Meeting Old Friends: Robots

Blue Sky Studios is one of my favorite animation studios. While they are most well known for the Ice Age franchise, which seems to have worn out it's welcome with most people, they have developed three other films during their tenure with 20th Century Fox. There was their adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic, Horton Hears a Who, a film that I felt was split. The scenes with the Whos were great. Very funny and charming. Horton, alas, sucks the charm out of the film and is one of Jim Carrey's lesser performances. Then there was Rio which looks spectacular and has some sensational music but is kind of paint by the numbers otherwise. Before those and the Ice Age sequels though, there was Robots.

Robots is one of the more clever animated films I've seen. The world made here is so vibrant, original, and full of life, despite the lack of organic beings. The jokes, while some are lame, are generally humorous. The one thing I would say might prevent one from watching it is that it has that issue of featuring an "all-star cast" which is usually a death sign for these kinds of films. Thankfully, the cast is pretty solid.

First is our main character Rodney, played by Ewan McGregor. He's the naive dreamer who has the guts to fight for his beliefs against impossible odds.

Next is Cappy, played by Halle Berry. She's honestly not a very interesting character and serves mostly as a love interest for Rodney.

Robin Williams plays Fender and Fender is more or less Funny Williams as a robot. Either you're fine with that or you're gonna dislike it.

Mel Brooks as Bigweld, a sort of Walt Disney analogue.

The rest of the cast includes Amanda Bynes, Drew Carrey, Jennifer Coolidge, Greg Kinnear, Jim Broadbent, and Harland Williams as well as cameos from Jay Leno, Al Roker, James Earl Jones, the American Idol judges circa 2005 sans Simon Cowell, and an amusing extended cameo from Paul Giamatti.

The film has some good messages and the characters are a ton of fun to watch. Unfortunately, like Blue Sky's other non-Ice Age films, Robots didn't fair so well in theaters and has since all but faded into obscurity. You can easily find copies of the DVD in bargain bins at various retailers, notably Wal-Mart. So the good news is that you can obtain this little gem of a flick for a very small price. I recommend it anyway.

Next time on Meeting Old Friends, I'm going to a very special convention. It's called DramaCon.