Made by the same people who made Ice Age, Robots moves from prehistoric animals to a world of robots and other sentient machines. The animated film tells the tale of Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor), a young hopeful inventor from Rivet Town who longs to make it as an inventor in Robot City and to meet Big Weld (a joyous Mel Brooks), head honcho of an eponymous firm and Rodney's idol.

A young person off to see a benevolent dictator who meets misfits along the way: how much more like the Wizard of Oz can the plot get? (Indeed, the Tin Man, perhaps the prototypical mechanical actor, makes a cameo in the film.) But as might be expected, the path of true invention never did run smooth: Big Weld has been absent from the helm of his firm, and in his absence, the villainous Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), egged on by his megalomaniacal mother Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), has taken over the running of Big Weld industries. Ratchet introduces - for shame! - the profit motive, thereby condemning to obsolescence the millions of robots who can't afford upgrades. Rodney thus has to team up with a ragtag bunch of misfit robots to save the day. Robots, inevitably, highlights the overarching importance of a firm's role as corporate citizen over its duty to shareholders. Or something like that - clearly in a post-Enron world rapacious corporations are the villains of choice, but it's surely a weird thing to posit that the corporation is the sole source and cure for all the world's ailments.

But enough about undertones: where Robots clearly stands out is on the surface - it's a beauty of a movie, and I only wish I could have seen it in IMAX. My chief complaint about the look of 3-D animated films has thus far been their overall sheen, which I find a bit dehumanising, but the shininess works to good effect in a film about machines. In Robots, skyscrapers gleam and the robots move with a certain mechanical grace, and the entire cityscape looks like some throwback to 50s sci-fi envisionings of the future. Indeed, the film is loaded with virtuoso visual displays - Rodney's ride into the city, in particular, is a Rube Goldbergian tour de force, leaving one literally dizzy from the view.