Where the Robots Grow

Well this is it, 1/10 is now reserved for the A. I. trash compactor from now on out. Because now even the worst of the worst movies should reserve a higher score for having actual effort. Birdemic, The Emoji Movie, Disaster Movie etc. They're trash but at least someone actually went through the effort.

Slaving yourself to a machine's output is now the lowest human morale. Beats rehashing sequels, terrible remakes, terrible CGI. This is the new rock bottom.

"Where the Robots Grow is film for all the family. Set in a future where Earth's last survivors send robots to farm a new world called Oracle. The latest model of robot, Cru, finds his purpose in life redefined by a pod carrying the last human baby. The first release by AiMation Studios"

This movie is ugly to look at. I understand that the stylistic destine might not be for me but I can't for the life of me understand why they made this movie look so soulless and uninspired. I look at the cast and feel nothing the movie feels like nobody put any love into the characters or background. I had to force myself to watch this all the way through this movie because i could not stay invested with the cast. I can not for the life of me tell you anything that was happening or the names of anything in the movie. Stuff just happened because it could Skip this movie it is soulless, lacks creativity ,and motivation. Skip this movie its not worth your time.

I've seen cursed artwork generated with artificial intelligence, seen animations created with artificial intelligence (thanks to Showrunner), and even used artificial intelligence to make music...but...this is it. I've reached the bottom of the barrel. I was so shocked by this that I nearly fainted. As a hater of AI, I couldn't believe that an animated movie out of all things can be made with artificial intelligence.

This movie was generated using, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. And I thought Disney, Rovio, and Coca-Cola were already on board with artificial intelligence. However, making an AI-GENERATED MOVIE is going things too far. Like the other items that can be generated using AI, this AI animated movie is incredibly dull and lifeless, particularly the voice acting, which is extremely dull. I have already disliked this idea ever since the trailer came out, and also still hate it when it was released on October 2024.

It's a film that even those who despise artificial intelligence might watch. Don't even watch this film.

My god, this is just horrendously bad. People who pretend that this is good are either coping really, really hard OR they have zero standards for movies or storytelling.

It's "made by AI", and holy cow does it show! No professional artist would release something like this.

No shot can hold longer than a few seconds. AI clearly can't handle long takes at all. Which creates a movie that despite it lack of actual things happening on screen feels completely eratic.

And when I say "lack of things happening", man, do I mean it! The entire movie consists of stiff, motionless "characters" standing or sitting around and talking... talking, witout moving their lips, faces or acting in any way (feels like the idea to make it a story about robots was made out of desperation, rather than artistic creativity). It does less than a basic puppet theater, it's ridiculous. But again: It's made with AI. And AI just can't animate anything more complex than people waddling around.

But hey, at least what we got looks good, right? The shots might be poorly edited together and contain barely any action, but that means that we get high quality individual shots... right?

Nope. Even the individual shots look horrible! The characters never move right, they keep jittering and sliding all over the ground, feet don't make proper contact with ground, legs don't connect with rocks when they sit down, characters and objects barely interact with each other, because clearly AI can't handle that either... it looks downright stupid, I've seen less floady animation in videogames from 25 years ago.

Maybe the style has something to offer? If you've seen any screenshot of the movie you might have seen the main character who looks very hand-painted, with visible pen-strokes on his textures. That's at least neat, right?

Well, it would be... if that was an actual style they were going for! But it's not!

Some of the stuff in the movie seems to go for photorealism, other stuff goes for hand painted, other stuff seems to mimick a Pixar-CGI-style... and even though lightnings and fire effects look downright unfinished, we have a surprising amount of scenes that have these elements as a focus, which matches even less with everything else. Calling the style "all-over-the-place" wouldn't do this justice! Heck, calling it a "style" wouldn't do it justice! It really seems to be the result of an unthinking, unfeeling AI just randomly mixing stuff together without any understanding of what it is doing.

Damned, I could swear that even the animation seems to be scavaging from different types of animations. There are some elements that look fluently animated like basic CGI-animation, while other stuff seems to have much lower framerate and almost looks like it was inspired by stop-motion animation.

So, the technical side is an embarrassment. And if you think it isn't, you are lying to yourself or REALLY need to develop some standards for yourself. Is there at least some quality in the aspects that had more human imput?

Like the story or voice acting?

Nope. The voice acting is pretty horrible, but I can hardly blame the voice actors for this. What they were given is just so bland and boring and nonsensical... how could you act any better with this garbage.

And the story is soooooo bland and boring and pointless. Not to speak, generic!

The only thing that gave me a good laugh was when I realized that they changed the main robots voice actor after they had a time skip, to make it sound more adult and masculing. So... apparently in this universe robots go through puberty and their voices break? That's so stupid that I found it hilleriously charming.

But honestly, what else can I say? This movie is terrible. The only reason why it didn't get only 1 star is based around the fact that the story TECHNICALLY is functional. It's not good, but if you've just recently undergone a lobotomy and are in the process of recovering from the anesthesia, it MIGHT be able to able to keep your distracted while floating in and out of consciousness.

Oh, and some moments are unintentinally funny. When the music swells and the voice actors are trying their hardest to make us think something action packed is happening... and then you actually LOOK at the screen and it's just a few stiff charactermodels waddeling around while the camera angles switch every few seconds... those moments are pretty damn hillerious.

But seriously, this is painfully stupid and not as much proof of concept as instead strong evidence that AI just can't do what its fans pretend it can.

My biggest fear watching this is less that AI will get to the point where it can do art in place of humans, and more that society will gradualy lower their standards until nonsense like this will be considered passable. Because THAT would be really, really bad for our species.

Fazit: Terrible, terrible, terrible. On every level.

It's hard to explain just how bad this movie is. Let's start with a positive: I applaud the creators for attempting to use AI as a creative tool. Whether we like it or not, AI will increasingly help film makers with arduous tasks like rotoscoping, storyboarding, shot and sound fixes, etc. And in the right creative hands, the creation of images, scenes, characters, etc. In the wrong hands, you get a movie like this.

In the first ten minutes I thought the horrible writing, voice acting and pacing were intentional and would, in time, reveal a clever creative technique that pays off as the film progresses. That never happened. The film is badly executed on almost every level: writing, editing, sound mixing, flat and lifeless voice acting almost is if no one gave the "actors" any direction. The AI animation stutters, as if the frame rate is mismatched somewhere in the pipeline.

While some of the imagery is quite striking, beautiful, etc. It simply cannot compensate for the above mentioned flaws - there's just nothing to hang on to or care about, which is a shame.