A lot of irony can be found in movies like Robots, most of which relate to their ambitions -- often, they have less of it than their own featured protagonists. "I wanted to grow up to be just like you," says Rodney Copperbottom (voice of Ewan McGregor) to his idol, a beloved inventor. And Blue Sky, the animation studio at Fox, seems to be echoing, "We want to grow up to be just like DreamWorks."

It's a shame that the makers of Robots seem trapped by the aspirations of fulfilling the generic cgi-animated kids' movie guidelines. Unlike their contemporaries at DreamWorks and Pixar, the group that brought us Ice Age feels the most content to lead the least; not to blaze its own path but to find its successes in imitating others. I wrote that Ice Age felt like a retread of Shrek and Monsters, Inc. Robots might as well be called Shark Tale but with robots instead of fish. Same goofy references to pop culture, same use of an alternate world as a pun-filled parallel of our own, same type of luckless protagonist who manages to find the will to become a somebody and do his pop proud.

However, it's still a hundred times better than Shark Tale, and that's where my "it's a shame" comment comes in. Robots is visually zippy and inventive (where Shark Tale was just ugly); one can tell the animators were full of ideas that came from somewhere interesting. The robots that populate this world are quaint, old-fashioned models that look more '50's gizmo than modern sleek. The sleek are represented as well, but they play antagonists -- we spend most of our time in the company of the crowd that look more like they were assembled from tinker toys. Even the roller-coaster scenes are based off of old toys and contraptions.

So why stick this creativity in yet another story parents and kids have seen before? It's safe, yes, but it's also not special. One interesting bit of fallout from this application of template-storytelling is how forgettable and arbitrary the characters are. We have the comic side character, Fender, voiced by Robin Williams -- because it's Williams, he dominates his screentime with his manic verbosity, and sometimes he's funny and sometimes he's not, depending on how used to Williams you are, but then think of this: that character doesn't exist for any other reason than to be Robin Williams. Take him out of the story, and barely anything would change in terms of sequence of events.

Another example is the robot Cappy, played by Halle Berry. She's one of the sleek models who is, of course, very feminine. But it looks like she's there just to be a "sexy" robot, because when we're in a new animated world, we simply must know what a sexy, feminine member of the population would look like (see also: Angelina Jolie's fish from Shark Tale). By the end of the story, she hasn't contributed much to it and simply joins the ranks of the large, interchangeable cast of good guys who essentially serve as a shapeless form of moral support to the hero.

Williams and Berry's inclusion brings up another lamentable fad in these movies -- the over-reliance on celebrity voices -- which serves to downplay any individual character the movie might possess in favor of stunt marketing. This one really takes the cake -- as the cast list scrolled up in the credits, I could recognize nearly all the names as regular movie actors. And yet, what does that add? The famous voices come and go, and, save for a couple of exceptions, you can barely tell who was whom, and this contributes to the forgettability of the characters. Once again, I'll make the claim that veteran voice actors can do wonders for creating memorable charcterizations, and it's a pity to see them being replaced.

That's yet another irony -- Robots is about the threat of the shiny, expensive, mass-produced new 'bots replacing the outdated, outmoded, individualized old models, tossed in the recycling bin, never to be heard from again. We're, of course, supposed to side with the old guys, fighting for their right to exist. So why should we, audience members of any age, believe this when professional voice actors aren't being employed, when 3-D animation threatens to replace traditional hand-drawn animation, and when the stories in these movies are taken off an assembly line, interchangeable with one another, with same-styled humor, same hyper rhythms, and little nuance given to characters and relationships? How can something so richly ambitious in look and design be so unambitious in personality?

(Released by Twentieth Century Fox and rated "PG" for some brief language and suggestive humor.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.