Robots is an incessantly banal tone poem of unmodulated hyperactivity. Set in a sci-fi milieu ripe for a satirical skewering of our own political, economic, and media culture, the filmmakers instead deliver a witless rendition of the Horatio Alger story devoid of either laughter or pathos. While it would be easy to accuse the studio of purposefully sanitizing the movie in order to make it go down better with the Whoppers with which it is being cross-promoted, it's far more likely that no one in a position of authority on this project possessed the basic abstract thinking skills necessary to propel the narrative into the sphere of literature.
Apart from its mind-numbing monotony, the movie is primarily distinguished by its narcissism, whereby our Hollywood filmmakers posit that in the world of robots, the greatest robot of all is...a television star. That it never occurs to Robots' creators that men who are machines might not need televisions (either because they *are* televisions, or because they are, rather, entertained by houseplants in the same way that we are entertained by machines) is illustrative of the incredibly lazy writing at the heart of this movie.
The animation itself is proficient and soulless. While the screen is always a hubbub of jittery activity, this is primarily to mask the fact that there is precious little dramatic *action* taking place. Instead what we have is a series of static dialog scenes decorated around the edges of the frame with wind-up contraptions to create the illusion that something is actually happening.
Robin Williams delivers a garish, ego-maniacal, scenery-chewing performance as the voice of "Fender" that challenges the notion that an animated film is created by the artists who draw it (on computer or otherwise). Perhaps rather than an "animated" film, Robots should simply be called a "rendered" one.
Apart from its mind-numbing monotony, the movie is primarily distinguished by its narcissism, whereby our Hollywood filmmakers posit that in the world of robots, the greatest robot of all is...a television star. That it never occurs to Robots' creators that men who are machines might not need televisions (either because they *are* televisions, or because they are, rather, entertained by houseplants in the same way that we are entertained by machines) is illustrative of the incredibly lazy writing at the heart of this movie.
The animation itself is proficient and soulless. While the screen is always a hubbub of jittery activity, this is primarily to mask the fact that there is precious little dramatic *action* taking place. Instead what we have is a series of static dialog scenes decorated around the edges of the frame with wind-up contraptions to create the illusion that something is actually happening.
Robin Williams delivers a garish, ego-maniacal, scenery-chewing performance as the voice of "Fender" that challenges the notion that an animated film is created by the artists who draw it (on computer or otherwise). Perhaps rather than an "animated" film, Robots should simply be called a "rendered" one.