Short films featuring robots don’t always have to be centered around ideas of dystopian futures—as Spike Jonze‘s love story I’m Here demonstrates. In his short film Mechanic Poems Ronny Traufeller breathes charming life into a series of robots that look like they’ve been jumbled together from spare parts, giving them a retro, clockwork aesthetic.Their comedic tone is further heightened by using silent film era title cards to relay the action and the mechanics behind the machines. The whole piece is centered around their movements, as they float in the air with the help of balloons or stumble along on four legs. If you’re a child of the 80s then they may remind you of the robots in Batteries Not Included, which seemed to be one of those movies only the 80s could deliver.With talk in the news of micro-drones and other scary automatons in development, it’s a welcome diversion and refreshing viewpoint to see robots not as mindless killers but as fanciful machines brought to life using 3D animation and puppetry. Traufeller says: “It illustrates a world of mechanical creatures that start to explore a real world space. The idea behind the piece was to create a realistic mechanical world that sometimes ignores the rules of physics.”[via Vimeo Staff Picks]@stewart23rd