Have you ever seen Robots? Not the generic mechanical creations; I mean the 2005 movie starring Ewan McGregor as the voice of the main character, accompanied by an absurdly star-studded supporting cast.
It seems so obscure, to me, especially since I'm pretty sure my family got it, for the first time, from Blockbuster Video. It had a theatrical release, apparently! Yet I know for sure I did not see it in theaters (and I was definitely old enough for my parents to take me to see kid movies in theaters; I’d seen The Incredibles the year before). Theater or Blockbuster Video aside, it was a part of my childhood.
I remember giving myself headaches at the most inconsequential part of the very first scene of the movie: the main character’s hometown is called “Rivet Town,” and I had no idea what a rivet was, so my brain was fiercely correcting it to “river” while being unable to rectify it with what my eyes clearly saw. I don’t jokingly say I got headaches. I still associate that movie with discomfort, even though I now know that rivet is a real word.
But if you read the title of this post, then you know I’m not here to complain. I recently revisited this movie (thanks to my younger brother pushing for it), and I have things to say. Nice things *gasp*!
As always, let’s start with a rundown of the plot. Full confession: for some reason, I really struggled to summarize this movie in the way I usually do, so I clipped this synopsis from Wikipedia and modified it for my purposes. I hate to have done it, but I was already late in getting this post out, and it spared me a lot of pain.
The Summary
Rodney Copperbottom is an aspiring young inventor. He idolizes Bigweld, a famous inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist whose company hires other inventors and provides robots with spare parts. Following Bigweld's inventing advice to "see a need, fill a need," Rodney develops a small, flying robot, named Wonderbot, to assist his dad, who works as a dishwasher at a restaurant. When his dad's supervisor confronts them, Wonderbot malfunctions and wreaks havoc in the kitchen.
To help his dad pay for the damages, Rodney decides it’s time to move to Robot City, hoping to present Wonderbot to Bigweld Industries. Upon his arrival, Rodney is ejected from Bigweld Industries by the company's current head, Ratchet, who, in Bigweld's absence, has stopped producing spare parts and inventions in favor of expensive "upgrades," thereby "outmoding" robots who are unable or unwilling to pay for them.
After failing to get into Bigweld Industries, Rodney befriends Fender, an outmode he met at the train station. Fender takes him into Aunt Fanny’s boarding house populated by other outmodes, including Fender’s sister, known collectively as the "Rusties."
After repairing Fender, word of Rodney's mechanical prowess spreads, and he is hailed as a local hero after he and the Rusties fix outmodes throughout the neighborhood, although they are eventually unable to cope with the demand due to the spare part shortage. Hoping to enlist Bigweld's help, Rodney and Fender infiltrate
the Bigweld Ball – where Bigweld usually makes an appearance – only for Ratchet to announce that Bigweld will not attend. Enraged, Rodney publicly berates Ratchet, who orders his security team to eliminate him. Cappy, a Bigweld Industries executive opposed to Ratchet's plans, rescues Rodney. Fender is captured by a Sweeper, a vehicle that collects scrap metal and outmodes, and taken to the Chop Shop where he discovers Ratchet's plan to destroy all outmodes and reduce them to ingots for his upgrades.
Meanwhile, Rodney and Cappy fly [in a vehicle] to Bigweld's mansion, where they eventually find Bigweld and tell him what has been going on. Bigweld reveals Ratchet's greed and business sense dwarfed his idealism in the management of Bigweld Industries, and tells Rodney and Cappy to leave. Crushed, Rodney calls his parents and plans to return to Rivet Town. Rodney’s dad encourages him to fight for his dreams, or he will spend the rest of his life regretting it. Fender returns upon escaping from the Chop Shop and reveals Ratchet's plot. Rodney rallies Cappy and the Rusties to stop them. They are joined by Bigweld, who has regained his resolve after realizing how much he and his ideals meant to Rodney.
After the final showdown, Bigweld retakes control of his company, promising to make spare parts available to everyone. Later, he holds a public ceremony in Rivet Town, where he nominates Rodney as his new second-in-command and eventual successor. Rodney provides his ailing dad with new replacement parts and an instrument to fulfill his dream of being a musician.
My Thoughts
The core message of the film is a good one for children and adults alike to learn and remember: old or young, rich or poor, whether you have a face that could win you everything in life, or a face that could cost you everything in life, you can succeed through hard work and kindness. And other positive messages are sprinkled everywhere.
Rodney’s parents are supportive of their son’s talent and goal, but they offer wisdom alongside that support. They don’t promote reckless spontaneity; they keep Rodney grounded, while releasing him to grow up and be a man.
Rodney associates with and repairs crummy robots and stands by them. Throughout the movie, Rodney tries to get a hold of Bigweld to show him his invention (Wonderbot) and be accepted as an apprentice. Once he finds out about Ratchet’s dastardly plan, his search for/desire to see Bigweld reemerge grows more desperate, not solely for his own benefit, but for the robots that are being reduced to scrap metal by Ratchet. He’s sure Bigweld is the only one who can help them, to the point that he party-crashes an event called the Bigweld Ball to try and see its namesake. When Bigweld doesn’t show up, and instead Ratchet is headlining the thing, as usual, Rodney confronts him, bitterly spitting out [after Ratchet accuses him of party-crashing], “Yeah, that's right, and I had to put all this junk [a disguise] on in order to get in here so that I could tell Bigweld that you are outmoding millions of bots. And I know, because I spend all day fixing them!” As a kid, I always thought he was burnt out and mad at life for all the robots he had to repair when what he was trying to be was an inventor. Watching it now, I realized that he’s not bitter about fixing robots. Not at all. He loves that he has a useful talent; he’s able to see a need in society/people’s lives and fill it—just like Bigweld said! What he is upset about is how he feels like the only line of defense, and he’s powerless to stop the enemy’s advance. He feels like the only one putting Bigweld’s “Whether you’re made of new parts, old parts, or spare parts: you can shine no matter what you’re made of” into practice, even though many like it in concept.
It’s anti-corporate agenda! That’s something anyone can get behind, right? It’s so on the nose, but it cracks right open the entirety of corporate marketing, and I love it.
In Aunt Fanny’s boarding house, Rodney, for the briefest of moments in the whole of the movie, lay in his tire hammock and broods. He’s avoided calling his dad because he feels like a failure in Robot City because he hadn’t met Bigweld and become an inventor instantly. Fender reminds him that there’s always a new day. Instead of brushing Fender off and/or wallowing, he comes out of his funk and joins Fender in arm farts. He may not have succeeded by his ridiculously high standard of success, but he has friends. On his very first day, no less.
Rodney’s solid ethics inspire everyone he comes in contact with, whether it be the friend group he associates with regularly, or the bots he fixes one time. He even inspires a jaded Bigweld—his personal hero!—to do the right thing by simply sticking to Bigweld’s ideals better than Bigweld himself did. Everyone who crosses paths with Rodney ends up better for it.
The ending, though partaking in the dance party trope (where kids movies that don’t know how to end just…have a dance party), shows Rodney’s dad getting to follow his dream of playing trumpet…and he kind of sucks at it, but the others around build on his “junk (jazz/funk),” as Fender calls it, and make something listenable out of it. I think, even though it is an excuse for a dance party, you can extract something a little deeper about it if you want to: you don’t need to succeed the first time, and beauty can be made out of imperfection when you have a community that wants to see you succeed.
The animation is beautiful. It looks like you could reach out and touch it. Mind you, this is animation from 2005, and the intricacies and textures look like you could interact with these characters if you transported them to the real world. The character design is unique and charming. You could maybe nitpick the logic of the character design--Why is there no consistency? Why don’t siblings even bear a family resemblance? When you have full control over your appearance and that of your offspring, how do you choose [fill-in-the-blank]? But for how they function in the vacuum of a movie, everyone stands apart, as they should, and designs cleverly incorporate metal parts we interact with in our world often.
The score is surprisingly good, it has solid motifs, is both cheery and dramatic when it needs to be, and feels wonderfully tinkery for all the inventing that is a focus of the movie. But it’s scored by John Powell, the same guy who did the music for How to Train Your Dragon, so maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised.
I’ll close with some grounding thoughts: Robots is not a perfect movie. If you’ve seen it and you’re scratching your head reading this, wondering if we watched the same movie, know I’m not blind to this movie’s deficiencies. The editing is choppy, it leans a little too heavily on juvenile humor (though the Britney Spears sequence was criminally short, and I will die on that hill) and oddly placed pop culture references. These elements hold it down from being a truly great movie. But here’s the thing: if some of those kinks would have been worked out, I actually think it could have been a truly great movie. Those kinks were not worked out, but even so, it has so much heart. So much good will and creativity. It’s not insufferable and shortsighted the way so many movies made just for kids are.
It’s on my list for future rewatches. I hope it’s on yours, too.
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