Hollywood ? In an ideal world, Robin Williams would have been born a cartoon.

After all, merely human roles rarely give him the chance to free-associate, deliver dozens of accents and leap through his imagination the way no regular person ever does. And, let’s face it, when he starts doing his shtick offstage, he occasionally wears out his welcome.

With his outsize personality, it’s little wonder that Williams has a serious affinity for the animated world. He even took a stand for “SpongeBob SquarePants” on Oscar night, arriving with his mouth taped shut because producers rejected his plan to sing a satirical song about the undersea character.

“They tell me now that SpongeBob is gay,” Williams said, referring to a conservative religious group’s criticism that the ‘toon had a “pro-homosexual” agenda.

“SquarePants is not gay,” Williams told the Kodak Theatre crowd. “TightPants — maybe. SpongeBob HotPants? You go, girl!”

When he took the role of the Blue Genie in 1992’s “Aladdin,” Williams crafted one of the most indelible characters in animation history. But after “Robots” opens on Friday, it’s possible that Williams addicts will begin calling him “Fender.” Fender is Williams’ first animated role since “Aladdin.” The red robot with a coffeepot for a head may not look much like the 53-year-old comic, but they share a certain manic energy.

Fender is “a Skid Row bum, a man living hand to foot who puts the ‘funk’ in dysfunctional,” Williams says. He also talks nonstop — sound familiar? — and keeps losing body parts to rust.

The performance makes use of Williams’ hyperactivity without, as he puts it, “my having to train. Animators can create the physicality I could never get near.

“You get a bit of carte blanche,” he adds. “I love doing the voices. I can play and create. You can’t find too many parts that allow you such freedom — and it’s easier to look at myself.”

Rodney Copperbottom (center, voiced by Ewan McGregor), befriends Piper Pinwheeler (left, voiced by Amanda Bynes) and Fender (voiced by Robin Williams) in Robots, which opens Friday in Lawrence.

For “Robots,” director Chris Wedge says all he had to do was turn Williams loose.

“We’d bring Robin ideas and script pages, and he’d very politely read the words we’d written,” Wedge says. “Then he’d start lifting off. He’d hit on something and go off for 20 minutes. The glass in the booth would be full of condensation.”

Robin Williams, who provides the voice of Fender, arrives at the premiere of Robots Sunday in Los Angeles.

Although Wedge admits, “We were able to use only about 1 percent of what he created,” they did manage to include his riff on “Singin’ in the Rain.”

And the eventual DVD outtakes will probably feature a sequence in which Fender’s unattached right hand tries to romance his equally on-the-loose left hand — in a heavy Hispanic accent.

After some troubled years in which he fought through drug addiction and a messy divorce, Williams seems to be at a peaceful point in his life. Even he has noticed that his comic libido may finally be starting to ebb.

“My wife, Marsha, says that if more than two people come into a room, I go into a certain mode,” he says. “But the older I get, the mode gets less like, ‘Hello!’

“It’s tiring, but it’s invigorating,” he adds. “Drama is cathartic, but you feed off comedy. It builds you.

“And sometimes it works the other way. If an audience is not laughing, you’ll feed off them — sometimes in an angry way but sometimes in a challenging way.

“Only later you find out they’re deaf.”