Last night, Jane and got fed up of scrolling through multiple streaming services trying to find something that we both fancied watching and decided to fire up the DVD drive instead and dig back into our small collection. What we picked out was Robots (2005), an animated film that tracks the quest of a small town protagonist who heads to the big city to pursue his dream of making a career as an inventor. It probably doesn’t give too much away to say that he succeeds, making friends, getting the girl and saving the world in the process.

I’d forgotten just what a brilliant film it is. It wasn’t a Pixar production (instead it came from Blue Sky Studios) but I’d put it up alongside the best of their work regarding both visual presentation and the plotting and scripting. It is helped by a strong voice cast, blessed particularly by the energising spark of the late Robin Williams doing the kinds of things he did best. I also spotted numerous homages to other films I am familiar with and I expect I missed many more.

The numbers suggest it did pretty well (estimated $75M budget and over $260M worldwide gross) but it isn’t a film I’ve heard many people talking about. If I mentioned something like Toy Story, Star Wars or Ice Age (the Blue Sky Studios series you probably have heard of), I’m pretty sure most people likely to be reading this would know those franchises but this one never made it to the franchise stage and I felt I had to qualify the title with “an animated film…”.]

Perhaps the title was too generic? Nevertheless, highly recommended for a funny, warm-hearted film that ought to appeal to a wide swathe of people.