Ever since I started seeing previews for it, I’ve been curious about 2007’s Meet the Robinsons.
This was partly because it was computer-animated, but not in
collaboration with Pixar. I also found myself chortling over a couple of
scenes in the previews, those involving the hyper woman in the lab coat
with caffeine patches and the Tyrannosaurus Rex who can’t fulfill his
mission because he has a big head and little arms. On the other hand, I
hadn’t been much impressed with Chicken Little, and I feared I
might have the same reaction to this Disney flick. I finally saw it, and
happily, it was better than I expected.
Lewis (Daniel Hansen /
Jordan Fry) is an exceedingly clever but lonely lad. He’s spent all of
his 12 years in an orphanage run by the kind-hearted Mildred (Angela
Bassett); though she treats him well, he longs to leave, to have a
family of his own. But he’s undergone 124 adoption interviews, and
somehow, he’s failed to attract a single set of parents. His inventions
have a way of scaring people off. But when Mildred suggests that the
mother who abandoned him might have done so out of necessity rather than
lack of love, he becomes obsessed with finding her. To that end, he
toils for days on a memory scanner that will allow him to retrieve an
image of his mother from the depths of his memory.
When the
day of the science fair finally arrives, Lewis is convinced that he has
succeeded. But testing the machine out leads to disaster, thanks to the
interference of a teenage boy named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman)
who claims to be a secret agent from the future and a sinister man
(director Stephen J. Anderson) dressed in black, from his shoes to his
signature bowler hat. Wilbur insists that Lewis must return to the
science fair and try again, but he’s hardly in the mood, so to give
credence to his case, Wilbur whisks Lewis off to the future in his time
machine. Lewis is suitably impressed - but then the time machine
crashes, and until he can figure out how to fix it, he’s stuck in the
future, surrounded by an extended, eccentric family and pursued by a
villain with a definite axe to grind.
In some ways, Meet the Robinsons
is a pretty silly movie. With all of Lewis’s unstable inventions, there
are explosions aplenty, and once he is introduced to the Robinson
family in the future, the mayhem really begins. Wilbur’s mom teaches
singing to frogs. The family has an octopus for a butler, and toothless
Grandpa has a funny habit of walking around with his clothes on
backwards. The future is full of eye-popping sights, like people
traveling around in bubbles or dogs wearing glasses. It’s all very well
suited to animation, and thankfully the characters look much better here
than they did in Chicken Little.
But this movie isn’t
just an excuse to show off in the visual department or to elicit giggles
over slapstick. No, it’s the story of a pair of orphans, Lewis and his
roommate Goob (Matthew Josten), both oddballs looking for families to
love them. In that way, it reminds me quite a bit of Angels in the Outfield.
Lewis, like Roger, is particularly focused on reclaiming a connection
to his biological parent. Unlike Roger, he is a man of science, and so
he turns to his experiments to help him achieve his dream of a real
home. What he finds in the future is that there are many different ways
to make a family and that love is the most important ingredient.
Because this takes place in the not-so-distant future, it’s fun to look
at those Lewis meets and contemplate whether we might have seen them
before in Lewis’s own time. The story behind Bowler Hat Guy is
especially interesting. I guessed his connection to Lewis fairly early
on, but that didn’t make his back story any less interesting or his
antics any less entertaining. As villains go, he’s pretty
nonthreatening; he reminded me very much of Count Olaf from A Series of Unfortunate Events,
and Jim Carrey even was invited to provide his voice. He is
over-the-top and easily bested by smarter, more accomplished parties,
not to mention manipulated by a reprehensible (albeit comical) henchman.
Despite his drive for revenge, he rarely comes across as truly vicious,
and one of my favorite aspects of the movie is the fact that he is
offered a shot at redemption.
Although I would never confuse
this with a Pixar movie, it’s still a very high-quality film, with a
tender message or two to go along with the futuristic hi-jinks. It’s a
little bit Lost In Space and a little bit Back to the Future,
but mostly it’s a whole lot of fun, culminating in a lesson from Walt
Disney himself to “keep moving forward” because “curiosity keeps leading
us down new paths.” I wouldn’t hesitate to introduce anyone to these
Robinsons.
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