The movie presents a society of totally robotic beings along with the main plot being critical of exploitative capitalism, but somewhere along the way it just starts getting strange.
1.The protag who has innate mechanical skills is saddened to see his father working long hours as a dishwasher, so he builds a smaller robot slave to do the work for him. Now his father is being paid for his hard work, the small robot is essentially a slave who gains nothing from the labor, so right off the protag is a bigger monster than anyone.
2.The main plot involves the disappearance of a CEO under mysterious circumstances, and in his place his company is being run by the villain. The villain stops producing spare parts which the populace depends on, in their place he is selling upgrades which are prohibitively expensive and out of the reach of all but the wealthy. Unable to get parts robots will eventually break down in public spaces where they are quickly found and melted down for scrap by cleaning machines overseen by the villain’s mother. The creepyness of this is not exploited fully, what is a rich robot has a glitch out in public? Bye bye Richey the Robot! Why is the robot society OK with this arrangement?
3.The creepy incest vibes between the villain and his masculine “mother”, damn!
4.The protag’s big city friends are basically bums, they do absolutely nothing all day but sit on their metal behinds and try to run scams to make money. Pretty odd for a movie criticizing predatory capitalism to feature criminals and bums as the populace.
5.After the refusal to sell parts the protag realizes he can use his knack for all things mechanical to fix poor robots, he is thronged by poor robots desperate for his skills. BUT he refuses to charge anything seeing this as morally wrong, even though the missing “good” CEO made his fortune selling parts which the poor robots now demand free repairs!?
I can’t believe right wing media never made a huff over this movie as a health care or capitalism parable. The movie seems like a very clumsy attempt at a deeper message, it condemns predatory capitalism but also doesn’t think an in demand service that takes up the protags time should be paid. And it is wrong to be a wage slave, so you should create a tiny human slave to do your work for free!
Just to let everyone know, the title of the film is Robots, not Robots 2005. It was released in 2005. Compare grude’s description of the film to this one to get a better idea about what the movie was really like.
I included the year so that people could figure out which movie I was talking about, the title is rather common and generic.
Yes it is an CGI animated film intended for children, I wasn’t providing a plot overview so much as an analysis of the strange stuff in it. Have you seen it?
There’s always something odd in animation when they have domesticated animals acting as humans do. What on earth is up with Pluto, who acts for the most part like a normal dog does, hanging around with Goofy, who is anthropomorphised?
Canis sapiens is a different species from Canis lupus, but closely related, just like Homo sapiens is a different species from Pan troglodytes, though closely related. (It’s been argued, and I think it makes sense, that the genuses Pan and Homo should be conflated.) They probably diverged earlier, since C. lupus is still fully quadripedal while C. sapiens has developed bipedal motion, whereas in the Homo/Pan had already developed a partially bipedal gait before H. sapiens broke away and finished the job while the Pan species remained knuckle-walkers, but the concept is the same.
As for Robots, I believe the concept eluding the OP is a little thing called “satire.” With that in mind I consider it a brilliant movie, much better than Pixar from that particular standpoint.
I don’t dislike the movie, in fact I think it is wonderfully deep compared with some of the real fluff out there in CGI(my son is making me watch every CGI movie ever ). It is beautiful visually and pretty clever, I remember saying how stupid the father’s job was.
“Why would someone waste money hiring a intelligent humanoid robot to wash dishes, what a waste…oh I get it!”
Now his father is being paid for his hard work, the small robot is essentially a slave who gains nothing from the labor, so right off the protag is a bigger monster than anyone.
). It is beautiful visually and pretty clever, I remember saying how stupid the father’s job was.
Am I being whooshed?