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From the Ice Age to the future!
Commedia dell'arte has a long-standing retroactive relationship with animation. Well before animation redefined the rules of reality and what could be physically accomplished in it, commedia was stretching theatrical and comedic expression to the farthest reaches of its limits - at least, that could be done in a live performance. Also, commedia was famous for not switching up the characters while switching up the situations around them, defining stock character types that could be called upon and identified in all commedia bits. This, of course, ties very neatly into both fairy-tale story construction (for which much of the feature animation world is renowned) and in theatrical short-subject cartoon series (where characters like Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck are constants in a consistently-morphing world). Commedia dell'arte, from a storytelling perspective, is practically animation's most direct forebear. |
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The reason I bring this up for my review of Blue Sky's newest film Robots is because that the film made me reflect on this fact more than any other animated film that I've recently seen, and that's because Robots is practically all lazzi - the Italian term for commedia "bits" and scenes. Many animated films work in a lazzi-esque fashion, it's true, but rarely do you see a film so steadfast on making everything not just funny, but based around some sort of funny situation. What's the distinction here? Well, take a movie like The Lion King. Simba's introduction to the world of eating bugs is a lazzi, a comic situation based upon Simba's reluctance to attempt something so disgusting heightened by the continued (and gross) zealousness of Timon and Pumbaa for their delicacies. However, when it came down to romantic scenes (Simba and Nala in "Can You Feel The Love Tonight") or dramatic climaxes (Scar and Simba fighting amongst the embers of the burning Pridelands), The Lion King let these scenes maintain a different tone, as dictated by their content. Robots, however, turns everything into a joke. The big chase scene near the film's climax might have provoked thrills had they "shot" it that way, but the way they use the magnetic cranes turns it into a comedic situation again. Funny, yes. But is that supposed to be an action scene, or a laugh?
Effectively, Robots is a pretty durned funny movie. Almost all of the jokes hit pretty squarely, and it makes for a very fun film to watch. However, the problem with Robots is that while throwing in everything but the kitchen sink in the way of comedy, they also threw in elements that frankly can't be supported by simple endless comedy. For instance, there's way too many gags for Halle Berry's Cappy character to have practically any character to her, and certainly no distinct genesis of the apparent romance between her and Ewan Macgregor's Rodney Copperbottom. Yeah, we all knew it was coming anyway, but if it's going to be done, then it'd at least be nice to see how it happens. Instead, it's just mentioned at some point out of nowhere with no particular rhyme or reason. The great commedia plays only pretended to include romance, danger, and other elements like that, and always because they would be making fun of them. A perfect example of a modern-day animated commedia piece is The Emperor's New Groove, which is wall-to-wall comedy, either based in pure lazzi or lazzi based on making fun of standard plot elements. Robots, for all its comedy, couldn't quite see its way to satirizing its own storytelling, and that is perhaps its biggest failure.
But while that may be Robots' main structural flaw, there's a lot to like about Wedge's new feature, too. For one, the animation is absolutely startling, even moreso when you consider that the last feature by Wedge was Ice Age, which didn't have nearly this amount of texture, visual confidence, and cinematic ambition. With this one feature, Blue Sky has comfortably set itself up as the third major force in computer animation between Pixar and PDI, realizing the potential viewable in Wedge ever since his Oscar-winning short Bunny. Outside of Berry (who just isn't given much), the cast is a real hoot, from Macgregor's highly believable young go-getter to Greg Kinnear's corporate shark of both neuroses and villainy to the ever-irrepressible Robin Williams. Fender may be an "old-school" variety of comic relief, but Williams practically perfected that character type 13 years ago. (Also, a shout-out to Stanley Tucci for handling his side of the dramatic stuff with the most aplomb out of anyone in the cast. He's the only one who made me really believe it.) It is a bore in the regular feature animation market to see celebrities doing voices that many career voice-actors could do better, but Robots made it work 90% of the time, and that's better than most.
I enjoyed Robots very much while watching it, but it passed through me very quickly and left very little lasting impressions. It is, again, simple and oft-effective entertainment. It's tiresome to see Pixar being the only American animation studio trying anything dramatically and emotionally risky. Surely more can be done with the medium. But that's a general complaint sent to the entire wash of animation studios in this country. My main complaint with Robots is not that it wasn't emotional enough, but that it tried to be emotional at all. If it's going to be a comedy, it may as well own up to it. For the most part, Robots does, and that's when the film is at its most entertaining, and most definitely worth a watch. But there are other scenes where you'll be sitting there thinking, "In a different film, maybe I'd care more."
***/****
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A Review by Alex Weitzman
First Published
on March 16, 2005