Meet the Robinsons
Daniel Hansen, Jordan Fry, Wesley Singerman; Directed by Stephen J. Anderson
Meet the Robinsons invites us to follow the extraordinary adventures of Louis, a young orphan boy with a curious mind and a love for inventing things. Unfortunately, his unusual creations don’t always go as planned, and Louis inadvertently sends many the prospective parent running out the orphanage door. After one too many rejections, Louis finally makes up his mind to try and find his real mother. The young boy genius works through the days and through the nights, keeping his suffering roommate awake, and piecing together a memory-reading machine that will hopefully send an image of his mother through a small screen, a projection of one of his earliest memories. When Louis is encouraged to enter his project into the science fair, he is approached by Wilbur Robinson, a boy who claims that he has traveled back in time to prevent a terrible accident from happening. Louis also learns that a villain known as Bowler Hat Guy is going to try and steal his mind-reading machine. All of this blows Louis’s mind, and he refuses to believe a word Wilbur tells him...until he’s taken for a ride aboard a flying time travel machine and rocketed nearly thirty years into the future.
Based on William Joyce’s acclaimed book, A Day With Wilbur Robinson, the film is a joyous mishmash of zany characters, outrageous happenings, and enough loopy, madcap architecture to make Willy Wonka consider moving his business out of the factory.
The Robinsons are kind and warm souls to be sure, but one can only realize this after the initial shock of the family has worn off. Grandfather Robinson regularly wears his clothes backwards, an uncle delivers pizzas in his spaceship, the butler is a monstrous purple octopus named ‘Lefty’, and Mrs. Robinson enjoys striking up a band of swingin’ green frogs who perform at dinnertime. There simply is no end to the madness.
Happily, there is heart and purpose to all of this. For the first time in his life, Louis gets to meet a group of people who accept and appreciate him for who he is. When the time machine breaks, Louis’s attempts to fix it go sour several times, and his frustration grows worse each time he fails. But the family applauds his failures, celebrating the fact that he has at least managed to try. The story also gets to benefit from one of the funniest children’s movie villains I have ever seen. Bowler Hat Guy fulfills almost every bad-guy stereotype there is - black clothing, twirlable moustache, a sneaking hunched-over prowl, and a mwuaha-ha-ha! laugh, to top it all off.You would almost be certain that this was the same guy who tied Mary Pickford to the train tracks in those old silent dramas, except that he’s a cartoon, and one of the most incompetent and unlucky schemers ever to try his hand at revenge. In fact, he is so misguided and unsuccessful, that one almost starts to feel genuine sympathy for him. This nagging feeling soon pays off when an alarming twist reveals that Bowler Hat Guy’s thievery and disagreeable intentions are actually all rooted in a great harm that Louis had unknowingly done to him.
Another thing I enjoyed about this film were the vocal performances. By the time the end credits rolled around, I was surprised to see that the majority of the voice talents were relatively unknown to me. For once, it was kind of nice not to have to see a preview for an animated film throw out talent bait with the words ‘Academy Award Winner’ or ‘Nominee’ preceding the names of actors. The performances here were all top-notch and got more laughs out of me than usual.
This film had no less than seven writers working on it, all toiling especially hard to pacify the doubts many people had about Disney’s ability to continue producing quality animated features without holding Pixar’s hand. If this film is a sign of things to come, they succeeded. An amazing plot twist caught me completely by surprise, something somewhere in the middle of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future, and Oedipus Rex - to some extent. Nothing was predictable here, and the story was so unexpectedly good that I found myself leaving the theatre somewhat stunned. The Robinson family motto, “keep moving forward”, is frequently repeated throughout the film, and it was so refreshing to see Disney embrace that saying wholeheartedly with Meet the Robinsons. I think that stunned feeling was a spark of hope for the future of family films.
Grading:
Story = A
Originality = A
Acting = A
Enjoyability = B+
Visuals = A
Overall = A-
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