nspired by weekly episodes of Bigweld's (Brooks) popular television show, young Rodney Copperbottom (McGregor) grows up dreaming about a future as a world-class inventor. Unfortunately, his folks can't afford to provide him with all of the opportunities he needs as a budding genius, so he heads off to Robot City when he's old enough and seeks success at the doorstep of Bigweld's massive corporation. Unfortunately, his erstwhile mentor is no longer in charge; rather, he's been relegated to company spokesperson and replaced by a boardroom full of oily executives.
Disillusioned by this real-world revelation, Rodney abandons his dreams and takes up with a junkyard's worth of discarded robots, including Fender (Williams), a fast-talking scavenger; Crank Casey (Drew Carey), his timid pal; Aunt Fanny (Jennifer Coolidge), who redefines "junk in the trunk"; and Piper Pinwheeler (Amanda Bynes), Fender's plucky little sister. What Rodney soon discovers, however, is that these 'bots are scheduled for the scrap heap—Bigweld CEO Phineas T. Rachet (Kinnear) plans to eliminate outdated models with a proposed series of "upgrades"—and he is the only one who can repair them.
Enlisting the help of his new pals, as well as a cute executive named Cappy (Berry) whose interest Rodney sparks, the underdog inventor adopts the role of blue-collar handyman, revives the winding-down dregs of Robot City and attempts to unseat the Bigweld Corporation from its impending monopoly of the mechanized market.
Clockwork kids' entertainment
The first half-hour of Robots amounts to little more than what audiences have seen from the earliest days of CGI animated features: cool imagery, clever ideas and the pronounced self-adulation of the folks who generated them. That said, director Chris Wedge and his team of animators almost come up with sufficiently breathtaking material to sustain this family-oriented jaunt. Among the cleverness is the literal process of babymaking, the way by which a 'bot might maintain his manicured lawn (a floor buffer) and the fairly brilliant portrayal of a robot dancing (doing "The Robot," natch) for change; as far as cool images are concerned, nothing beats the protracted, powerful but ultimately purposeless process by which Rodney and new pal Fender ride Robot City for all of its twists and turns.
Once the wheels of the plot grind into motion, however, the film actually begins to take on emotional proportions befitting the enormity of the filmmakers' conceptual vision. There are few themes among family films as tried and true—much less perennially relevant—as accepting yourself and others for who they are, and the Rodney's story gains dimension as he struggles with his place among the denizens of Robot City, and in particular against the patrician-class executives at Bigweld's company, embodied with all of the smarm and self-satisfaction that only Greg Kinnear can muster. By comparison, his blue-class buddies are as unglamorous as your parents' Oldsmobile station wagon, but just as reliable; once the film falls into the predictable rhythms of evil-vanquishing and hero-making, they're all there to learn their own lessons and employ their unconventional designs to significant comic effect.
McGregor is no stranger to acting against himself—he has, after all, completed two movies with George Lucas—but he runs through the rigamarole of idealism-disillusionment-redemption with the vigor of a kid unwrapping presents on Christmas morning. Williams, meanwhile, returns to the mania that made his Genie in Aladdin such an irresistible figure and enthusiastically accomplishes his given task, which one supposes is to squeeze every drop of entertainment value from any remaining moment of screen time not devoted to plot or character.
The final feeling the film generates, delightfully enough, is not that the voice talent elevates those clever ideas and cool images to something more than the sum of their significant parts. Rather, it's the other way around, and that's not a cinematic achievement that can be accomplished simply by reading the manual and following instructions. Robots may be designed from familiar blueprints and constructed from conventional parts, but what's ultimately built is a thoroughly original creation.
