Steve Pratt talks to one of the creators of Robots, Chris Wedge, who reveals tha the project wasn't his company's first choice. But he agrees this is animations golden age.

PIXAR may not be a name that many cinemagoers know but must gain more nods of recognition than Blue Sky. While Pixar has been in the public eye with massive movie animation hits such as Toy Story and The Invincibles, Blue Sky has had a lower profile despite the success of its first computer-animated feature film, Ice Age.

Robots should establish its name once and for all. Robin Williams - in his first voice role since Aladdin in 1992 - is joined by Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent, Halle Berry and Mel Brooks in the heard-but-not-seen cast of a movie about inventor bot Rodney Copperbottom trying to make his name in the world.

Chris Wedge, co-director of Robots and vice-president of creative development at Blue Sky, is honest enough to admit that his company is small fry compared to Pixar. "You're not going to get too much of the business strategy perspective from us because we mostly react with other people in the industry on a creative level," he says.

"Inside our studio, we don't have the perspective that the public does on how the movies are performing against each other. When we're making movies it's impossible to have a fear of the competition. We just have to concentrate on the movie. You can go see our movie or go see their movie. There's really no direct competition for people because it's not exclusive."

They're both doing the same thing but with different approaches. "Our technology is radically different to what they use in other companies and helps give our movies a different look, especially Robots and the idea we have coming in the future," says Wedge.

Blue Sky was set up 17 years ago by "six of us pooling our pocket change" to explore a fascination for discovering what they could do with computers. Eventually, they teamed up with Fox to make feature films. Today, they're still a relatively small studio, employing about 230 people.

The present time is regarded as something of a golden age for animation, which has never been more popular or appreciated. Wedge only regrets that makers are being limited to a degree by the types of films they're making. "I'm waiting for the moment we can break into genres that aren't as expected as the fast-talking comedies that are coming out now. If we're in the golden age of animation, it's going to get better," he says.

Wedge's earlier release Bunny won an Academy Award as best animated short film and was the first film to use radiosity, a complex computer application that recreates the most subtle properties of natural and ambient light.

He's aware of the dangers of showing off techniques. "At Blue Sky, when it comes down to it we're a bunch of geeks about rendering - simulating the way light works, the photographic quality that things have," he says. "But you find very quickly that you may be more interested than the audience. That's the stuff that hits the cutting room floor first."

The idea for Robots arose from Wedge and writer Bill Joyce trying to develop one of the latter's storybooks into a movie. When that didn't happen, they decided on a film about robots. "It really came more from us wanting to do something that had characters, it's a world of mechanical people," he says. "It's a case of what would it be like to be made out of metal, how would we interact, what would we dream about or be afraid of. It evolved over about seven years. For every character or situation, we went to the industrial age or mechanical world's equivalent.

"I hate the fact that you get a laptop computer, start putting your life into it and then you need more memory, a faster processor, an internet upgrade - and you finally say, 'let's get a new one'. What does it feel like to be part computer? That's a weird concept."

The voice cast was chosen for their suitability for the characters and not simply for their star power. Wedge also knows that movies in Hollywood are mostly sold on the stars, so having a big name like Robin Williams aboard does no harm. "He hadn't done anything since Aladdin and I wanted to stay as far away from that as I could. At the first session we spent an hour fiddling around with his voice. It was clear that he should just be himself and do what he wanted. He was always the most effective when his energy was high."

* Robots (U) opens in cinemas tomorro

Published: 17/03/2005