You don’t often get to see concept art on an animated feature unless you work for the studio involved. If you can’t drop into Twentieth Century Fox or Blue Sky Studios, you can pick up this lovingly created coffee table book and browse through a brilliant presentation of the conceptual drawings and paintings of Blue Sky’s Robots, which hit theaters in March 2005. Along with nicely done reproductions of the paintings and drawings are lots of commentaries from various artists connected with the film, including Chris Wedge, director; Amid Amidi who wrote the book; William Joyce, producer and production designer; Greg Couch, designer and Steve Martino, art director. The text is cleverly augmented with paragraphs of these artists and a lot more, discussing a particular area of the production or the design ideas, giving the feeling of an informal panel analyzing the picture for an audience. This format gives the reader a lot of insight into the thinking behind the various designs.

Insights From the Artists
For instance when Bill Joyce talks about Rivet Town, the small town where the story starts, he says “Rivet Town is all kitchen utensils… it’s a nice town; they’ve taken care of it, but it doesn’t have that sheen that uptown would have.” Visual influences for both the backgrounds and the characters came from “coffee pots, waffle irons, and motorcycle engines,” according to Joyce. The insides of a watch and that ophthalmic eye tester that you peek through at the optometrists can be seen in some of the buildings of Robot City.

Martino says about Joyce’s drawings, “… there’s that same balance of form from the largest scale to the smallest detail… He gives you solid compositions with shapes that don’t clutter the frame, but then your eye can move through the image and find all these surprising little details.”

Joyce gives credit to the whole Robots team when he says, “There’s a little bit of everybody at Blue Sky in the way the movie looks.” He characterized the genesis of this film as “… a sort of crazy, creative delirium that bordered on bliss.”

Art Deco Feeling
The robot world is divided into three different feeling areas, each taking its design elements from a different era of mechanical gadgets, “steam, combustion and high-end.” They all feel rather art deco to me; very organic with swooping lines and curves. The book takes you through how the feeling of the area was established not only with what utensils underlie the concept, but also by the color and lighting. In trying to create a world from scratch that would resonate with the audience, they tried to set up a parallel universe where every living thing is metal. Plants, pets, all the intelligent beings are all made of metal. And some of the objects are intelligent that you wouldn’t think would be, like lampposts and fire hydrants.

When the Copperbottoms, the hero’s parents, decide to have a baby, they buy a kit and assemble him. As he grows they have to buy new parts to replace old ones. The illustrations show how they had to buy some used parts, a little worn around the edges. As Mr. Copperbottom grows older, he gets a bigger and bigger contraption making up his middle. The sketches reproduced clearly show how this ages the character.

The Details of the Designs
A lot of thought was given in this book toward showing the details of the designs. Throughout the book there are photographs of the 3D characters with insets of photos of the actual objects that the texture or color was taken from. Rodney, our hero, is the turquoise of one of those wonderful old VW buses. Several pages are devoted to the way he evolved into the final design. Drawings of Rodney by Joyce, Couch, Michael Knapp, Peter de Seve and the maquette by Michael de Feo are shown. Old rusty parts, shown in an inset, inspired one of the villain’s textures.

One of the wildest series of sketches shows the mechanics of the Rube Goldberg-ish kind of transportation system in Robot City. The drawings are numbered in order, with an explanation of how Rodney is thrown, careened and shot all over the city. Joyce says the idea started with the kid’s game Mouse Trap. Color was used lavishly in the movie, establishing the feel of each section and that is apparent in the artwork shown here. There is a color wheel that explains the color theory behind the treatment that was wanted for each part of town.

The film is CG, but very little of the book is in tech jargon. The CG term for stretch and squash is deformation, and a discussion of how the modelers used this to make the metal faces more expressive is clear. And expressive the faces are! There is an explanation of a new technique to automatically adapt textures to an object’s shape and girth that even I could understand. The book tells of how libraries of existing body parts were created that could be mixed and matched to create new characters in the Chop Shop scenes, where many, many individual robots were needed. They called them Franken-bots.