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Robots (2005)

Director: Chris Wedge, Carlos Saldanha

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From Time Out London

The CGI animation featured in Chris Wedge and Blue Sky Studios’ ‘Ice Age’ was never as well defined as that presented by benchmark-setters Pixar, but the film’s Chuck Jones-style humour was always an unequivocal winner. Well, it seems the bar’s been raised with the company’s latest, which not only retains the same level of quick-fire jokery as ‘Ice Age’ but anchors it all to some of the most imaginative and impressively detailed computer-generated imagery ever produced.
The film is set in a mechanical retro-future world inhabited entirely by robots. It’s never explained how we got here but we do discover how every new generation is spawned. Rather quaintly (and in one of many comic references to our own world), prospective parents ‘make babies’ by assembling them from kits. ‘Ah, 12 hours’ labour, but it was worth it,’ says Mrs Copperbottom (Dianne Wiest) to her enamelled dishwasher husband as the film’s hero is ‘born’. Cut to years later and Rodney (Ewan McGregor) has become a budding inventor who’s itching to show his Wonderbot to soft-hearted corporate investor Bigweld (Mel Brooks). But on his arrival at Robot City (where he bumps into future pal Fender, voiced in a predictably manic manner by Robin Williams), he discovers that his prospective financier has been sidelined by a suave megalomaniac with an eye on a profiteering scam involving upgrades. Revolt! Revolt!
‘Robots’ is basically a coming-of-age pic, but one that also addresses notions of capitalism, consumerism, greed, individualism and all that. Granted, it doesn’t always connect with the emotions, but it’s an absolute stunner to look at, briskly paced, cute and hilariously funny throughout.

Author: DA

Time Out London Issue 1804: March 16-23 2005

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