![]() Every character, building, vehicle and toy had to be invented. Robots is the first computer-animated movie that is not based on the real world. After Ice Age 2, there is an adaptation of Dr Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!. 'It was a rite of passage.'Īfter Ice Age grossed $375m and sold 25 million DVD and videos, Fox awarded Wedge a five-year exclusive deal and not one green light, but two: Robots and Ice Age 2 (due in March 2006). 'We had to learn on Ice Age how to make a movie that big,' Wedge admits. Ice Age was Blue Sky's first talkie: the crew had never done lip-synching before. So Wedge and Joyce made Ice Age and developed Robots on the side. But he promised to make it if Ice Age was a hit. 'There's no script for Robots,' Meledandri pointed out. Even so, Wedge pleaded with Fox animation tsar Chris Meledandri: 'Look, how many furry animal movies do we need? Why not make Robots instead? It will look cooler than hell.' Then Fox offered Wedge a deal that he couldn't refuse: turn the action adventure Ice Age into an animated comedy and they would bulk up Blue Sky to handle a $65m feature. It was tough for me because Blue Sky was part of the package'. I had a lot of meetings.' He could have closed a rich directing deal, he admits, 'if I were an asshole. 'If you win the Oscar,' says Wedge, 'you get to go into just about anybody's office for a month. When Bunny won the 1999 Academy Award for best animated short, Wedge had some Hollywood leverage. The poignant kitchen drama about an old rabbit and an expiring moth amazed the animation industry with its rich, lifelike detail, warm lighting and pathos. Wedge and his crew indulged themselves with silent short Bunny, which took eight years to finish. After Aliens 4, Fox invested in Blue Sky, hoping that it would deliver more cool visual effects. Blue Sky got by doing commercials, MTV logos, dancing cockroaches (Joe's Apartment) and swimming aliens (Aliens 4). It took two years alone to write Blue Sky's signature software for tracing light rays. One year, Wedge earned $9,000, another, zero. It was five years before anyone at Blue Sky 'earned a living wage,' says Wedge. In 1987, Wedge pooled his life savings with five Magi refugees to start their own CG animation house, Blue Sky. 'This was going to be the way people were going to make movies in the future,' he says. Before the advent of Power PCs, punching commands into piles of data cards was frustrating, but Wedge was excited by the possibilities for these primitive 3-D computer images. 'They were making images with the data.'Īt Magi, Wedge helped to create the pioneering digital effects for Disney's 1982 cyberfantasy, Tron. 'What they were doing was similar to the way light rays worked,' says Wedge. The piece helped to land him a job at the fledgling computer animation house, Magi, run by a band of nuclear-particle scientists. He never studied animation he lingered in college for six years to finish his student film, a seven-minute stop-motion short about a wizard who thinks he makes the sun rise. Long gone are the days when Wedge shot stop-motion miniatures in his upstate New York basement, sent his exposed film to Kodak for processing, and then hovered every afternoon by his mailbox to check what came back. (Fox bought Blue Sky in 1999.) 'Chris Wedge has been around this medium as long as I have,' says Pixar's John Lasseter, the man behind Toy Story. ![]() 'For me, part of the fascination with making animation is you go to a place it's a complete immersion in someone else's fantasy.'įox hopes that Wedge, 47, and Blue Sky, his 18-year-old computer-animation company, will do for them what John Lasseter and Pixar (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles) did for Disney. 'We got incredibly uptight about every paint chip, scratch and weather-worn rooftop,' says Wedge. The aerial chases in Robot City are more exhilarating than a Disney theme-park ride and the detail in the movie rewards repeated viewing. In a brilliant homage to Buster Keaton, the magnetised Rodney runs down the street, pursued by metal objects. Their nemesis, rising executive Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) looks like a sleek steel Mercedes-Benz and works with Cappy (Halle Berry), a fleet rollerskater who comes to the aid of Rodney and his pal Fender (Robin Williams) when they are chased by giant roving magnets. Rodney turns out to be clever at fixing all his new city friends, who can't afford costly upgrades. The film's plucky inventor hero, Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) leaves his parents in Rivet Town to make his fortune in Robot City.
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