20 years later, Robots is still a surprisingly timely story about a post-capitalist dystopia disguised as a children’s comedy.
You remember Robots, right?
That 2005 animated movie where Ewan McGregor plays a starry-eyed inventor named Rodney Copperbottom, Robin Williams does peak mid-2000s fast-talking sidekick antics, and the entire world is made out of metal? Yeah. That one.
At the time, it came off like just another CGI cartoon trying to ride the Shrek wave—quirky worldbuilding, celebrity voice cast, lots of jokes about flatulence and falling apart. And while Robots never quite reached Pixar levels of emotional devastation, it still managed to weld together a surprisingly rich world. One that, in hindsight, looks less like a whimsical city of helpful nuts and bolts…and more like a prophetic blueprint for where late-stage capitalism could be headed if we’re not careful.
Yes, I’m saying Robots is secretly a post-capitalist dystopia. And I’ll die on this rusted hill.
The Metal Beneath the Shine
Let’s start with the setup. Rodney Copperbottom (McGregor) leaves his humble, working-class home with dreams of becoming an inventor in the big city, where he hopes to meet his idol, Bigweld (Mel Brooks…no, seriously). This rotund, jolly CEO of Bigweld Industries built his company on the motto, “See a need, fill a need,” which feels like the robot version of open-source idealism. Build cool things. Help people. Don’t be evil. Sound familiar?
But by the time Rodney arrives in Robot City, Bigweld is gone. Disappeared. Replaced. His company has been hijacked by a sleazy corporate heir named Phineas T. Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), who’s implemented a bold new policy: No more spare parts.
That’s right. If your parts are old? Rusted? Broken? Too bad. “Out with the old, in with the new.” Buy upgrades or be left behind. Or worse—sent to the chop shop, run by Ratchet’s villainous mother, Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), where outmodes are melted down for scrap.
You see where I’m going with this.
Planned Obsolescence, the Movie
There’s no subtext here. This is the text. Robots directly portrays a society where planned obsolescence isn’t just a design strategy—it’s government policy.
And it’s not like this idea was born in a vacuum. In the real world, we’ve spent the past two decades arguing over whether our smartphones are throttled on purpose and whether billion-dollar companies are intentionally making products that break faster to maximize profit. (Spoiler: They are.) But Robots puts that conversation into stark relief for children.
The upgraded elite are shiny and perfect. The outmodes are dented, rusted, limping—too poor to keep up with the upgrade cycle. They live in junkyards. They’re mocked in public. They’re told their existence is a burden. And that’s when Ratchet isn’t trying to literally recycle them into raw materials.
And we’re watching this in a movie rated G, by the way.
The Bigweld Problem
Bigweld’s absence in the story isn’t accidental. It’s a crucial piece of the metaphor.
He represents the old-school tech utopian—the benevolent founder who started a company to change the world, not dominate it. His motto was about community. Helping the little guy. In today’s terms, think early Google before they dropped the “Don’t Be Evil” thing, or maybe the original idea of Kickstarter before every second campaign involved crypto and air fryers.
But when Rodney tracks Bigweld down, he’s not leading a resistance. He’s retired. Alone. Watching TV. He gave up.
He lost.
And that? That might be Robots’ most brutal idea. That good intentions alone aren’t enough. That the system chews up idealists and replaces them with people who only care about control, margins, and crushing the unprofitable.
It’s not just that Bigweld lost his company. It’s that he let go of his belief system. And the system cheered.
Rodney Copperbottom: Blue-Collar Messiah
Enter Rodney. He’s the repairman. The fixer. A working-class hero in every sense. His family builds coffee machines, for crying out loud. He doesn’t want to be famous or rich. He wants to make things better.
Rodney’s entire ethos flies in the face of Ratchet’s corporate manifesto. He believes in repair. In care. In refusing to throw people away.
And the thing that sets him apart isn’t power, money, or some chosen one prophecy. It’s ingenuity. Craft. Community. When he arrives in Robot City, he doesn’t punch his way through problems. He fixes them. Literally. He patches up old robots, builds devices to help others, and eventually inspires the “outmodes” to fight back against the system trying to scrap them.
It’s less The Matrix and more Les Misérables with bolts.
A Revolution of Rust
Let’s talk about that ending. It’s not a clever trick or loophole that saves the day. It’s a full-on uprising. A mob of rustbuckets and misfits, armed with wrenches and moral clarity, storms the chop shop. The rebels toss Ratchet. Bigweld returns, reborn with purpose. Spare parts are back on the menu.
And look, I’m not saying Robots is Karl Marx’s fever dream. But I am saying it stages a revolution led by a literal underclass who band together in the name of equity, repair, and bodily autonomy.
In other words, this is WALL-E before WALL-E. It’s Idiocracy for kids. And unlike most modern dystopias, it ends with the people—not the system—winning.
So Why Did We Forget About This Movie?
Great question.
Robots didn’t flop, but it didn’t become a cultural monolith either. It came out in the shadow of The Incredibles, Shrek 2, and Madagascar. It was Blue Sky (distributed by 20th Century Fox Studios), who had its feature debut Ice Age roll out three years prior, trying to do Pixar without the Pixar polish. The animation? Fine. The jokes? Hit or miss. The story? Underrated.
But the reason we’re still talking about it 20 years later? Because its message aged like fine oil.
In 2025, Robots feels less like a quirky footnote and more like a movie that knew exactly where the world was heading. In an era of broken devices, gig work, disappearing safety nets, and CEOs named “Ratchet” in spirit if not in name…yeah, maybe this little film about spare parts and scrap piles had something to say after all.
Robots wasn’t warning us about the future.
It was documenting the present. With, ahem, fart jokes.
Robots is currently available to stream on-demand. Watch the trailer here.
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts and our resident Podcast Editor. He hosts the podcasts Cinemaholics, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
