Movie Review: Robots

Movie Review: Robots                                                                                                                   3-31-16

Boy, 2005 was a rough year for animated features. That year, we had 5 CGI animated features, none of them from Pixar, and none of them got nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. There was DreamWorks' Madagascar, Robots, Blue Sky's followup to Ice Age, Valiant, which was about pigeons during World War 2, Chicken Little, which was Disney's first attempt at making a CGI feature WITHOUT Pixar, with disastrous results, and Hoodwinked!, a Glob-awful looking Shrek knockoff that takes the tale of Little Red Riding Hood and turns it into a detective story. Today, we will review Robots.

Robots takes place in a world where everything is a machine. Even objects like toilets, watches, and telephones can talk, and there's no organic life anywhere. The movie tells the story of a young robot named Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor), who dreams of becoming an inventor. His hero is Bigweld (Mel Brooks), whose TV show Rodney would watch each night as a kid. Rodney journeys to Robot City to work at Bigweld Industries, but finds out that it's been taken over by the dastardly Ratchet, who wants to discontinue spare parts and replace them with upgrades. Now it's up to Rodney, along with a ragtag team of 'outmodes', including a red robot named Fender (Robin Williams), to prove 'you can shine no matter what you're made of.'

Now, what do I think of Robots? I actually liked it more than Cars! The animation is lovely, the characters are funny and rememberable, and the pop-culture references, while sometimes overwhelming, some of them work in their own right. I am aware that the story could've used an 'upgrade', but believe it or not, it's actually an allegory! During the time Robots was being made, Michael Eisner wanted Walt Disney Animation Studios to abandon hand-drawn animation in favor of the more profitable computer animation, leaving the 2D animators jobless. Ratchet serves as Michael Eisner, Bigweld serves as Roy Edward Disney, Walt's nephew, and the 'scrap metal', robots that can't afford new parts, represent the 2D veterans at Disney. Does that mean Rodney serves as John Lasseter, who would rejoin Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006? Probably. Anyway, Robots is a film the entire family can enjoy.

Rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5.