‘Robots’ Dazzles, Dazes
Like a Well-Oiled Machine

By Olivia Farrow (March 17, 2005)

Picture this: A bunch of misfits are trying to go to sleep in an urban home in some distant city in the future. What are they doing to wind down? They make fart jokes. Can you guess who makes the biggest fart? The lady with the butt the size of a car.

Now, scratch that part about those misfits being human misfits. In this movie, there are no humans. Only machines.

Robots, the new movie from the makers of Ice Age, explodes on screen in a metallic, somewhat rude, zippy tone as we see the main character, Rodney Copperbottom, grow up in a world where everyone including him, is a robot. Yeah, I guess that’s a little self-explanatory. Let’s dig in deeper, shall we?

Rodney Copperbottom is an inventive kid robot that grows up in a family of where "follow your dream" stories are spouted out from his dad, a robot who works as a dishwasher. He even has a dishwashing machine stuck to his stomach for practicality. But what does Rodney dream of becoming? An inventor.

As Rodney grows up to be something other than a child robot, we see him invent this ugly little gizmo that can buzz around and pick extremely large things up, like a ladybug on steroids. So, an adult Rodney, voiced by Ewan McGregor who doesn’t sound like his Scottish self but still does his part, sets off to the big city to get a patent from the big guy company of products that supposedly listens to new inventors called Bigweld, run by Bigweld, voiced by Mel Brooks. Does Rodney get an interview and the movie’s over? What do you think? Right. He doesn’t.

Wait a sec. Let’s rewind a bit, for there’s about a billion subjects one could discuss in a decent 140 minute version of this movie that this computer-animated movie mentions but instead was crammed into 90 minutes, so everything is condensed. This big city consists of robots that are fire hydrants voiced by Jay Leno, a gate guard voiced by Paul Giamatti, (the guy from Sideways) and to drop a few other names, Dianne Wiest and James Earl Jones. One could write a paper on how many darn actors voiced for this thing, because there are dozens. Really.

So one of these robots helps Rodney out, or at least tries to by attempting to show Rodney the city. His name is Fender, the lovable, outdated robot, voiced by Robin Williams. Now that I typed this name, we all know that the reason his character failed to help out Rodney is because Fender gets hit by a giant hammer and is shot across the city, because Fender is simply Robin Williams. It says "HI, I’M ROBIN WILLAIMS" all over his goofy, red metal face, and this is good, because this guy can really play a very funny robot. He’s even willing to have his character dress in "Cha-Cha heels." That’s commitment right there.

So after Rodney gets booted out of the invention headquarters, we learn that Bigweld has been dealing with some new management, a titanium character with lots of oil, Ratchet (Greg Kinnear). This guy is like a Jaguar of a robot, and is trying to get rid of all old parts for robots when they break, so only the rich robots can be repaired because there will only be shiny and expensive parts available. What happens to the broken old robots? They’re sent to the hellish scrap dump, operated by Ratchet’s mommy who looks like a robotic version of Satan, voiced by Jim Broadbent, yeah, the Oscar-winner decided to do a voice over for a role of a mom. Don’t worry, it’s still funny.

The discouraged Rodney is kicked out of Bigweld headquarters and comes across Fender and his band of outdated robots again, who are under threat because of the lack of affordable parts, and we get to have the kiddie jokes that remind you that this is actually a kid movie. You know, the fart jokes, the big butt jokes, and yes, the "break into Britney Spears dance sequence" joke. Why do you think this is a bad thing? Don’t be stupid! Every ne loves a good fart joke once in a while. There’s nothing like giggling along with the 6-year-old girl in the row behind you because there’s a cross-dressing robot on screen. That’s what makes Robots so fun to watch: there’s fart jokes, subtle adult jokes, a decent plot, a bizarre setting, and an entertaining chase scene, parody scene, battle scene, and of course, a "surfing on dominos" scene.

Just make sure you drink two cups of coffee and have some quality aspirin in your pocket: you’re gonna need them to stay with what those robots will do next.