indeed a good little film. The look of it is remarkable--all the little details from the crazy transit system right down to the bolt that holds on Rodney's nose.

Rodney is also a fairly well-developed character. In the opening sequence of the film we're treated to a rather entertaining look of how a baby robot becomes a little boy robot and then an adult. It's this little bit of detail about Rodney's family life that provides just enough depth to make his plight worth our attention.

His plight however is... well, a little strange...

***POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD***

...maybe this is the failing of watching such a movie as an adult (sin of sins) but the premise goes something like this: The big bad corporation has stopped making repair parts for robots and is now saying if you don't buy our upgrades (entirely new pieces of hardware) then you'll be dead... either because you fell apart or because these maniacal street sweepers will send you to the chop shop to be melted down.

This is kinda where my adult brain goes... "whoa, how does that work? Big corp openly threatens your very 'lives' and nobody is crashing the building until our hero arrives?!" After going through such trouble in the rest of the movie to get the audience to sympathize with these characters and think of them as alive... this seems just a little over-the-top... like someone decided to throw a holocaust chamber into the middle of a Disney movie.

Anyways, if you can ignore such silly trifles... a logical plot--pfft, not necessary... you will likely be entertained. You'll note by my star-rating that even with this rather troubling point of logic I still felt as though my money hadn't gone to waste.

ROBOTS is just like ICE AGE - a nice, enjoyable film but it can't compare with Disney's or DreamWorks best works.
My biggest problem with ROBOTS is the society this films portrays. I would have been nice when they at least gave us a hint where all these robots come from. After all, there machines that have to be build by somebody. But in this movie they just exist (yeah, I know, you shouldn't think about something like this when you're watching a movie that is mostly marketed towards kids). That leads me to the other 'society problem'. The robots in this world are beings that can think and feel just like humans and it's okay to collect them off the streets and burn them? It's a very 'inhuman' (well ... inrobot...?) society - living beings are left alone to die when there are no more spare parts for them or get killed and the society as a whole doesn't seem to care. Sure, our heros care, but they are the good guys, it's their 'job'... But hey, maybe it's all allegorical (sp?)?
Okay, maybe I'm going to far with this. ROBOTS isn't the kind of movie that wants to provoke some thoughts about live, death and society, it wants to entertain. And this is a goal ROBOTS achieves. Even the obligatory fart joke wasn't as bad as usual because it had a new 'twist' to it. Oh, and the talking phone booth was hilarious. Plus, there's a little bit of innuendo whichs goes over the head of children but will make adult as least smirk ("When was the last time you've been oiled?" - "Eh, I can't answer that with my kid sister around..."). Robin Williams's Fender was the best character in the movie, the others where just 'there' but have done nothing to support the story (especially the robots that live in Aunt Fanny's house). William's dialouge felt really fresh and improvized, he had more energy than any other of the voice actors, which I suspect where just hired because of their big name. For example, as much as I like Halle Berry as an actress, her voice work didn't made Cappy interesting (or her relationship with Rodney for that matter - this never worked in a single scene, I tought that he would be better off with Piper), same goes for Greg Kinnear.
ROBOTS offers family-friendly entertainment with some gorgeous animation and some pretty funny scenes and pieces of dialogue. It's not an outstanding film but it does its job right. And, to be honest, I didn't expected anything groundbreaking from Blue Sky Animation.

It was okay. It had some funny parts and the animation was excellent even Pixar quality! However there were some big plot holes in it and overall the story could've been better told.

It wasn't what I was expecting at all. I thought it would be just a plotless kiddy comedy. I was very wrong.

The story is about Rodney Copperbottom who travels to the city to seek out Big Weld the inventor, who owns a huge corporation, in hopes that his inventions could help make other robots' "lives" better. When he gets there he finds that things aren't what he expected and he ends up fighting against the giant corporation of Big Weld so that the little people, or in this case robots, can have a chance to survive.

The characters are very entertaining. The main characters have a fair ammount of depth to them. Fender, the sidekick comic relief, is actually quite funny, whereas most times the comic relief characters just come off as annoying. He didn't, at least to me he didn't. There was loads of humor in this film. A lot was not aimed at kids either, hence the PG rating.

The animation was really great. There was so much detail in everything. From the giant city shots down to the rust on the robots. The score was very well done and fit in great with the movie. There were a few rap and rock songs, but they didn't last too long.

Overall it was a very good movie, not the best I've seen but definitely entertaining. It didn't really seem to drag on in any spot, but moved rather quickly. If you haven't seen it yet, give it a try.