The Autobots (simplified Chinese: 汽车人总动员; traditional Chinese: 汽車人總動員; pinyin: Qìchērén Zǒngdòngyuán) (not to be confused with the more iconic alien robots of the same name from the Transformers franchise) is a 2015 Chinese computer-animated film directed by Zhuo Jianrong. It is the Chinese knockoff of the Cars series.
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 Why even bother ripping-off an already mediocre-rated film and making something a lot much even worse? Also, what about Car's Life 2 too as well? And yet, the title has nothing to do with the Transformers.
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Why It Doesn't Win
- It's an obvious mockbuster of the Cars series, as almost all of the characters look extremely similar, even some from the first film. In fact, the poster generally shows characters that look extremely similar to the Cars 2 characters, so it could be argued that the movie is specifically trying to rip-off Cars 2.
- Terrible racing scenes, thanks to completely unrealistic car physics and stupid tire models.
- The producers didn't even bother to change the character designs much, as K1's design is obviously very similar to Lightning McQueen and K2's design is just Francesco, with the only difference being Francesco's #1 being replaced by a Japanese letter. In addition, some designs are even ripped from other media, notably the Batmobile.
- Other characters in this movie have character designs that hugely resemble Cars characters like The King, Sarge, Lewis Hamilton, and Professor Z
- The animation is atrocious and very low quality, it so poorly textured that it can be easily mistaken for some early PlayStation 2 or Xbox game.
- The characters' movements are very strange, as random parts of the characters' bodies stretch and shrink.
- The character's personalities are practically unidentifiable.
- There's also little-to-no lip-syncing.
- Lazy voice acting that can be barely understood, even by Chinese-speaking people. The audio quality is inconsistent; it sounds like the actors recorded on different microphones.
- Speaking of the voices, many of them are rather unfitting; for example, all the cars have childlike voices for some reason, even the Batmobile-like car, whose design is dark and intimidating.
- All of the human characters look the same, except for minor changes.
- Speaking of which, the humans have abnormally huge heads which look like Funko Pops or a Bobblehead.
- As further mentioned before, the character designs and the backgrounds are so bad to look at.
- The film's plot is barely understandable. It is also very generic, as it just talks about how friendship is the most important thing, a clichéd story already seen millions of other times.
- Atrocious soundtrack: some of the music is also stolen from other films such as Ice Age: The Meltdown.
- The film often stole the Autobots' name from the Transformers franchise.
- False advertising: The poster of the film would fool audiences into thinking that the film would have great and colorful CGI, but in the film, the CGI is actually terrible. Not to mention that the character images are ripped straight from Cars 2, changed.
- Also, the second poster shows a mirrored edited version of Lightning McQueen's artwork and shares a similarity with another Cars 2 poster.
- Even its own end credits sequence is plagiarized from another movie; in this case, it's from Dragon Nest: Warriors' Dawn, though the names were changed slightly.
- It destroyed China's creativity of animation as a whole, until 2019, when Ne Zha became the third highest grossing Chinese movie of all time (at the time) and The Legend of Hei being nominated in Annecy.
Redeeming Qualities
- The cars' bodies stretching and shrinking can be funny sometimes.
- K3's design, while ugly and low-quality, is the only one of the cars that has a character design that isn't just ripped from a Cars character.
Full Movie
Videos
Trivia
- In July 2016, The Walt Disney Company filed a copyright case through the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court and on December 29, 2016, the court ruled in favor of Disney, fining Bluemtv and G-Point $190,000 and ordering them to cease copyright infringement immediately.
- There was a sequel in the works, announced during the lawsuit in Summer 2017, a possible rip-off of Cars 3. But thankfully, it never happened thanks to Disney winning it.
- The production company and filmmaker stated that it was an independently produced film, while several critics and people who watched the film accused it of being copied from Disney and Pixar's Cars franchise (with the characters looking like the characters from Cars). Shen Lu, Katie Hunt, and Anna Hsieh of CNN stated that Chinese title of the film was similar to the Mainland Chinese title of Cars (赛车总动员; Sàichē Zǒngdòngyuán).
- Paramount Studios, the industry behind the Transformers franchise, never joins the lawsuit and barely fining Bluetv and G-Point for copying the name based on the good faction of the franchise, Autobots.
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