Give Fox’s young computer animation unit credit, they may not have the vision of Pixar but they are rapidly improving the quality of their animation. Ice Age was an entertaining movie but it looked a bit cheesy. Robots, on the other hand, looks fabulous, but is pretty damn bland otherwise. Judging by the trailer for Ice Age 2, they are preparing to make another massive leap forward in the complexity of their animation. Hopefully it has a decent story to go along with it.
The story is your basic rags to riches stuff. Young inventor Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) heads off to Robot City to show off his stuff to Bigweld (Mel Brooks) the head of the biggest maker of robot parts. Sadly, Bigweld has been shuffled off into retirement by vicious new CEO Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) and the new plan is to no longer make parts for old robots. The new way of things is to either upgrade or just die out. Rodney starts out repairing old robots and eventually works his way up to leading an armed revolt. I’ll stop there but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out where this movie is going at any point. The creativity pretty much stopped after the visuals. Not much was left for the story. Okay, none actually. This is a perfectly formulaic and predictable story.
One of the big selling points of the movie was the appearance of Robin Williams as the battered robot Fender. It is a part very much in the same vein as that of the Djinni in Alladin. Much as I generally like Williams, this part is just too predictable for him. He keeps popping up to add a couple moments of highly rehearsed hilarity to the proceedings. Yawn. Try again with some situations the man can really riff off of rather than this generic crap.
Looking cool just isn’t enough. My three year old son, who the night before cheerfully sat through that big turkey Chicken Little, was demanding I put something else in the DVD player after fifteen minutes of Robots.
- This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it will watch virtually anything to make his son happy. Well, maybe not The English Patient, but that’s about… no, let’s add Magnolia to that list while we’re at it.
