Absolutely Fantastic

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

A boy decides he wants a robot companion like the friendly, smiling Blinky™ that he sees on the TV adverts. His parents oblige and he finds himself with a great friend and servant who never tires and always does what he is told. However, while the boy has this friend he has to see his parent's relationship deteriorate in front of him.This short film has a nice air in brooding tension and it builds it pretty well across the film. The main selling point is of course in the area of the visual effects because for a short film these are very well done. Blinky looks convincingly real for the majority of the time, but he also has a nice sense of menace in the way that all dead-eyed staring and smiling things do; he feels wrong even when he is so clearly just a loyal robotic dog of a thing. So on this level it works but the problem is that the narrative moves us too quickly and the further it goes the more blatant it gets. This is seen very quickly as the brooding menace becomes almost comic excess, whether it be the melodramatics of the boy yelling at the robot or final shots. This disappointed me a bit because it felt like the leaps were too big and undercut the nice build up it had mostly done.It does still work for what it is and the visual effects are well worth a look, but at times it appeared much smarter and more subtle that it ultimately turned out to be, and it was hard not to feel like the journey was better than the destination.

One of the things I really liked about this short was how it, before rushing headlong and irrevocably into horror territory, does an effective enough job with the few more dramatic scenes of establishing why the kid is so lonely and messed up inside that he would treat the poor little robot helper like complete s**t until he eventually scrambles its circuits and causes it to turn homicidal! When I first watched it I thought that the constant mistreatment had somehow bred some kind of resentment in the robot against the boy, what especially make me think that theory was the definite 'tone' with which it says "Look at the mess you made." But I suppose the most credible and obvious reason it turns murderous would be simple "user error." It did get left out in the rain, was given multiple conflicting commands, the order by the kid to kill everyone and probably the mother's "If you make a mess like this again I'll have him clean and cook you for dinner", creating an order 'stack' so that when it rebooted, it was simply doing what it was told to as perceived orders from the family. The robot was the only real intelligent character in the story! The robot's design was eerie because it looked so innocent, like it had a permanent sweet smile on its face. It looked like a cross between Wall-E and R2-D2, and I honestly had no clue that it was a CGI creation, it looked like it was really there to me. It is such a wonderfully chilling moment when it grabs the meat carver from the kitchen drawer and says "Ready or not, here I come!" And that sure is one helluva nightmarishly grisly twist! The moment is all the more disturbing because it's slightly humorous by the cheery matter-of-fact way in which it informs the astonished parents! It's more effective in that it's what the robot was implied to have done, not what was shown. I think the ending would have worked better if they'd have just left it with the door closing instead of showing the unnecessary moment of gore which I found a little tacky. It just goes to show you, don't ever take out your troubles on someone that's only there to help and wants to be your friend, even when it's just a machine. Alex would have been just fine if he'd only respected Blinky, but the constant abuse made a monster out of it. Very good, it seamlessly blends elements of family sci-fi and horror into a wicked short which combines the creepy terror of the killer robot with the more old-fashioned macabre horror of cannibalism. That horrid little brat was a creep, he asked for it! Not too many problems that I personally can think of with this short, it delivers the goods. Later!

In the future a child is given a pet robot by his warring parents. Before long the neglected child grows tired of Blinky the robot and begins to play unkind games on it. It all ends in tears.This was a decent enough, if unremarkable, little short. The robot is easily the best character, although the child actor is incredibly convincing as an annoying little brat. Mostly, this is a showcase for the animation of Blinky. We also get to see an unusual scene where Blinky and the boy pass by another android in the street, with a future city-scape in the distance. Although it isn't a sequence that has much relevance to the plot-line it's probably the most memorable moment in the film. As short films go though, this isn't too bad. The ending is quite amusing as well.

This short is well made, great realistic visuals,and even though the gore factor is not present it will leave you with a bit of a sick stomach. The story is obvious, boy gets robot, robot gets boring, boy plays cruel games with robot and acts like an annoying prepubescent tyrant with his electronic companion. Blinky is indeed cute and lovable, but as we know this is not going to end well. The performances are strong for the kid and his dog, and the short screen time for mom is also convincing even though rushed. It is an easy watch and would recommend it to all parents who what a robot to cook for them. Oh and if you don't want to spoil your child, keep them in the fridge.