Disney Movie Challenge
Meet the Robinsons (2007)
Starting with Meet the Robinsons we enter a transition period for Disney. The 2000’s saw Disney struggle and be overshadowed by animated features from Pixar and Dreamworks. While Meet the Robinsons wasn't a huge success you feel Disney starting to right the ship and the beginning of the second Disney Renaissance.
Meet the Robinsons is about an orphan twelve year old named Lewis. Lewis fancies himself as an inventor and has some crazy gadgets. But, it is these gadgets that seem to keep him from getting adopted. When he enters a science fair with a machine he thinks will show memories (he hopes to find out why his mother left him for adoption) a man in a bowler hat sabotages his machine and causes it to fail. Luckily there is another kid (Wilbur Robinson) who wants to help him succeed. Wilbur tells Lewis he is from the future and to prove it he takes Lewis to the future with him There Lewis meets the rest of the quirky Robinsons. They welcome him to their home and for the first time Lewis feels like he has a family. When the family finds out he is from the past they tell him he can’t stay and must go back to his time. Meanwhile the man with the bowler hat is still trying to steal Lewis’ invention so he can claim it as his own. The bowler hat is revealed to be a sentient robot called Doris who has nefarious plans of her own. There are a bunch of twists that follow but in the end Lewis goes back to the science fair and proves his memory scanner works and everything works out.
As I mentioned earlier Meet the Robinsons came during a transition period for Disney. After Jeffrey Katzenberg left to start Dreakworks in 1994 Disney Animation went through a number of leaders. After Disney bought Pixar in 2006 John Lasseter, who was Vice President of Pixar, was named Chief Creative Office of both Disney Feature Animations and Pixar animations. At the time he took over Meet the Robinsons was already in development. When he screened the film for the first time he told them the villain needed to be more scary. 60% of the movie was then reworked adding Doris the hat and a dinosaur chase at the end.
Meet the Robinsons is the second (third if you count The Wild) fully computer animated film for Disney. While it’s definitely an improvement it still feels like early computer animated films. By this point Pixar and Dreamworks had come a long way and making cutting edge films and the Disney team still had a lot of catching up to do. To give you an idea, the animation in this movie reminded me more of Jimmy Neutron which came out in 2001 and less like Ratatouille which came out the same year as this film. But given the film has an overall retro look it doesn’t take too much away.
What I really liked about the movie is the writing. It has funny and clever dialogue that feels like early Lord and Miller style. I even had to look up if they were involved but they weren’t. One of my favorite lines from the film is “Knock ‘em dead...that was a figure of speech don’t kill anyone” right before Lewis turns his invention on at the science fair. The biggest problem I had with the movie is the time travel. Time travel is always a tricky aspect and very rarely works for me. Each time travel movie has their own time travel rules but this one just doesn’t have any. They don’t try to explain anything and if you think too much about things it will make your head hurt. The most egregious part in my opinion is when**SPOILER ALERT** Lewis tells Doris that he just won’t invent her in the future and that solves the problem. As long as we are doing spoilers the reveal that Lewis is Wilbur's dad is kind of odd because Wilbur's dad is named Cornelius. While that is kind of explained it still feels dumb.
Overall: Not a super memorable movie but has some fun parts with good dialogue. It also moves along quickly and keeps you from getting bored. I have my issues with time travel movies and this movie doesn’t even try to explain any time travel paradoxes so best to just roll with it.
Random Facts
The character of Lewis was voiced by both Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry. Daniel Hansen voiced Lewis at the beginning of the film's production, and when the studio needed Lewis' lines changed, they had Jordan Fry re-dub many segments
Director Stephen Anderson wanted to direct the movie because he was also adopted and connected with the character Lewis.
Only Disney Animated film to be scored by Danny Elfman. While I usually enjoy his scores this one wasn't very memorable.
