I've watched a few episodes of Rolly Polly Ollie with my little sister, and when I sat down to start watching Robots, it looked like I was in for more of the same. Rolly Polly Ollie is a fairly sedate children's show, CGI animated with robots as the characters. Robots started in much the same vein, with a quaint little village of robots and talking appliances.

From there it quickly diverged. The main character, I think his name was Ratchet or something.. he decided to go to the big city and pursue his dream of being an inventor. His dad saw him off with a few fortune cookie sentimentalities, and off he went. All a bit vapid compared to contempary CGI movies like The Incredibles, but still, tolerable.

After he arrived in Robot City, Robin Williams entered the picture. The mugging for the camera started immediately. Williams's voice tends to grate after an hour and a half, especially when the film has no plot to distract you, and there is, it seems, never more than five seconds of sustained silence. I get the impression that they hired about 20 big name voice actors and then had to figure out how to use all of them.

The animation in this film (don't get me wrong) is spectacular. Everything is whizzy. There are visual gags galore, and pop culture references in abundance.

So, why does this approach work for the Shrek films and not for this? Because while Shrek is a parody of superficial moralizing, Robots is a movie that moralizes without ever really offering anything in the way of story.

Shrek is a guilty pleasure and Robots is a boring techni-color kaleidoscope with built-in speakers.

Robots tries to convey a powerful moral message (about class struggle, incidentally), and at the same time maintain a kind of Shrek-style giddiness. It fails.

It would all be so much more tolerable if Robin Williams would just shut his mouth now and again.

One bright spot: the animated short preceding the film was hilarious. That little squirrel character from Ice Age was back, and up to his old antics. They should have run that at the end, and maybe I would've left in a better mood.