For months now, The Kid has been really charged up to see Robots. At first I thought the previews looked kinda cool… until I saw that Robin Williams was in it.
Robin Williams is one of my favorite dramatic actors. He has that weathered everyman face, and always has a hint of sadness in his eyes. He was moving in Good Will Hunting. Unnerving in One Hour Photo. Inspiring in Dead Poet's Society.
Robin Williams also happens to be one of my least favorite comedic actors. I'm just not a big fan of that free-form, one-outrageous-thing-after-another style of his. He's very funny, but he never stops. That's a little irritating. Maybe even a little creepy. After all, when he never stops playing the comedian, you really have no idea what he's like, now do you?
So anyway, I imagined that Robots would basically be "the new Robin Williams movie." I pictured him being… well, him.
I couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised. There was just enough Robin: not too little, not too much. But the movie wasn't really his movie.
He had a significant part, but it was much more an ensemble piece than I imagined. The voice acting was almost universally solid. Strangely, the one talent that seemed out of depth was Halle Berry. Maybe it was the script, or the director, but she seemed uninspired. Her part could have been played by pretty much anyone.
Another bright note is the animation was a bit more polished than I expected. There was one scene, shown partially in the previews, where Ewan McGregor and Robin Williams are traveling in a sphere. Parts of this sequence remind me of Minority Report. Although Robots was a little better, actually. The high-speed travel scenes in Minority Report were just fine, but Robots combined the feeling of speed and precision in just such a way that it actually made me lean back in my seat a bit. During that scene and a few others I actually felt a sense of wonder. It's rare that any movie, much less an animated movie, can make me feel that.
All of my expectations were wrong. Robots is surprisingly good.