One of Joyce’s proudest moments is Rodney’s ride on The Crosstown Express. The sequence was greatly influenced by Rube Goldberg and the game Mousetrap.

Meanwhile, one of Joyce’s proudest moments is Robot’s biggest set piece when Rodney first gets to Robot City and takes The Crosstown Express with the wily Fender (Robin Williams). It turns out to be a wildly unexpected ride, greatly influenced by Rube Goldberg and Mousetrap. “There was one line in the script, ‘And they take The Crosstown Express to Big Weld.’ Now this could be fun, I thought. We just sat around for a couple of hours and Chris said he didn’t want jetpacks — this should feel more mechanical like everything else. Designer Dave Gordon and I were assigned to think about this for a month. All these centrifugal forces and magnetic pull sort of things that we had. Actually, the first drawing I did of the catapult was only eight inches high, but it was 84 inches wide and covered an entire wall. I kept taping pieces together to make the arm of the catapult incredibly long. Chris told me that this won’t fit into the frame — this isn’t Cinerama.”

Wedge and Joyce looked to industrial design for ideas. This VW van influenced the color scheme and look for Rodney.

Animator Aaron Hartline, who worked on such gags as Rodney’s hair getting magnetized and the interplay between Ratchet and Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), his evil mother who runs the Chop Shop, says the can-do attitude at Blue Sky began at the outset with early testing of Rodney. “I actually worked on that where they had this whole debate about how strict we should conform to their metallic nature. I had done facial rigging on Ice Age and was asked to do the same on Robots. I was just bending metal all over the place to prove how pliable it is. It was a very slow process. We actually started animating some of the film with no deforming metal on his face. All Rodney had was an open mouth that rotated to resemble a smile. We had to deform up to get him to smile. After a couple of months, Chris and the executives realized that we had to start bending the metal and do tricks and hope the audience would go along for the ride. “

Hartline adds that the biggest difference between Ice Age and Robots was that there was more direct contact with Wedge here. In the first movie, the sequence directors would convey Wedge’s instructions to the animators, but on Robots, they all met every day in The Sweat Box to hammer out details. “There was no holding back. It was fun to get in there and play around with different character traits. With Ice Age, we were breaking the rig a lot with Scrat, and they were worried about joints and fur breaking, but on Robots they said we could bend it way beyond where you think you’d want to go. The pistons would go even farther. You can actually feel that squash-and-stretch in there even for a single frame.

“The biggest improvement was the auto extends on all the limb rigs and the arm rigs. We’d throw them in anywhere. We did a test of Fender holding his breath where he blows up and all the pieces go flying. Like Scrat, it was just to show them that we can blow these guys apart and not be afraid to be expressive and push us a little bit.”