Meet the Robinsons
"Meet the Robinsons" is the first movie to come out of Walt Disney Feature Animation since
Especially if you see it in 3-D, which you probably will. With "Robinsons," Disney is escalating the 3-D experiment it started with 2005's "Chicken Little ," and the film industry is watching very, very closely. Nearly 700 theaters nationwide have recently been outfitted with projectors capable of showing the twin polarized images, and boxes of grey-tinted imitation Ray-Bans are stacked up. It may be time to replace that iconic '50s photograph of an audience wearing red-and-green paper glasses with a vision of a theater full of Roy Orbison clones. (The film will also be released in the standard 2-D format . )
So how's the movie? Good enough that it doesn't really have to be in 3-D. This tale of a boy genius misunderstood in his own time but loved and even necessary in the future is bright, fast, and comical, with a poignant emotional throughline that's only slightly compromised by Disney's heavy-handed way with a branding iron. However Pixar's DNA has entwined with the host object, it's to the benefit of "Meet the Robinsons," which is a markedly better movie than "Chicken Little."
Our Tom Swift -wannabe is Lewis (voiced by two actors, Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry , though the film's publicity materials are mum on why), a bespectacled, bristle-headed orphan desperate to be part of a family. Some 124 couples have rejected him, mostly because his many inventions have a tendency to blow up. How was Lewis to know his PB&J-making machine would kick off a peanut allergy in one prospective dad?
Determined to find out why his mother left him on the orphanage steps when he was an infant, Lewis creates a memory-retrieval device and plans to unveil it at the school science fair. He's stopped by two figures out of the future: a moustache-twirling villain in a bowler hat (director Stephen Anderson , doing double duty) and an energetic young boy named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman ). Turns out that something awful is going down three decades from now and Lewis's help is required.
If this sounds like we've somehow wandered into "Back to the Future Part II ," you're right. "Meet the Robinsons" dodges the issue by introducing us to Wilbur's extended and strenuously wacky family: It's as if The Incredibles were staging a revival of "You Can't Take it With You " on the leftover sets of "The Jetsons ." Grandpa (Anderson again) wears his clothes backward , Uncle Art (Holy Comeback, it's Adam West ) is a pizza-delivering superhero, mother Franny (Nicole Sullivan ) is a hot mom, the butler's an octopus, and there are two strange cousins in the potted plants.
I haven't mentioned the lounge-jazz-singing frogs, have I? Nor the uncle who's married to a hand puppet? (They've somehow had kids, but I don't think we want to go there.)
All this comes at us fast and furiously, and in one frenzied sequence the 3 - D action-o-rama became so intense I began to feel physically disoriented. (Like they say in the
There are reasons for the villain's campaign to stop Lewis, and they're fairly baroque, involving an army of mind-controlling bowler hats, enslaved frog zombies, an earnest T. Rex, and much zip-zap-zipping between now and tomorrow. The classic logic of time-travel fiction doesn't hold up, but your kids will still get the giggles from scenes they're not already familiar with from the trailer.
So will you -- but you'll also notice the bits cribbed from other movies, as well as a narrative motor that keeps coughing like one of Lewis's misfired inventions. There are seven credited writers on "Robinsons," and it sometimes seems as if they're all talking at once.
I ended up just luxuriating in the film's pastel retro-future visual scheme and trying to ignore the parts that looked like Disney World. There's so much visual invention in "Robinsons" that it sometimes runs over the sides and a bluebird wearing a fez will pop up in a corner of the screen. Why? Who needs a reason?
The film's mantra is "Keep moving forward," and it's applied until you want to happily cry uncle. For all its wonderment, though, "Meet the Robinsons" is product that comes from a massive entertainment conglomerate, and at the very end of the movie comes an unexpectedly blunt reminder of that.
Some parents and kids might find this last touch charming, a reconnection with Walt's original mission. Those of us who already resent how deeply Disney has colonized our children's imaginations may find it leaves a sour taste more unsettling than any 3 - D-induced vertigo. Enough already: Who's wearing the bowler hats here and who are the enslaved? And how do we get back to the future?
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