‘Robinsons’ Shows
Disney Improvement
© By Kevin Paquet, 2007

"Meet the Robinsons" is the computer-generated story of Lewis (voiced by Jordan Fry), an orphan who keeps being turned down for adoption because he likes to test his inventions out in front of prospective parents.

On the day of his 124^th rejection, Mildred (Angela Bassett), the caretaker of the orphanage, tries to comfort him by telling him that although he has been turned down by everyone, at least his mother must have loved him. The unintentional by-product of her comment, however, is to cause him to try and remember what his mother looked like by building a brain-scanning device.

He takes his creation to the science fair, where he meets Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who claims to be a time cop from the future, and attempts to use a coupon as ID to prove it. Wilbur warns Lewis to watch out for a man wearing a bowler hat. (I’m not condensing that much, either; the movie was pretty jerky.)

There is indeed a man wearing a bowler hat in the room, and the hat, which is robotic, disables Lewis’s machine so that when he turns it on, the cement mixing attachment sticking out the top of it flies loose and takes out an overhead light.

Lewis wants to be left alone after that, but Wilbur, who really is a time traveler, takes Lewis to the future in a time machine he stole from his parents. As it turns out, Wilber left the door to the garage unlocked the previous night, and one of two time machines was stolen by the man in the bowler hat. Why Wilbur didn’t just travel back to the previous night and shut the garage door properly is just one of those things you don’t think about too hard.

Lewis is astounded by the future, which looks like something that came out of a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Wilbur and Lewis fly across a brightly colored futuristic city to the accompaniment of trippy pop music that would probably be soothing to people trapped in stuck elevators. Wilbur then takes Lewis back to his home…where Lewis meets the Robinsons.

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I still think that Disney is bringing up the rear in terms of computer-generated films, but I will say that they’re getting better. The characters here are less stereotyped than those in Disney’s previous showing, "The Wild" (2006), itself an improvement over the awful "Chicken Little" of 2005. "Meet the Robinsons" featured likable (if spastic) characters, a plot that actually had some twists, and just enough (but not too much) of the blended concoction of wholesome values and humor known as Disney Magic.

The truth of the matter is that Disney never lost the Disney Magic; on the contrary, they lost the Disney Normal (believability, plot structure, etc.) and produced a couple of films that were like eating a plate of sugar and ketchup.

The one problem that hasn’t seen any refinement from "The Wild" to this film is the overly hectic pace of the plot. All this movie really needs to take it from "Decent" to "Good" is about five minutes’ worth of dead silence spread around between breaths.

Bonus points for the caffeine patch, the meatball combat sequence, and the fact that the present looks like 1989, but the future looks like 1955, possibly under the influence of drugs from 1968. Kevin gives it three stars out of five.