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Meet the Robinsons Running time 1:42 Rated PG-13 ShowPlace West, ShowPlace East
Even after dominating the field for years, Disney
still doesn’t seem to know which way to turn when it comes to
cartoons. The Mouse Factory’s latest foray into this genre is Meet the Robinsons, a futuristic
computer-generated little film that has the bonus of being presented in 3-D
in selected theaters. Although great strides have been made in the area of
jump-off-the-screen thrills, it’s still a gimmick that works only
part of the time. Sadly, this is an indicator of how desperate Disney has
become in the now-crowded animated field — resorting to trickery when
inspiration used to be the company’s bread-and-butter. It isn’t that Robinsons is necessarily a bad
film — but it is familiar, frantic, and unfocused.
Twelve-year-old Lewis (voiced by Jordan Fry) is an orphan who happens to be
a mechanical genius with a penchant for building outlandish inventions
(shades of Jimmy Neutron). His goal is to invent a cerebral time machine that will somehow
allow him to go back to his past to meet his mother. However, before he can
do this, he’s visited by Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), a young
teen who whisks him to the future. The reason for the trip is
shrouded in secrecy, but suffice it to say that it has something to do with
the nefarious efforts of the worst-named bad guy of all time, the Bowler
Hat Guy (Stephen J. Anderson, also the film’s director). Everything
is explained in the end, and though it doesn’t take a rocket
scientist — or a teenage inventor, for that matter — to predict
that these shenanigans have something to do with Lewis’ family, the
heartfelt sentiment behind the story
allows us to push aside many of the film’s overused plot points. To its credit, Robinsons sports a slick visual style,
a wide variety of quirky characters, and a memorable dinosaur. However, at
times there is far too much going on in the film, and it feels as though
director Anderson is taking the kitchen-sink approach to
entertaining. Ironically, these acts of desperation fit perfectly with
Disney’s current approach to filmmaking.
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2007.
