Hollywood sings a new kind of 'toon

There's only one type of film that has opening-weekend clout to rival that of Will Smith: the computer-generated animated feature film.

"Robots," a whimsical tale about a young automaton who aspires to be an inventor like his dad, is likely to post impressive numbers on the scoreboard of Fox Studios this weekend. It's the latest film in a hugely popular genre that last year produced megahits such as "The Incredibles" ($600 million worldwide to date) and "Shrek 2" (which is the third-biggest film of all time).

Hollywood has taken note. Virtually all the major studios now have an inhouse facility producing computer-generated (CG) feature films, from Sony's Imageworks to Fox's Blue Sky Studios, which created "Robots." Not surprisingly, the film-release calender for 2005 is filling up with CG films. Dreamworks has "Madagascar," a tale of zoo animals surviving in the wild, due out Memorial Day weekend. "Chicken Little," the first film to hatch from Disney's new CG studios, arrives in November.

But some observers wonder how long Hollywood can sustain the CG-film gold rush. The early computer-animated films were buoyed as much by their striking aesthetics as their strong stories. Several years on, the novelty of the genre threatens to wear off as CG animated films become more commonplace.

The competition may force studios to come up with stronger storylines to lure audiences, but here again lie potential difficulties. Because computer technology hasn't yet been able to create realistic-looking humans, screenwriters have been limited to concentrating on stories about fish, ogres, monsters, toys, and inanimate objects that can be anthropomorphized.

"What's happened is that CG films have been so successful that there's a great public appetite for it," says artist Peter Weishar, author of "CGI: The Art of the 3D Computer-Generated Image." "The challenge right now is to live up to the hype."

Pixar kicked off the current craze for CG animation back in 1995 with the first fully animated major feature film, "Toy Story." Prior to that, critics and filmmakers alike had dismissed computer animation as too mechanical and limited in storytelling expressiveness. To date, many of those problems have been overcome by creative uses of computer animation.

Chris Wedge, the creator of "Robots," admits that his team of animators faced their own set of challenges in depicting the inner emotions of the characters. "It's extremely difficult to make metal look alive," says Mr. Wedge. "To get more emotion out of the characters without breaking the tension of believability was what we had to work out."

Blue Sky's animators tried to create facial expressions by adding quirky eyebrows and more flexible mouths to the robots. The studio, which also made 2002's "Ice Age," had already pioneered a technology to animate the way light falls on objects. In the real world, light is always coming from more than a single source, so re-creating shadow and depth in an animated film is extremely complicated. "We have developed the software to surround objects with multiple light sources, and this makes them look more believable," says Wedge, who adds that they have refined the techniques further in "Robots."

Despite the enormous progress made in bringing computerized worlds to life, the CG feature film still faces some vexing technical hurdles, say animators. "It's always dangerous when you try to do human simulations," says Rolf Herken, an artist at Mental Images, a CG studio. "The industry is really not quite there yet," he adds.

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