DO Robots dream of electric sheep? In Chris Wedge’s animation they clearly do. The Ice Age director has a barmy vision of the future. The world has been taken over by fridges and retro kitchen appliances. Babies are delivered in vintage Ikea kits, and look as perplexing as their parts. “Twelve hours’ hard labour but it was worth it,” moans Mum after tightening Rodney’s nuts. The young lad beams at her like a fairy godmother. Dad cracks a rare smile. He is an old dishwasher just a couple of dirty plates away from the council skip; Mum oils his arthritic hinges. Can noble Rodney salvage his family? And will eight-year-olds actually care?

My guess is that they will, but don’t bank on the parents. Rodney (voiced by Ewan McGregor) grows up with the skills of Caractacus Potts. He designs a coffee jug that has eyes, ears, and wings. If he manages to patent his eccentric product, it will earn him a fortune. But there are fairytale problems. The king of invention, Bigweld (Mel Brooks), has been deposed by a psychopath, and Rodney has to save and reinstate the kindly wizard if he has any hope of realising his dreams.

It’s a topical clash of ideologies. Greg Kinnear’s smooth-talking bastard wants to trash the robots who can’t afford his expensive upgrades. The saintly Rodney has vested interests in old spare knobs.

He is Dick Whittington in a fable with unmatched views. Robot City is a junkyard of Heath Robinson brilliance: a floating conflation of steel and scrap. There’s not an inch of flesh or a blade of organic matter in sight. The familiar sinners — “scam artists, calculators, and beggars” — litter the rusty streets.

This is a nightmarish dystopia of drones and bored time servers. The public transport system is a pinball machine. In one of the best set pieces, Rodney skelters like a marble around wire gutters with terrifying twists and turns, huge industrial springs that ping him into space, giant see-saws with vertiginous drops, and crowded Rollerball slides.

The serious disappointment is that the script fails to live up to the fabulously painted sprawl. The story is riddled with missed opportunities. The simmering anger felt by the plebeian robots strikes a thrilling visual chord with Fritz Lang’s 1926 masterpiece, Metropolis. But the satirical teeth sink into pure chocolate. I expected more from the PG rating. The sentiments of Wedge’s film are uniformly childish.

Technically, Robots stands head and shoulders above its illustrious digital peers. But it lacks the light-fingered savvy of Shrek 2 and the shifty family values of The Incredibles. The usual tragicomic test of character wouldn’t challenge a four-year-old. Can Rodney and his motley screws overcome Kinnear’s satanic yuppie, and restore the soft-hearted Bigweld to his corporate throne? Your guess is as wild as mine.

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