Road to blue skies

Chris Wedge's animation company is a spinoff of a company where he worked in the '80s.
By MICHAEL SRAGOW
BALTIMORE SUN
Think of Chris Wedge as a suburban superhero from his rival Pixar's "The Incredibles."
On a recent weekday morning, Wedge, 47, sounds like any other sleepy, harried family man in White Plains, N.Y., getting a slow start on the workday because of an overnight snowfall. He's trying to conduct a phone interview while his 8-year-old son fiddles with the fax machine. (He and his wife also have a 20-year-old daughter, off at college.)
But Wedge has an alternate identity as one of the most successful filmmakers on the planet. The director of 2002's cartoon smash "Ice Age" and of the giddy new animated thrill ride "Robots" (opening today), also heads the creative side of Blue Sky Studios, not far from his home. Like Emeryville, Calif.-based Pixar, it's a cutting-edge computer-animation company on a mission to move and dazzle audiences with original comic creations.
"I always liked making little puppets and little sets and lighting them," said Wedge, recalling his film student days at the State University of New York, Purchase, where he specialized in puppet animation. "When you looked at them through an eyepiece, you would see a different world, and if you lit it right, you could make it seem small or really big."
But Wedge wanted to combine the 3-D quality he loved in puppets with the expressive movement of hand-drawn animation. He figured, correctly, that computer graphics would be the answer. He earned a Master of Arts degree in CG programming at Ohio State, and got in on the ground floor of digital effects with Disney's breakthrough picture "Tron" (1982).
"'Tron' was panned at the time," Wedge said, "but these days some people will bow down before you when you say you worked on it."
Wedge and five of his colleagues on that movie, from the pioneering MAGI/SynthaVision company, formed Blue Sky in 1987, after MAGI became defunct. Three of them, including Wedge, still work there.
'Robots'
"Robots," as Ed Sullivan might have said, is a really, really big show. It overflows with verbal and visual puns, musical flights, burlesque pratfalls, steals from Harpo Marx movies and wild Warners Bros. cartoons, and pop-culture allusions that are more purely bizarre and thus more engaging than "Shrek 2's" pandering to brand names such as Starbucks. They include references to movies that only parents will have seen, such as "Do the Right Thing," and to acts so old they actually appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show."
Along with production designer William Joyce (the beloved author-illustrator of children's books such as Dinosaur Bob), and legions of artisans and actors, Wedge has created an imaginative environment as detailed as Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and lots more lighthearted.
When the plucky young tinker hero, Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor), travels from a hick 'burb named Rivet Town to seek his future in Robot City, he boards the Crosstown Express. As Joyce puts it, the Express resembles "a giant Hot Wheels track, but with balls rolling along, and chutes sending you off this way and that, and a catapult."
'Different world'
The whole movie is a Rube Goldberg device, but it arose from the same "simple, nerdy" motivation Wedge had as a kid: "To see what this different world would look like."
In the mid-1990s, Fox Animation president Chris Meledandri shrewdly introduced the distinctive, whimsical Joyce, who has created classic comic-fantasy characters and landscapes (his most famous offspring: Rolie Polie Olie), to the humorous, casual visionary Wedge. They wanted to adapt Joyce's Christmas story, "Santa Calls." It didn't happen. So they began conjuring a movie about robots -- partly because they couldn't analyze why the subject of robots tickled them.
"Why be you when you can be new?" applies as much to human "extreme makeovers" as it does to computer upgrades. But Wedge and company started sketching their robots seven years ago. They threw the upgrade-makeover theme into the mix before real-life and fictional soap operas about plastic surgery took over chunks of TV's prime time.
"The movie is filled with metaphors," said Wedge, and they're not just about planned obsolescence. "They're about haves and have-nots, about what it is to grow old and physically frail, and about how others look at us when we do."
Wedge admits that his distributor, 20th Century Fox, occasionally balked at his and Joyce's desire to model "Robots" on that full-blast Technicolor Wonderland, "The Wizard of Oz" -- executives thought some shots might come off as "too nostalgic." Nevertheless, "Robots," while more contemporary, has much of the spectrum and size of "Oz," and several characters straight out of it.
Wedge is quick to credit 20th Century Fox's casting department for some of his vocal performance coups, including Jim Broadbent's rip-roaring turn as the film's ultimate villain, Madame Gasket, Ratchet's mother and the chief of an underground Chop Shop.
"Robots" richest source of humor is its parallel between robot and human life cycles.
It starts with Rodney's "birth." Wedge says his initial (rejected) plan "was to slowly push in on Mom and Dad in the living room. It's a quiet evening, TV, books. Dad is saying, 'Are you tired?' Mom answers, 'Not really, why?' Dad says, 'You know that thing we were talking about? I read all the books now and I know how to do it.' And Mom says, 'OK, let's make a baby!'"
Then she pulls out an assembly kit.