Robots: A Fine Example to Animators....of What Not to Do.

From Adrien-Luc Sanders,

Blue Sky Studios’ 2005 release of Robots is a film that I have put off watching for some time out of both anticipation and dread; I’d hoped that it would be the spectacular that the previews promised, but feared that the nagging sense of “wrongness” trickling in premonitory waves down my spine would prove to be correct. When sitting down to watch it this weekend, my original plans had been to enjoy it the first time through, and then on the second run make technical notes in order to write an article for you, dear readers, regarding the animation techniques used in this film.

However; while the animation in Robots is visually stunning and a wonderful example of what attention to detail can do, I think that this film can teach animators a much more important lesson: what not to do when creating an animated film/story.

That, my friends, is what we will be discussing today; I’ll try to maintain a tone free of venom, though but I can’t really be held responsible if my acerbic personality seeps through.

There are many things that can make or break an animated film, things that wouldn’t even come into play in a live-action film or that a live-action film would be able to get away with more easily: poor lip-synching, bad casting, plot holes, overused visual effects, even going so far as to make the animation too realistic to the point where the motions sit falsely and bring a sense of discomfort and unease while watching them. (The latter was one of the many things that made Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within such a disaster despite its obvious potential.)

The main crime of Robots, unfortunately, is a weak script completely unworthy of the beautiful animation that went into it. You cannot tell a story without a story to tell, and many animators forget that as they get wrapped up in the process of making things look pretty and coming up with something “cool” or “stunning’ to shock and awe the audience. The script for Robots seems to have been a secondary concern that came after planning certain visual effects; I’m not sure what the developers were thinking, but it seems to be something along the lines of, “We want this scene, this scene, and this one, and if a story kind of happens in the crevices along the way, well, hey, great!” (As evidenced by the sudden and pointless insertion of a robot in the guise of Britney Spears during a random moment in a fight sequence that made little to no sense and wasn’t even believable in the context of humor.)

An animated feature film is not a demo reel; with a demo reel you can get away with maybe two-three minutes of plotless “look what I can do!”, but when you string that together into an hour and a half of film and then have the nerve to call it a story, that goes beyond audacity and borders on insulting the intelligence of the audience.

The timing of the film was horrible; the scenes were poorly-sequenced and disjointed. The use of random bits of pop music did nothing to endear me as a member of the generation it was more than likely targeted at; in fact, it didn’t fit the environment at all, and the quick, short bursts weren’t timed well with the animation itself. The same can be said of the “subtle” attempts to interject hints of adult humor in a very childlike, simplistic world and storyline that just didn’t have the depth or complexity to handle it. Even the classic pitting of antagonist vs. protagonist was too shallow for words; you understood that the villains wanted to do something bad, but you didn’t understand the point behind it or even what they stood to gain from it other than money, which despite the conversational stresses didn’t really seem to be much of a factor in this futuristic, robotic world. It’s like an animated version of the classic spoof, “But what’s my motivation?!”, only the director’s answer is, “Sorry, kid, there is none.”

There just wasn’t enough real solidity to the story; it was replaced by too much pointless showing off or non-sequitur that someone said would be funny and therefore threw in at random without enough development. I've seen more plot in twenty minutes; they had an hour and a half, without even the excuse of commercials. The time could have been used for far more than painfully bad mimicries of Fred Astaire that were clunkier than the body parts of the character performing them; in fact, the time would have been much better spent giving more life to a group of flat, uninteresting characters who did little to compel the viewer to take interest in their plight or identify with them in even the smallest way. The best member of the cast was an ambulatory, flight-capable coffee pot invented to wash dishes and not even capable of speech beyond squeaks and whistles. That, right there, should signify a problem.

The Rant Continues
Of course, the casting of the voice-actors didn’t help. All of the famous names in the world won’t do a thing if the voices don’t suit the characters, or if the acting is flat. And let’s not forget the disastrous mistake of casting Robin Williams as Fender; while Williams has an amazing range as a live-action actor that would surprise many familiar only with his comic side, as an animation voice-actor he’s typecast and overdone. At this point his voice acting pretty much typifies a character and locks it into a certain role; congratulations, you've just created the Genie from Aladdin with a detachable crank. Every zany, goofball, spastic sidekick out there has been voiced by either Robin Williams or Billy Crystal. Enough already.