Ok guys, now that the Spiderman marathon is over with I can get back to reviewing Animated movies, which we'll be doing for a while, so you can step away from me talking about bad ways to keep canonicity and instead you get to watch me talk about good and bad ways to do an animated movie.
This movie is one of my favorites to be honest, so I can right away and say that this is a VERY good movie, but that's not just because of bias but because it really is. It's a heart-warming story about how new and shiny things are not always better and that you should always chase your dreams. The movie is only 80 minutes long, quite expected from an animated movie really (seriously, I could watch two animated movies in the time most live actions take nowadays, what's with that?)
The movie stars Robin Williams as Fender Pinwheel, a slightly deranged weirdo trying to make ends meet in the big city of Robot city. But he's not the main character, though he is one of my favorite characters with how cooky he is.
The main character in this story is Rodney Copperbottom, voiced by Ewan McGregor. He's a very intelligent and imaginative guy with dreams and hopes and goals and has to come to terms with the harsh reality of the big city. Luckily, he doesn't break down from it all and instead fights back, kicking and proving his worth among the chaos.
Then theres the Supporting cast and boy there's a lot of them. There's Piper, Fender's younger sister, Crank, a loser/quitter who never sees the bright side to things and is always remarking with sarcasm, Cappy, Rodney's love interest, and a hundred more.
The movie was out for almost a decade now so no spoilers, though there's no twist ending. The plot is such, Rodney wants to be an inventor and work under his idol Bigwell. He even makes a pretty cool invention and heads to Robot City to prove himself. Unfortunately, the company isn't taking new inventors anymore and is being run by a greedy corporate tycoon named Ratchet. Ratchet has an irrational hatred for anything outdated and plans to destroy every poor robot that can't buy his upgrades. Because Ratchet stopped selling spare parts to fix robots because he wants them to die, Rodney takes his place, fixing the robots himself. But he can't keep them all fixed forever, so he tries to find Bigwell and get it all working.
The movie is very well written and works like a short story about the cruelty of the modern day industry as opposed to how we saw it growing up. I also love how the entire world is set up. It's almost like someone made it all out of spare parts out of their room. And also, i see this argument about flying being the best way to show off 3D animation and I have to argue otherwise. Flying isn't the best way, it's just the easiest. This movie showed that 3D animation can also be shown best when using a surfing/roller-blading style environment. With everything sliding and swinging around, it makes it an ideal candidate.
The only problem I see with the movie is that there are quite a few romance subplots and other subplots in this movie and the movie doesn't spend much time on them. I'd love to see Fender and that receptionist girl he picks up get around to seeing each other some more. Or maybe have some other side-plots happen to explore some more character? but for what I got, i got a lot of what I like. In fact, this movie is probably one of the reasons I studied engineering back in high-school.
The story is very simple and isn't intended to be complex at all. But it is VERY mature and VERY well written. The movie isn't just about the story itself, it's seeing how this world works and seeing how the culture works. Instead of drinking hot coffee in the morning, they pour hot grease over themselves. I also love just how much attention to detail this movie does. The characters in this movie actually blink a LOT. People often joke about how in cartoons the characters don't blink, but they do it a LOT here and it just adds to how amazing this movie is.
It also has a very nice assortment of songs that work very well to set the tone of the scene. I especially love Tom Waits's Underground, which is the best song to ever play in a factory/hell setting like it is.
The movie did great critically and even got nominated for a few awards, though some critics argued that the story felt like it came off the assembly line. I don't exactly disagree with that, but the story is still very nice and good and definitely has a meaning that hasn't really been told as of late nowadays. Still, a great movie and you should all watch it.
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