March 10, 2005 - As 2-D animation gasps its final breath, just about every studio is launching into the computer animation market. Pixar is the bonified leader, but a few studios are catching up, little by little. With its two Shrek films, DreamWorks has probably had the best success aside from Pixar, but now Fox is hot on their tales. Ice Age was a surprise success a few years ago (an Ice Age sequel is now in production) and they have now assembled one of the largest line-ups of voice talent yet for Robots.

Directed by Ice Age's Chris Wedge, Robots features the voices of Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry, Greg Kinnear, Mel Brooks, Drew Carey, Amanda Bynes and Robin Williams. There's also an impressive list of cameo voices including Jay Leno, Dan Hedaya, James Earl Jones, Al Roker, Conan O' Brien, Terry Bradshaw and Carson Daly.

McGregor plays Rodney Copperbottom, a young starry-eyed robot who dreams of moving to the big city (called Robot City) to become a great inventor like his idol, TV star Bigweld (Brooks). Along the way, Rodney meets a zany group of robots including the ultra cute Cappy (Berry), Fender (Williams) and Piper (Bynes). Robot City is a little more complicated then Rodney first imagined, and he soon learns that becoming an inventor and meeting Bigweld is a much more complicated endeavor than he first imagined. Meanwhile, a deceptive corporation, led by its CEO Ratchet (Kinnear), is attempting to prevent spare parts from being offered to ailing robots thereby forcing everyone to buy his upgrades to look shiny and new. Now Rodney must help his friends from being sent to the scrap yard.

Robots borrows heavily from shows like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, with the robot world containing many clever twists on our own reality. In one scene, the teen robot, Piper, buffs her face to a shine. In another, Williams' Fender launches into a Britney Spears song and dance. The robots are often made up of the parts that represent their jobs, such as Rodney's father, who has a dishwasher for a body. Robot City is similar to any big city, but everything has been altered to fit in the robot theme.

	-20th Century Fox A Robot shindig!

The look of Robots is terrific. It's slick and shiny, pun intended. This is as close as I've seen any animation come to the industry-leading work Pixar has done. As everyone strives to keep up with their groundbreaking technology, Wedge and his crew seem to be getting it down. The colors are bright and extremely vivid, the characters look appealing with very fine details for each (although a little more variation in the character looks could have added to the visuals).

The voice talent of Robots is impressive, but largely pointless. Williams is very funny in certain scenes, and Carey and Brooks add a laugh or two here and there, but there is no real reason for the rest of the cast. From the looks of the list, they were probably pretty expensive to gather. Their assemblage appears to serve more towards making the ads look impressive rather than any relation to the story. In Incredibles, Pixar surprised many by casting voices such as Holly Hunter and Craig T. Nelson. They may not have been the biggest names available, but they were right for the parts.

-20th Century Fox Rodney (left) with Fender (right)

Wedge keeps the film at a strong pace through the first hour, with enough creative devices and amusing jokes to keep the film fresh, even if it is treading down the path of a fairly standard animated film plot. Robots lags a bit towards the final third and I found myself detaching a bit, intrigued more by the film's look than the story. The biggest drawback for Robots is that the plot is pretty cookie-cutter in terms of animation storylines. It's a fish out of water story where the main character, Rodney, meets a new group of friends and has to save the world from disaster. If you can't figure out where the story is going to go by that point, you probably haven't seen very many movies.

An animated film like this takes so long to make, it often seems as though the script part is a bit rushed. This is actually where Pixar's strengths lie more so than their visuals. Each one of their stories is more creative than the last, their characters are each distinctly different, and the worlds they create are completely fresh and new. In the end, Robots is visually terrific, but the story holds it back from the "classic" status of CG tales such as Toy Story and The Incredibles. All the same, Robots is cute and colorful. Kids will love it and parents will be entertained enough not to mind.

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