Partial Recall

Robots

Directed by Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha

In an interview with Gregory Solman, Warner Bros. animation artist Chuck Jones declared, "I didn't make the Bugs Bunny cartoons for children." This truth has been forgotten in the recent craze to sell animated films to ticket-buying families. The sophisticated humor that made the classic Hollywood cartoons classic (well represented in 2003's Teacher's Pet) established a level of culture-wide understanding that children could reach toward and grow into. If kids were entertained by the color and simplicity, fine. But the anarchic whimsy and cultural in-jokes were especially right for adult delectation. The best parts of the new animated film Robots continue this rarely recognized tradition of grown-ups' amusement.

Toddlers might chuckle at the odd sight of talking machines and antique-looking, jerry-built creatures, but it's unlikely that this story will speak to them as it does to adults. An ambitious, second-generation robot Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan MacGregor) takes an Oz-like journey to Robot City where he inspires other obsolete robots on to a quasi-Luddite revolt. Robots has special appeal for an older generation who can remember Erector Sets, electric trains and model cars with rubber-band motors. This film's animated imagery evokes the era of skateboards made from plywood and roller-skate wheels or sling-shot rifles fashioned from sticks, shredded innertubes and pop-bottle caps. It brings back the fascination with factory hardware and kitchen appliances that, in the digital age, seem to no longer be a privilege of childhood. (Recall that Simpsons joke where Bart pronounces "metal" as a foreign word.)

Robots recovers the childlike awe of the machine age, which is not the same as encouraging juvenilia. The film is most expressive when its animation brings a memory to life—such as Rodney's invention of a gizmo that looks like both a juice blender and an old-fashioned egg-beater that flies. (It replaces the familiar Disney-cartoon fairy that hovers around the hero like a footnote to his subconscious.) These figures resurrect the moment in history when imagination and dexterity went together. Robots creates nostalgia for the era of manufacturing—a time when a person's aspirations could link with a dream of the nation's future; when "industry" seemed to imply human participation and benefit. (No wonder Manny Farber took to painting canvases about model trains when he retired from movie criticism.)

This film's humanizing of obsolete objects is complexly affectionate. Unlike the anthropomorphic use of animals in most cartoons (like the magical "Be Our Guest" dishware in Disney's Beauty and the Beast), these items don't emulate human traits so much as they embody the warmth of human use—the personal spirit attached to a favorite pen, a fondled watch, a multipurpose pocket knife. That's why Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel's screenplay is kind of ingenious; this unpeopled world of robots, in which the future of machinery is endangered, alludes to the obsolescence of human worth and the depreciation of individuality. Rodney travels to Robot City to meet the manufacturing kingpin Bigweld (Mel Brooks), hoping to use his talent for invention. But Bigweld has been made redundant by Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) an elegant computerized robot CEO. Bigweld's egalitarian motto "You can shine no matter what you're made of" is threatened by Ratchet's slogan "Why Be You When You Can Be New?" This sly joke on make-overs (Ratchet has the computer equivalent of a six-pack) comments on the new practice that discontinues making replacement parts for customers' hand tinkering in favor of—gasp!—mandatory upgrades.

Robots' drama comes from a slight twist of both futuristic and idealistic fiction. The potential dread in this H.G. Wellsian premise stems from Ratchet's mother (Jim Broadbent), a greedy corporate wonk planning to convert Robot City into Ratchet City; she is the emasculating figure of oppression as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest fought by Rodney's gang of nonconformists. This convoluted plot exposes how Hollywood routinely traduces cartoons as kids' stuff. Such limited thinking is to blame for the genre's lame, shallow animated films made without Chuck Jones' integrity (such as the technically brilliant but thematically appalling The Polar Express).

Most recent animated films offer trite, nursery-school homilies. You can't avoid the self-righteous tone of boomers, new to parenthood, preaching at their offspring. There's a little of that when Rodney wants to leave the nest of his dishwasher and homemaker parents, but I like Robots for its resistance to being a large-scale babysitter. It's honest about the boomer impulse to make up for the lapses in their own childhood by bequeathing to the next generation the same old-fashioned items that formed their aptitude for ingenuity. Directors Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha use a visual style that mixes art deco and Jules Verne—nostalgia with a sense of adventure. Each character-figure highlights a wondrous function: cranks, sprockets, springs, screws, levers and gyros. Tools as toys. There's little rust on Rodney and his friends, but their slightly shabby appearance of worn and oxidized paint is automatically endearing. Rodney's best friend Fender (Robin Williams), a fire-hydrant-red C-3PO look-alike, introduces him to his family of appliances including Aunt Fanny (Jennifer Coolidge), whose name must be an allusion to cinema's masterwork of nostalgia The Magnificent Ambersons. (Aunt Fanny's rump is itself magnificent, an oversized vacuum-cleaner canister the size of an old car trunk.)

Something of Spielberg's A.I. can be found in the way Robots imbues its machines with feeling. There's a peculiar sense of mortality in its recall of outdated technology. The hope for a future of leisure that was epitomized by the 1939 World's Fair is connected to the mid-century modernism that Jacques Tati satirized in the then new-fangled gimmickry of his 1958 Mon Oncle. Funny metallic incidents include Rodney becoming magnetized and a chase scene atop ball bearings that becomes an accidental pas de deux—brief, inspired slapstick that you may have had to handle ball bearings to appreciate. (The joke is extended when Mother Ratchet tells her cowardly son "Grow some bolts!")

Sex is represented in Robots by plugs and sockets used as male and female restroom signs as if the entirety of human experience can be read through machines. Thus, this cartoon evokes the industrial revolution's lost possibilities. (Even a Hal 9000 joke is poignant without being sappy.) The dazzling but empty b-movie nostalgia of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow failed to evoke a volatile economy and the desperation of individuals who bond when they feel politically endangered. But in Robots' chop-shop sequence, a pulley carries our object-friends toward a furnace: a smelting inferno formed by jagged, layered, flame cut-outs. It's brilliant: Theatrical in design, not digital, it has the quality of handmade artifice like a diorama from the previous fin de siecle when artists still believed in hell.

At its best, Robots is not a kids' movie because it perfectly expresses the adult melancholy that the world has gotten away from us. Every new doohickey makes us redundant and wistful for our past proficiency. Yet the film's ambivalence is genuine—a tickling, unsettling reminder that what we now pine for is a Luddite's nightmare.