The History of "Robots"

This edition of The History of... is about an animated movie that I have a pretty complicated history with.

I first found out about Blue Sky Studios' Robots when my family went to see Shark Tale in theaters. In the lobby, there was a banner featuring the characters from the movie. And... uh, to be honest, the characters freaked me out*. Not the villains, who are supposed to be a bit creepy, I mean the good guys. I'm not sure why, they just DID. So as a result, I avoided the film for years. Learning that the DVD had a short film starring the character with a large posterior called Aunt Fanny's Tour of Booty didn't exactly put the film on my "to-watch" list either.

I started warming up to the film after hearing people praise it online and watching the Blockbuster Buster's (extremely negative) review of it. That was, I think, 2014. It took me until 2022 to actually sit down and watch the film for myself. And y'know what? It was pretty good! It's no Ice Age, but what is? I feel silly for avoiding the film for so long now, honestly.

So, to make up for my misjudging the movie, let's take a deep dive into its production process and history. I normally only do this for films that were box office bombs, which Robots wasn't, but apparently there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff to talk about and the film's a Cult Classic, so what the heck?

Concept art of Rodney's parents building him.

So how did Robots get started? Well, instrumental in the film's creation was its producer, William Joyce - no stranger to working with animated robots, as he also created Rolie Polie Olie. He first became aware of Blue Sky Studios' work when he saw Joe's Apartment. Remember that movie? It wasn't animated. It was about a guy named Joe who moves into an apartment that he discovers is filled with friendly talking cockroaches. Blue Sky Studios animated the cockroaches for the movie.

In the book The Art of Robots, William Joyce said, "They created a Busby Berkeley-style dance number featuring cockroaches. It was incredibly inventive and broad, yet completely believable, and I thought, 'If these guys can be this original, funny, and clever, I've got to see what else they can do.'" Thus, he met up with Chris Wedge and they began developing an adaptation of his 1993 book Santa Calls. A test animation of that was produced, but nothing came out of it.

I think I've actually read this book. I found it at a local library.

So instead, they started thinking about robots. They didn't have an idea for a story and characters yet, they just thought it'd be cool to have a film with an all-robot cast. "When we started to draw them, or even look at the pop culture history of robots, the only robot that was really interesting to look at was the robot from Metropolis. Everything else was basically a soup can," William Joyce said. They went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which was having an exhibition about robots, and that gave them the inspiration not to do "what everybody thinks as the [look of the] future", but something "deeper" and "simpler". They started looking at machines.

Here's the best way I could put it: y'know how, in my Did You Know? post about WALL-E, I mentioned that Andrew Stanton said they wanted to "play with both really high-end technology and really low technology"? His exact words were, "WALL-E, I always call a tractor, EVE, I always call sort of like a Porsche. She's the highest, most expensive, no expense spared kind of project that the Buy 'n' Large corporation could use to make a probe droid... WALL-E is much more 'nuts and bolts' and you can kind of get how he works from afar." The filmmakers of Robots wanted the characters to be less EVE and more WALL-E. Basically, everything in the movie looks like it was made from household appliances. Rodney resembles an Evinrude outboard motor, one building looks like Chris Wedge's waffle iron, and another is a coffee pot.

Concept art for Rodney.

As the film's art director, Steve Martino, put it, "In the typical cartoon, you'll have a jet-propelled robot, and all his mechanical apparatus is hidden. All you'll see is smoke as the robot takes off. We thought it would be more fun to strip away the coverings and show the real mechanics. So if somebody is going to fly, put him in a pod, spring-load it, and fling him across the city. That way the audience gets to see the setup, the anticipation, and the result."

The robot world was organized into three distinct sections based on three distinct periods of technology: the steam era, the combustion era, and the modern era. The steam era, based on the Industrial Revolution, is the Chop Shop. The combustion era, based on early automobiles and engine-driven objects of the twentieth century, is the neighborhood where Fender and the Rusties live. The modern era, with its streamlined materials and the mechanisms mostly hidden under composite metal, is Bigweld Industries and the robots who run it.

After that, the search began for the film's writer, someone who "worked from character first". They eventually read the play Fuddy Meers and thought that its writer, David Lindsay-Abaire, would be a good choice. Chris Meledandri, one of the higher-ups at Blue Sky, said, "David was the one that really got our Robots story started. He wrote a sweet, funny draft that nailed a lot of the tone I had in mind for the movie." Specifically, Chris wanted the film to be a musical with the tone of a 1930s screwball comedy. David Lindsay-Abaire watched those movies, came up with a lot of funny lines, and even wrote a song. Eventually, however, it was decided not to make the film a musical. Blue Sky wouldn't make their first musical until Rio. David was joined by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. While they previously worked on City Slickers and A League of Their Own, this was the first animated film they wrote for.

Concept art for Rodney's arrival in the creatively named Robot City.

It's not easy creating an entire world from scratch. Chris Wedge said, "It was very intimidating at the beginning, because for a long time we had no idea what the limits of the world were and how fantastic we'd be able to make it. But as the work collects, the movie world starts to talk back to you. It's really a process of discovering things. You wade into the pool first, and then everyone jumps in."

So, who was the hardest character to design? Believe it or not, Rodney. According to William Joyce, it took two years for them to get his design down. As he put it, "He's an amiable ordinary fella, he's not Arnold Schwarzenegger and he's not Tom Cruise. We didn't want him to be too muscular or perfect. We wanted the audience to be able to put themselves in his shoes instantly and easily." Cappy and Ratchet were pretty hard, too.

Concept art for Piper.

Aside from that, designing the characters was pretty easy. ANIMATING them was another story. "This is the hardest thing I've ever animated," animation supervisor Mike Thurmeier lamented. "You don't get anything for free. The models look great as static images, but there's no flab jiggling around or tails and ears to follow through. You have to work incredibly hard to get a really good expression or mood." They wanted to make the robots really feel like they were made of metal but still have them be warm and expressive. Using that old technique of squash-and-stretch was difficult, for instance, because metal doesn't squash and stretch much at all. Early animation tests just looked too stiff and mechanical. "We knew we had to find a way to break the rules without breaking the character," co-director Carlos Saldanha explained. To help with that, the riggers built hidden extension rods into the characters' arms, legs and spines, allowing the characters to make goofier poses without making it look like metal was stretching.

Giving the robots detailed textures was hard, too. The traditional method of texture mapping, where 2D images are painted and then put on the 3D models, wasn't working, so they developed a new procedure to create a multi-level texture - for example, a core metal base topped by corrosion, primer, paint, and oxidation. To create the Chop Shop workers, the filmmakers created libraries of existing body parts that could be mixed and matched to create "Franken-bots".

Here is the original animation test for the movie (the director character here had his character design reused for Jack Hammer in the movie):

Robots was first announced to the public at the American Museum of Natural History's IMAX theater in June 2003. In addition to Ewan McGregor, Halle Berry, Mel Brooks, Drew Carey, Amanda Bynes, Stanley Tucci, Jim Broadbent, Dianne Wiest, Harland Williams, Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Giamatti, and Dan Hedaya, it was also mentioned that D.L. Hughley, Jamie Kennedy, and a pre-Modern Family Sofia Vergara were among the voice cast. I don't know which characters they were supposed to voice, or why they wound up leaving the film. There was also, strangely enough, no mention of Robin Williams or Greg Kinnear - maybe they joined the film after that?

"[Joyce's stories] have a golden era of Hollywood nostalgia to them," Chris Wedge said. "The robots aren't futuristic or spacey transformers. They ooze personality and personify objects that we know in our world, whether a car, an outboard motor or a washing machine."

I watched the DVD commentary of the film to see if it gave more information about the film's development that wasn't online, but there wasn't a lot. I did find out a couple things, though. For instance, at one point the film's plot was apparently going to be "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets The Three Musketeers meets Robin Hood", but with robots. Also, Rodney's name was "Dart" for a while.

Concept art for Fender, Crank, Diesel, and Lug.

John Powell was brought in to do the film's score (he would go on to do the scores for several other Blue Sky films). The filmmakers told him that they wanted to have the music sound like it was being done by the "Robot Philharmonic". "Part of the trick of putting a movie together with a theme like this... is to try and make everything feel connected," Chris Wedge explained on the DVD commentary. So instead of strings and violins, they used brass instruments. And who was brought in to help John with the score? Blue Man Group! Remember those guys? I think they're still a thing, but they were super-popular in the 2000s. Fitting that they were involved, seeing as they're something that freaked me out a lot when I was younger too (no offense to any members of Blue Man Group reading this).

Some of the music heard in the movie was replaced after scenes were done, though - apparently the higher-ups at FOX wanted more pop songs in the film.

I don't remember THIS scene being in the movie.

Since there are a lot of comedic actors in the movie, there was a lot of ad-libbing. ESPECIALLY with Robin Williams. Y'know the scene where Rodney and Fender try to sneak into the Bigweld Ball, and Fender is posing as the strangely-accented valet of  "Count Von Brokenzipper"? Robin did the scene about eight times, in eight different dialects. Fender's iconic "Singin' in the Oil" song was ad-libbed by Robin as well.

Perhaps the hardest part of making the film was the editing process. Apparently, there is a director's cut, but it's never been released. Among the stuff that got cut was some more development for Cappy and Lug, an extended version of the scene at the Bigweld Ball, there was an entire character cut out of the film, too - Dr. V. Needle, a mad scientist robot who was going to give Bigweld a lobotomy under orders from Madame Gasket.

A screencap of Dr. V. Needle.

To promote the movie, there were, of course, tie-ins. The first one to sign on was Sunbeam - if you bought a specially-marked Sunbeam toaster oven, toaster, mixer or iron, you could get a toaster oven that imprinted Piper's image onto your toast, or a cookie cutter in the shape of Rodney. There was also a contest where kids ages five to sixteen could write an essay about a hypothetical invention that could make things easier for their family, with the grand prize being a four-day trip to New York City, five hundred bucks, a tour of Blue Sky Studios, and the chance to meet the film's director. Robots also got its own cereal, and you could get toys of the characters in boxes of Kellogg's cereals and Burger King Kids' Meals. There were Robots Pop-Tarts, U.S. Postal Service put Rodney and Fender on its cancellation stamp, there was even a limited time flavor at Cold Stone Creamery called "Rodney Copperbottom's Crazy Crackling Cotton Candy Concoction".

I never ate these, so I have no idea how they tasted.

Unlike with Quest For Camelot, all that promotion paid off. The film made $262.5 million dollars on a $75-80 million dollar budget. Reviews were mostly positive. The main reason for Robots' obscurity is that, unlike Ice Age or Rio, it never got a sequel. An article from around the time that the film was released on DVD claimed that Chris Wedge was considering doing a sequel, but nothing came out of it. Probably for the best, honestly... Blue Sky's sequels were not their best work. I often find myself wishing that Ice Age had just been a standalone film.

If you can find Robots on a streaming service, give it a watch. You'll have a good time.

Sources:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20210418223204/https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/06/10/foxs-robots-revealed
- https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/robots-pushes-animation-envelope-20050916-geirtp.html
- https://www.chiefmarketer.com/robots-the-movie-brings-150-million-in-promotional-tie-ins/
- The Art of Robots

* I know, it's tremendously ironic that I thought Robots had creepy character designs while I was in the lobby waiting to go see Shark Tale. Nothing in Robots is as creepy as Will Smith Fish.

Did You Know? - Thirty Fun Facts About the "Ice Age" Franchise

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

For this second edition of Did You Know, I'd like to talk about a movie called Ice Age.

The very first feature-length film to be made by Blue Sky Studios, Ice Age focused on a woolly mammoth, a giant ground sloth, and a saber-toothed tiger teaming up to return a human baby to its tribe as the Ice Age approaches. I've loved Ice Age ever since I was younger... and by "Ice Age", I mean the first one. The second one sucks. The third one was okay. The fourth one was bad too. Haven't seen the fifth and I plan to keep it that way. I believe that the first film should've just been standalone, but the sequels haven't stopped me from loving it. I seem to be alone in that department, though.

As a tip of the hat of sorts to the first film and the talented folks at Blue Sky Studios, this edition of Do You Know? focuses on the Ice Age franchise. Be they behind-the-scenes facts, hidden details, bloopers, or just weird coincidences, we're going to talk about 'em. Let's get started!

1) The first movie was originally going to be traditionally animated and directed by none other than Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. After Titan A.E. (which coincidentally ALSO had John Leguizamo voicing one of the characters) bombed, the project was offered to Disney, but they turned it down. Then Blue Sky Studios was given the film. The rest is history.

2) Before Ray Romano was cast, Ving Rhames and James Earl Jones were considered for the role of Manny. Albert Brooks was also offered the part.

3) John Leguizamo tried about thirty different voices for Sid. After watching a documentary about sloths, John learned that they stored food in their mouths and was inspired to give Sid a lisp.

Concept art of Manny and Sid.

4) A female sloth named Sylvia (voiced by Kristen Johnston of 3rd Rock From the Sun fame) was to appear in the first film. She was essentially Sid's stalker. She was cut because, among other reasons, she made Sid come across as unlikeable. When I was younger, I borrowed the film's "Movie Storybook" from the library and I couldn't help but notice that Sylvia was in it.

Here is Sylvia. Repulsive, isn't she?

5) The second film also had a character cut from it - another saber-toothed tiger named Joe Junior (not sure whether or not a Joe Senior was also supposed to appear in the film at some point). Below is a Marquette of him.

You can see him about to attack one of the possums in that
piece of concept art in the background.

6) All of the actors, at least in the first film, were encouraged to improvise as much as possible to help keep the animation spontaneous.

7) Originally, Scrat was just going to appear in the first scene (his scene was included because without it, the first sequence with snow and ice wouldn't appear until about thirty-seven minutes into the film, which would be kind of weird in a movie called ICE Age). But he was so popular with test audiences that he was given more scenes. Now he's for all intents and purposes the franchise's - and Blue Sky Studios' - mascot. They also considered having him talk, but decided against it.

8) The responsibility for animating the scene where Sid snowboards was given to animators who actually had experience snowboarding in real life.

9) Originally, Diego was going to actually die at the end of the film. Sobbing test audiences convinced them to change this and let Diego live (thank goodness cats have nine lives).

10) Ya know those drawings of the film's characters that appear during the end credits? Those were drawn by the animators' children.

Concept art for Diego and Sid.

11) Nowadays, we know Alan Tudyk best as Disney's good luck charm, lending his voice to every movie in the Disney Animated Canon made since 2012. However, before that he made his voice acting debut in the first Ice Age, showing off his range by voicing THREE characters - he's Lenny (the fat member of Soto's pack), one of the long-necked tapir-esque dudes (you know, the "How do we know it's an Ice Age?" "Because... of all... the ICE!" guys) and at least one of the dodos. He also voices characters in the second (a big animal called "Cholly") and fourth (Milton the sloth and the hunky sloth siren that Granny is turned on by) films. Neat, huh?

12) To promote the second film, Sid hosted the Fox Network's lineup for at least one night. I remember seeing one bumper featuring him asking why it was called the "Fox" Network as opposed to the "Sloth" Network.

13) Scrat was going to officially join the group in the second film, but that didn't happen.

13) Speaking of endings, the second film was originally going to end with Manny and Ellie parting ways with Sid and Diego to join the mammoth migration. The filmmakers decided to instead keep the herd together. Which, in my opinion, was a wise move.

14) Buck was originally to be voiced by Harrison Ford, but he turned the role down due to scheduling conflicts with the fourth Indiana Jones movie.

15) Captain Gutt, the fourth film's main antagonist, was originally going to be a rabbit, then a bear. Somebody theorized that an ape would be right at home swinging through the rigging of a ship, so they made Gutt a Gigantopethicus.

Concept art for Zeke (the Jack Black-voiced saber-toothed
tiger in the first film).

16) The fifth film was released on John Leguizamo's fifty-second birthday.

17) The scene in the first film where we learn Manny's backstory (the biggest "make the audience cry" scene in the movie) was originally going to be at the beginning of the film.

18) Cretaceous and Maelstrom, the creepy reptile dudes that attack the main characters in the second film, were originally going to talk. They changed this to make them more threatening. They were also originally going to be joined by a third aquatic reptile guy.

19) Ray Romano's kids voice minor characters in almost every sequel (for example, his daughter Ally voices one of the teen mammoths in the fourth movie).

20) During that scene in the first movie where Manny, Diego, and Sid walk by a UFO frozen in ice, Roshan (that's the name of the baby) does the iconic Vulcan salute from Star Trek.

How does a baby in prehistoric times know about Star Trek? I dunno, it's best we just
don't think about it too much.

21) Josh Peck and Queen Latifah were fans of the first film before getting cast as Eddie and Ellie in the sequel.

22) There was a live show based on the films called Ice Age Live! A Mammoth Adventure. I have not seen it.

23) The third film was the first Blue Sky Studios film not to be released in March.

24) It's kind of funny that the fourth film has Wanda Sykes playing a character voiced by John Leguizamo's grandmother, as they were born the exact same year.

25) There were rumors that the fourth movie would've been called Ice Age: TH4W and been about the characters getting thawed out in a modern day museum. I'm honestly really glad they didn't do that. It sounds like it would've been incredibly stupid.

26) At one point in the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid movie, the first film can be seen playing on TV at one point. A highlight of an otherwise pretty drab movie.

I remember seeing that film in theaters. It was mediocre.

27) Scrat made an appearance in a 2006 episode of Family Guy.

28) At one point, there was actually an Ice Age RIDE. In March of 2005, an attraction called Ice Age Adventure opened at Movie Park Germany in... well, Germany. The attraction featured audio-animatronics of Manny, Sid, Diego, and Scrat, as well as special effects. Alas, it closed in 2016...

29) However, an Ice Age ride still exists, but if you want to ride it you'll have to go all the way to Indonesia. At a theme park there named Ancol, there's an indoor flume attraction called Ice Age Arctic Adventures. It too features audio-animatronics and special effects.

30) Finally, it's pretty common knowledge that there was never an actual saber-toothed squirrel in prehistoric times. However, in 2011 a prehistoric animal was discovered and dubbed the "Cronopio". It wasn't a squirrel, but paleontologist Guillermo W. Rougier pointed out that it looked very similar to Scrat, saying "It just goes to show how diverse ancient mammals are, that we can just imagine some bizarre critter and later find something just like it." I've included a restoration of the Cronopio below so you can see the resemblance for yourself.

The Cronopio.

Well, there you have it. Thirty fun facts about the Ice Age franchise.