Starring Ewan McGregor, Greg Kinnear, Robin Williams, Stanley Tucci, Halle Berry, Mel Brooks, Amanda Bynes, Drew Carey, Paul Giamatti, Jim Broadbent, James Earl Jones
Written By: Ron Mita, Jim McClain
Directed By: Chris Wedge, Carlos Saldanha
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Buy on Amazon.com link

I wanted to see Robots but I never got the chance, or just didn’t feel like seeing a movie with a bunch of 4 year olds. Crying and talking in the theater, yeah not a good movie going experience. Blue Sky Studios are the ones that did this movie, same folks who brought you Ice Age, and while I was impressed with the animation, the story really falls flat.

The movie is about a small town robot named Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who’s a young inventor. Rodney travels to the big Robot City in hopes of becoming an inventor and working for the big time inventor of the city, Big Weld (Mel Brooks). Rodney finds out Weld is missing and a new, shinier robot named Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) is taking over the business. He’s trying to replace all the old robot parts with new exoskeleton suits, which cost a lot of money. Rodney and a group of old robots known as Rusties rise up against Ratchet and try to find out what happened to Mr. Big Weld.

I thought the animation of the movie was incredible. The cities were jaw dropping, the texture on the robots looked realistic, but still cartoonie. Some of the robots weren’t exactly appealing to the eye, kind of outright ugly but I guess you had to show different types of robots. Even though the animation looked great and the film looked nice on DVD, I just felt really bored with the movie. It might have been I was super tired and fell asleep while watching this, but I just felt the characters and story weren’t as strong as a Pixar movie. I usually like Robin Williams in these wacky roles but he just wasn’t that funny to me in this. Robin Williams a robot, he should have learned his lesson with Bicentennial Man. All the actors were kind of blah with their performances. Just nothing really stood out as outstanding or funny to me in the movie. I think Pixar has risen the quality of movies, with everything from story to character development to the look of the movies. I just don’t think Robots comes close to Pixar movies, perhaps if they concentrated on the story and characters more. Just seeing a movie about a robot inventor isn’t very interesting to me. How much a Robot inventor who takes over the world and kills all the humans with intergalactic weapons he makes? Eh that sucks too.

There’s a bunch of neat extras to watch if you liked the film. There’s a few deleted scenes, which weren’t that great but you can find out why they were in cut in the commentary of the scenes. There’s a look at the making of Ice Age 2, which I still haven’t seen the full movie of the first one. There’s some other extras on here like the original robots test, some dance arcade thing, audio commentary, and character profiles with behind the scenes look at the actors doing the voice overs and being interviewed about their characters. There’s lots of things to check so I didn’t get to everything on the DVD.

I’m sure little kids will get a kick out of this movie, or people not as critical as I am to animation movies. I felt the film was kind of boring and lacking in story & character. The only thing I thought was good was the animation and look of the movie. But overall, I was generally disappointed with Robots. I’d say rent this if you haven’t seen the movie yet, if you liked Robots, than this DVD is worth buying.

Features:
“Aunt Fanny’s Tour of Booty” Animated Short
Inside Look at the Making of Ice Age 2
Xbox Exclusive Multi-Player Racing Game
Set-Top Games
Commentary by Director Chris Wedge and Producer William Joyce
Technical Director’s Commentary/Animator’s Commentary
Discontinued Parts (deleted scenes) with Optional Commentary by Chris Wedge
The Original Robots Short (original short that sold the movie to the studio)
“You Can Shine No Matter What You’re Made Of”
The Blue Man Group Featurettes
Character Bios

Audio:
ENGLISH: Dolby Digital 5.1 CC
ENGLISH: DTS 5.1 CC
SPANISH: Dolby Digital Surround
FRENCH: Dolby Digital Surround

Video:
Widescreen 1.85:1 Color (Anamorphic)

Subtitles:
English, Spanish

Favorite Scenes: when Rodney and Fender go in that ball machine thing to the city and the end battle thing.
Rating: PG
Running Time: 89 minutes
Extras Rating:
Overall Rating: