VOTD: Bad Robot Concept Animation Teaser

You might know the name Ruairi Robinson; if you don't I'm betting you will very soon. Robinson made the cool short film The Silent City (which I've embedded below) and was the guy tapped to direct the live-action Akira. I'm not sure whether he's still attached to that film, which was recently said to be not as dead as once reported. Regardless, Robinson is now working to finish a film called Bad Robot, and the teaser concept video now floating around the interwebs suggests it could be a lot of fun. Check it out after the break.

Quiet Earth has this clip for Bad Robot, but sadly not a lot of additional information. There's a tagline ("Soon every house will have a robot helper. Don't worry, your kids are perfectly safe.") which suggests a lot of things, not least the possibility that while the film is billed as a sci-fi comedy, it may have more of a horror angle than a hilarious one. I'm picturing some weird cross between Hardware and Fido, but that's probably totally off.

You can get that idea from watching this concept teaser, which is really just a strange humanoid/R2D2 robot dancing around for a few seconds. There's not much to indicate how the film will actually look — the background is very basic — but the character animation is great, and the way the clip ends is fantastic. Having seen what Robinson did with The Silent City, which I loved except for the showoff-y crane to plane to helicopter CGI transition in the middle, I can't wait to see how this turns out. We don't even know yet if it's a short or a feature. (And yeah, I get the point of that showy transition, and was impressed by it from a technical standpoint, but thought it really broke up The Silent City — that's my beef.)

One question: is a cease and desist order from JJ Abrams production company going to be thrown at this film?

The concept teaser is embedded first, followed by The Silent City. (Which we've posted before, when Robinson was announced for Akira.) Watch both!