Tue, March 15, 2005

In Robots, we follow plucky Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) as he chases his dream of becoming an inventor in the big city. His idol is manufacturing magnate Mr. Bigweld (Mel Brooks), who welcomes unsolicited submissions from amateur inventors. But when he gets to Robot City, Rodney learns that Bigweld has been shoved aside by the ambitious Ratchet (Greg Kinnear, in a devilish performance), whose only concern is profit. Ratchet doesn't want to sell replacement parts to old robots any more – he wants them only to buy expensive cosmetic upgrades (pretty metal shells which snap onto existing robots to dress them up). Rodney is taken in by a gang of misfit "outmodes" and begins to put his tinkering skills to work fixing other old robots, setting the stage for a climactic battle between his plucky do-it-yourself spirit and the corporate might of arch-villain Ratchet. But the film fails to heed its own moral: rather than creating something special that people will enjoy, it keeps an eye on the bottom line like Ratchet – delivering a shiny container that is ultimately empty.

In any creative enterprise, there's a choice between innovation and imitation. Do you blaze new territory and forge new molds – or do you stick with what works and churn out another knock-off from the assembly line? In movies, it's hardly ever a black-and-white choice: film is rarely capital-A Art, these days it's art-as-commerce and so there's a balancing act between the new and the proven. Robots is the latest from Blue Sky Studios, which produced the lively and charming – if simple – Ice Age in 2002. In those days, Pixar had been dominating the still nascent market for half a decade, Shrek had just appeared the year before, and it was still anyone's guess how the field would shake out. Ice Age had a compact cast, a fun and family-friendly story, and a strikingly original aesthetic. Their artwork and animation, every bit as craggy and energetic as their corporate mascot Scrat, was unique and imaginative – and filled a niche left open between Pixar's butter-smooth detail and the by-the-books staging of DreamWorks. At the time, I picked them to leapfrog DreamWorks as the main challenger to the Pixar throne. But a lot's changed since then. Fox and Blue Sky didn't have the crazy box office returns of Shrek to fund them (nor the laser beam focus of Katzenberg to propel them), so their sophomore effort took longer to reach theatres – during which time the battle proceeded without them. These days, computer-animated features are an "industry" – the stakes are a lot higher, and Blue Sky can't afford to ignore them when placing their next project on the continuum between different and derivative.

There are some great moments in Robots, and some great performances. Stanley Tucci (The Impostors) imbues Rodney's father with sincerity and wisdom, and Amanda Bynes (What a Girl Wants, TV's What I Like About You – she's excited to be making her non-what debut) lends her undefinable verve and spunk to Piper, one of the outmodes that befriend Rodney in Robot City. Bynes is so good in fact – with her combination of sass and bubbly, goofy charm – that she infects the design and animation of Piper. Even in scenes where Bynes isn't speaking any dialogue, Piper is acting like her. She positively pops off the screen. Kinnear, as mentioned, is excellent, and Hollywood's underappreciated underdog Paul Giamatti is absolutely captivating in a joyful turn as Tim, a tiny guard who mans the gate at Bigweld Industries. But these performances, and their subtle nuance, are overshadowed by the film's main character: the shiny dazzle with nothing inside.

Malcolm Jones of "Newsweek" had the following to say about Robots: "Quite simply, it's the best piece of computer-generated eye candy any studio has ever produced." (Admittedly, this was in the context of a profile and not a critical review, but it certainly reads like a review – enough that Fox is using it in ads for Robots.) For me, "eye candy" has always had a connotation near to "window dressing" – that is, dazzling on the surface but lacking in substance. Not exactly a claim to fame for a group of storytellers, but I think "Newsweek" is falling prey to a common misperception about computer-animated movies: that they're a showpiece for spectacle first and a method of storytelling second. In reality, the "only in CG" spectacle is one small part of what makes a good computer-animated film. I think the filmmakers know this, and I think the audience perceives this – even film critics – but popular magazines like "Newsweek" still tend to pigeonhole these movies, and see the spectacle as the main thing setting them apart from other films. (While I agree with Incredibles director Brad Bird that computer animation should be viewed as just another filmmaker's tool, it will remain segregated as its own subset of the industry until someone throws enough money behind a CG movie for grown-ups.)

However, the "Newsweek" quote hints at a larger problem, and one of the core missteps of Robots: for many sequences, the whiz-bang spectacle is all that's on the screen – it's just wall-to-wall ocular confection for minutes at a time. This deficiency was shared by The Polar Express; ironically, both films feature numerous sequences which mimic the physical experience of a roller coaster – a metaphor typically invoked to describe a movie's dazzling pace when there's no story to talk about. A few times during each movie, the filmmakers will park the narrative, then careen off on some hair-raising adventure of whooshing, flying, and zooming, then return to the story as though nothing happened. In Robots, the broadest example is a Rube Goldberg-inspired transit system that Rodney encounters when he first arrives in Robot City. Unfolding across the entire city and involving countless doodads, the sequence plays right into the hands of the gushing "Newsweek" quote, but serves absolutely no other purpose. In fact, it kind of plays on the misconception of how computer animation works – in CG, a grand, city-wide spectacle is no more laborious nor expensive than a scene at the breakfast table. As Brad Bird says, "It's easy to blow up a city in CG, but it's hard for a character to grab another character's shirt." (You'll notice nobody in Robots wears a shirt.) The world of Robots is painstakingly designed, but showing it off isn't the way to go – it reveals a lack of focus in the narrative.

Worse yet, the visual design of Robots – while impressive – is deeply flawed in a few key areas. It lacks the original flair of Ice Age, which had an oddball Dr. Seuss-meets-Ren & Stimpy kind of feel. Robots has a beautiful retro aesthetic, but it still feels kind of blah. Co-director Chris Wedge talks about how the character designs were inspired by actual objects (Rodney's head shape is based on an outboard motor, for instance), but it seems like nobody bothered to throw any original design on top of that inspiration. They look like robots we've seen before, perhaps because of the familiarity of their real-world shapes. They're also more intricate than they should be. All the extra gadgets and sprockets make their faces and body language harder to read – it's as though another layer should be ground down to make them into more effective animated characters. (Giamatti's Tim the gate guard is the refreshing antithesis of this. He's utter simplicity: a plump little body with a big doorman's cap; each hand consists of a big flat mitten split in two, with a hinge down the middle. He moves like King Friday from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. It's brilliant!) Robots does employ some clever tricks to make their automaton creations more expressive, like adding teeny, articulated eyebrows, rigged above each eye – but they also cut some corners, making parts of each robot curvy and flexible where they shouldn't be. If the animators of Futurama could make Bender expressive without curling his cheeks up and down, surely Blue Sky can squeeze the same personality out of their gigabytes of computer power. It's not so wrong to add a little bend in the lips, but it opens the door to laziness in other areas. Rodney's mother's hair? Why does that have to bend and flex?

Sadly, while the design, casting, and animation are hit-or-miss, the trite story – overwrought and underwritten – shows no redeeming qualities at all. The stark black-and-white setup of good vs. evil is familiar enough to make even the young children in the audience groan. Ratchet is so exceedingly evil, complete with an underworld lair (literally) and a giant, shark-toothed mother who chops up and melts down other robots – the character is only saved from being a complete caricature by Kinnear's adroit and smarmy performance. Like Shrek and 13 Going on 30 and countless others, Robots sets its sights on the fashion industry – Ratchet is bad because he wants robots to fit an ideal of physical beauty rather than being happy with how they look now. (His slogan, "Why be you, when you can be new?" replaces Bigweld's "You can shine no matter what you're made of.") But Robots also takes aim at the corporation: Ratchet wants to sell pricey upgrades to those who can afford them, while Rodney wants to help robots in need, no matter what the cost. The tired story takes the usual turns: the outmodes track down Bigweld to convince him to fight back (suffering the same crisis of confidence as today's Democrats – who needs a figurehead, when you can take to the streets en masse?), Rodney learns to believe in himself, the lithe young lady in Ratchet's office whom he's been sexually harassing turns against him and aids the revolution, a giant battle ensues. The story has cute moments, but it proceeds along a path so well worn by previous family movies it almost seems to have no story of its own.

Given the decision to follow in the footsteps of others, it should come as no surprise that Robots devolves into the same puns and pop-culture references as you might find in Shrek or Shark Tale – giving a nod to everything from Braveheart to Scarface to Rollerball – plus crude jokes meant to zoom over the heads of the little ones (like a throwaway line about a Brazilian wax which horrified me). Worse yet, they hired Robin Williams to play a key character – he's already a pop-culture-spewing robot to begin with. (I honestly don't understand why anyone would hire him for a comedy any more.) The film already suffers from the overanimated frame that has been infecting CG work from The Matrix Reloaded to Star Wars: Episode II – incorporating the overanimated Williams creates nothing less than mayhem. The violence and peril is more frightening than the gunplay and domestic strife that placed The Incredibles at the receiving end of so many clucked tongues. (Both are rated PG.) But, perhaps the violence in Robots seems mitigated because in the middle of the epic battle, Williams's character stops everything and shimmies to Britney Spears's "...Baby One More Time." The film skips between its amped-up action, schmaltzy moral, and goofy humor so often, it loses its identity completely. If the aim was to capitalize on the success of the Shrek franchise by seeming indistinguishable, they're well on their way to achieving that goal.

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