I had recently been pretty taken by Tavares' film Jonah and read of this previous film. The general feeling about this seemed to be it was a great short with impressive animation used in support of an intelligent and political core; having seen it myself I'm afraid I have to be contrary to these. The animation for sure is impressive and I applaud the effort going into it even though it is clear that Tavares' vision exceeded his reach at this time, because that does show at times. The expansion of Brixton to be more of a broken and mechanical future is good and generally the animation of the robots is good although there is a certain clunkiness to some of the movement and some of the camera movements which put me in mine of those limited Saturday morning cartoons you see. Still, for a short film it works very well.
The thing that will make this more than a showcase though is the narrative – and I already saw that Tavares can do that as he did well in Jonah. Unfortunately in this case the message seems to be more tacked on rather than part of the delivery. The robotic riots are linked back to those in the early 80's in Brixton and the suggestion is that things will repeat forever if we do not actually address them – hence badly treated robots rising up in the way the Afro-Caribbean community did then. This is a very simple point and I didn't think the film did it well since it really just delivered some effects on the way to merging into a photograph from the era; to actually deliver it really needed to have more commentary and subtext throughout the short but it didn't and as a result felt fragmented.
It is a shame that ultimately Robots of Brixton is more about what Tavares could do rather than what he did. The impressive effects and the attempt to have a social commentary as part of the film grabbed people's attention but it is a shame that the film as a viewing experience is not all it could be. It was positive to see how much better Jonah was compared to this film as it shows him moving in a very positive direction.
