Robots

From the creators of Ice Age (a very underrated movie, so great), comes Robots, a new CGI adventure set in the world of machines, and like with almost all animated movies these days, all the characters are voiced by very well known actors, here ranging from Robin Williams to Carson Daly to Dianne Wiest.

We follow the story of Rodney Copperbottom, a small (robot) town young man going to the big city to became an inventor for the company run by his idol, the greatest inventor ever Big Weld. Rodney has invented a dishwashing gadget to help his dad at the restaurant he works for, and that's what he wants Big Weld to see.
When Rodney gets to the big city, he soon learns that Big Weld is no longer running the company, and has retired and left, and he has put Phineas T. Ratchet in charge, a robot secretly working with his evil mother on a plan to end all robots made of spare parts and get everybody to have the new (very expensive) upgrades the company is producing.
After being rejected by Phineas, Rodney searches the city looking for Big Weld, and he befriends first Cappy, a young female executive working for the company, and then Fender and his family, aka the Rusties, who are also old robots made of spare parts like Rodney.

Though the story is good, the movie's artistic aspects disappoints big time, starting with the world it's set in. Being this a new universe they had to create, I was expecting something great, but they failed. I actually can't remember anything worth commenting about from it. This is something that separates Fox from the genius at Pixar and Dreamworks, whose backgrounds and everything on screen is full of life in movies like Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and the Shreks.

The voice work also disappoints, not because is not funny, it is, but because the cast is huge but you can easily recognize a small part of it like Robin Williams (Fender), Ewan McGregor (Rodney), Mel Brooks (Big Weld), Greg Kinnear (Phineas) and Amanda Bynes, Harland Williams and Jennifer Coolidge who are part of the Rusties.
Those are just 8 of a cast of more than 20 that also includes Halle Berry who plays Cappy. She barely talks a few lines at the start and then stays quite during the whole second part of the movie even though she's onscreen. And you can't even tell that is Halle's voice.
And then major thumbs down for totally unrecognizable cameos by Drew Carey, Jim Broadbent, Carson Daly, Conan O'Brien, Jamie Kennedy, D.L. Hughley, Paul Giamatti (!!!), Stanley Tucci, Sofia Vergara and Dianne Wiest. When I saw the credits at the end of the movie I couldn't believe all those people were in the movie.
Oh, and James Earl Jones has a line, though it's taken right out off Star Wars and I don't think he actually went to record it again for this movie.

But it has Robin Williams who's really great, and it's CGI. That's the big reason this movie will make tons of money. But we have to start criticizing these animated movies of the new era, and criticizing them hard and make their creators work extra hard on them before the really horrible movies start coming to make lots of money, or (since I'm not a big Dreamworks fan) just let Pixar do them all. Remember, just because it's CGI, doesn't make it automatically great.