Robots: An Essay

Robots (Directors: Chris Wedge, Carlos Saldanha)

Wedge and Saldanha worked on Fox's first foray into digital animation with 2002's Ice Age. Co-written by comedy vets Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

Welcome to Digital Animation Flick #1 of a year that will be chock full of them. Robots comes packaged with a Pixar-esque "otherworld" type of story and tons of name actors supplying voices. Robots centers on young bot Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor) who has left his dad (Stanley Tucci) and mom (Dianne Wiest) to go make something of himself in Robot City, where he plans to meet inventing mogul Bigweld (Mel Brooks). Instead, he is turned away at the gate of Bigweld's building by Tim the Gate Guard (Paul Giamatti), where he finds a way to sneak in to the boardroom where hopeful boss Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) has got the soul-less corporate mentality, hoping to sell only upgrades for wealthy robots rather than fix "outmodes." Also a part of the board is sexy bot Cappy (Halle Berry), who eventually joins Rodney in trying to stop Ratchet, along with a family of bots, "Rusties," including Fender (Robin Williams), Piper (Amanda Bynes), Crank (Drew Carey), Lug (Harland Williams), and "mother" Aunt Fanny (Jennifer Coolidge).

It's Robin Williams who gets the attention, and Fender is a bot specially created for Williams' high-wire, improv-on-speed act. After the trailer, I thought he was going to annoy me, but lo and behold, he is the funniest part of the movie. The animation is, well, spectacular. Have we seen one of these digital creations not be? More kudos go to the fact that there's no wise-ass Dreamworks-style fingerprints here. It's better than Fox's awful Ice Age, which is slated for a sequel next year. However, there's a lot of pointlessness in here, mostly to show off incredible animation--there's the twisting, flying, speedy ride through Robot City, and a sea of dominoes that Rodney and Cappy get caught up in, and more. I read a review recently that talked about how many of the jokes are futuristic takes of "Flintstones"-style humor, and this is true. Yes, too, the robots get in some fart jokes as well--a scene that was fairly terrible until the following gag, in which I laughed whole-heartedly.

What can I say about the main characters played by McGregor and Berry? They're pretty pointless, too. They are characters especially made to be straight-men for gags, and to advance the story. Overall, a decent picture, which leads me to my little essay about animation.

Preface: I know that domestic figures are not the only grade of a film's performance at the box office, and know that it's worldwide where films can be made or broken--but the U.S. dollars usually give you an indication of how the movie played overall. There are exceptions, like Alexander, which made $35 million here but over $100 mil overseas (that usually goes for historical epics, anyway...still a tank job for that film overall). But, considering the U.S. dollars here, you can tell what a company backing a film is thinking when it comes to certain films.

Walt Disney Pictures had lost its grip with traditional animation after the sixties, seventies, and well into the eighties. You could argue there are some "classics" in the group following 101 Dalmatians (1961) or even The Jungle Book (1967), but there were no real Bambi-style classics in there, those that would get consideration as some of the best of all-time, until 1989's The Little Mermaid revived the animation game which would lead to a Best Picture nomination with Beauty and the Beast (1991) and box office smash The Lion King (1994). Then came the we-can-push-anything attitude with the terrible Pocahontas (1995). That year, Disney got a boost from Toy Story, the first-ever all-digitally animated film. Yes, Disney did get a couple more traditional hits in with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan, and Tarzan, but they were not considered classics by any means, and Pixar had pushed A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2 through during those same years. Those two films combined made almost as much as the other four did combined. Considering the budgets of the traditionally animated films (with Tarzan's at $150 million), and considering that the digitally-animated films were highly sought-after, it was easy to see where animation was headed.

After Ice Age, Shrek, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo came out, making nearly a billion dollars combined, the traditionally-animated (or 2-D...some of these became less and less hand-drawn) films Sinbad, Treasure Planet, and Brother Bear made a combined $140 million or so (Disney took a $100 million bath on Treasure Planet...but remember all of these figures are domestic, not worldwide, so they're a little askew), every newspaper that you picked up was hailing the "Death of 2-D Animation." No one wants to watch the "inferior" animation, forecasters were saying. Just look at the results!

Well, once again, the predictions are tremendously short-sighted. If anyone bothered to notice, the 2-D animated films had no stories, no reason to go see them. Treasure Planet, probably the biggest film in this bunch when it comes to disasters, would not have made much more money in the Little Mermaid-to-Lion King era, before Pixar. It was a mess. Same goes for all the other trash, including Warner's horrid Quest For Camelot and Dreamworks' Road to El Dorado. Now, due to the perception, all animated films coming out are going to be digital. That includes Dreamworks' Madagascar, and Disney's without-Pixar flick Chicken Little. Once this becomes the norm, digital animation is going to have to find stories, too. The reason why Pixar has been batting 1.000 is because they have great stories going along with their animation--and they are stories that usually need the digital polish. Some of these pictures, like Madagascar, really don't need it--but the perception dictates they must do it in this way. Madagascar (and not to mention Chicken Little) is going to be a really interesting test for digital animation, since it doesn't appear to be anything special, and it's going up against stiff summer competition including Star Wars Episode III. Last year, Shrek 2 was the most highly anticipated summer blockbuster--not so for this film.

And even now, Robots is performing below expectations. Hell, Robots may be the first digitally-animated film (not including Final Fantasy, that doesn't count in the discussion) to play below $100 million (domestically). It started off with $30 million, but it may very well dwindle sharply in the next couple of weeks. Eventually, maybe, people will finally understand it's not the technology so much as it is the story. The technology certainly served as a beautiful marketing tool a few years ago, but I can't say that it does anymore. If a good story, and good marketing team, got behind a 2-D feature (like, the return of traditional animation is here!) we'd see similar box office results. This goes for really any movie, to be truthful. Good stories, well marketed, well-done, it doesn't matter what effects or budget you have.

When it finally all calms down, we'll be seeing the same media outlets saying, "Well, it sure looks like digital animation has lost its luster," and so forth, and that's not the point either. It just means the product has been watered down. Digital animation was reserved for the stories that really needed it, and now the films that don't need it (or didn't need to get made in the first place) are getting the royal treatment. Which reminds me, that my next essay will be about movie stars, and how Hollywood mismanages films (and the stars themselves) due to their perception of them.