Bynes hard-wires `Robots' with heart

[Still Dirrty]

Girl power knows no limits, as Amanda Bynes happily discovered.
When Bynes, the teen star of the WB's ``What I Like About You'' series, first agreed to play perky Piper, the sister of Robin Williams' Fender in ``Robots,'' it was a big deal.
``I loved the script from the moment that I read it,'' the 18-year-old said of the digitally animated robot adventure by ``Ice Age'' creator Chris Wedge.
``The film has such a good message, which is `Shine no matter what you're made of.' So it's really sweet, the type of movie that I want to see. And with Robin Williams in his first animated piece since `Aladdin,' that was all very exciting.''

``Robots'' became more exciting as it developed and was shown to test groups.
``Initially I had a small part - Piper started out as sort of just a cute character,'' Bynes said. ``But the more I did and the more screenings that they did, the role kept getting bigger. They saw that kids enjoyed a strong girl character, and so it kind of grew as I did it.
``I always just try to do my best job. I don't have that big of an ego, and so I was happy doing a small part. They wanted more though, and so I was happy,'' she said.
That upbeat attitude and modesty has made Bynes sort of the anti-Lindsay Lohan, a teen queen who isn't tabloid fodder.
``I enjoy having fun, letting loose; I just don't want to be known for that,'' she said. ``Now that I'm 18, I'm an adult technically, but I've sort of always been mature. I like to have fun, but I'm serious. So I don't know, I'm just sort of me.''
With a thriving TV and film career and a loyal fan base of young women who have grown up with her, her common-sense approach seems appropriate for someone with a dentist dad and a chiropractor brother. Unlike so many others who were pushed into the spotlight by the prototypical stage mom, Bynes began at age 7 because she wanted to.
``No one in my family is an actor, but I've always loved to perform,'' she said. ``My goal is different than, I think, a lot of actors. For me, I want to do things that I can show my kids one day and that I can watch with my friends and be proud of. I don't want to be a celebrity. I don't want to be a big movie star. I mean, it's exciting when you get to do a fun photo shoot and have very talented makeup artists paint you and make you look different. But it's unfulfilling to have the goal of wanting to be a movie star.''
When she was 10, her father enrolled Bynes in a Saturday-morning comedy camp at Hollywood's Laugh Factory. In classic Hollywood fashion, Nickelodeon producers spotted her, and until she was 14, Bynes was on the network's kid variety show ``All That.''
One of her characters, a comic bipolar advice columnist, was such a hit that Bynes was given her own Carol Burnett-style variety show, ``The Amanda Show,'' which ran for three seasons.
In her next film, ``Lovewrecked,'' due this summer, she gets shipwrecked with ``the man of my dreams, this rock star played by Chris Carmack (``The O.C.''),'' she said.
With success comes scrutiny - and critics.
``You have to have thick skin,'' Bynes said. ``I'm lucky enough to be confident in who I am. I'm like, `This is who I am and you can take it or leave it.' ''

http://theedge.bostonherald.com/movi...rticleid=72687

[Sk8er gurl]

robots sounds really cool :D