Kids movies are made for kids. We all know that. Parents can take-it-or-leave-it. However, we also know that the good kids movies save parents from having to hire a babysitter by being enjoyable to both children and adults alike. Why is this? Because they tell good stories. In most cases, when they’re unable to deliver convincing pathos (read: The Lion King), they can still be howlingly funny and ooze fun (read: The Emperor’s New Groove, which director Stephen J. Anderson worked on).
Meet the Robinsons is further proof that Disney can’t work in CG without Pixar. This film speeds towards madcap and fun fun fun, but forgot to pack humor, wit, or even a remotely sensible story in the trunk. Young kids will find this movie colorful and bright, but I question how much they’d really like it after a few days. Adults, unfortunately, will just have to suffer through colorfully bright trash.
The story goes something along the lines of this: a twelve-year-old orphan boy named Lewis is a genius inventor prodigy who’s lived his whole life in an orphanage because nobody wants to adopt him and his wacky, malfunctioning inventions. After scaring away over a hundred potential parents, Lewis decides that he’s going to find his real mother by building a memory television and submitting it in the Science Fair. However, a shady guy wearing a sentient mechanical bowler hat sabotages the fair and steals the machine. Lewis then meets a strange boy called Wilbur Robinson, who claims that he and Bowler Hat Guy are from the future. To prove this, Wilbur takes Lewis to the future, where he meets the rest of the Robinsons’ big wacky family. It is here that the movie stops being a movie and becomes a pilot for a Saturday morning cartoon. We are introduced to a dozen family members, all of whom function as nothing more than one or two sight gags; leaving an impression that maybe we’ll see more of them in next week’s episode.
For half the movie, Meet the Robinsons doesn’t even have a valid story. We know there’s an evil Bowler Hat Guy, but who is he? Why is he doing any of this? Who is Wilbur and why is he clinging to Lewis? More importantly: what the heck is going on? I don’t know, and the film doesn’t care. They keep things in a mystery, but when the answers are finally revealed at the end, it’s just predictable and not very inventive. All that matters is introducing one kooky family member and shiny gadget after another. Meanwhile, Walt Disney’s quote “Keep moving forward” is perpetually repeated as the moral of the story, which is all sorts of endearing, if they didn’t take it too literally and made the movie in fast-forward.
But perhaps all this can be ignored if only the movie’s funny and charming. Meet the Robinsons deliberately renounces sweet charm in favor of hip, sharp-shootin’ jokes. It has many blunders, but lack of trying is certainly not one of them. There’s a gag in nearly every scene; you almost lose track of them. Yet nearly all of them miss the mark. Worst of all, if the audience I saw it with was of any indication, a lot of the jokes go over the youngins’ heads, but not funny by adult standards, worthy of maybe a pity chuckle from a handful of people. It’s actually quite painful to sit through these constant misfires. It’s telling that the biggest laugh the movie got was when a picture of Tom Selleck abruptly appears after Wilbur mentions the actor (which, by the way, what is the possibility of a 13 year old from the future knowing who he is, since you can hardly find one today? But that’s a cheap shot and let us not go there). The romps are random, pointless and obnoxious; like Family Guy with G-rated jokes (it’s worse than it sounds).
The animation isn’t crappy, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. The 3D aspect is handled tastefully, without the usual audience service of having objects fly off the screen, but doesn’t that take out the fun of 3D in the first place? Especially when the alternative is watching three-dimensional renderings of bland designs. Without anything else to sustain my interest, the least they could do was to make the 3D experience fun. Monster House was a great movie in itself, but it still treated the 3D audience with fun sequences that pop stuff out.
This is probably the most insufferable and hard to endure Disney film since Home on the Range. Though I suspect it’s worse without the 3D glasses. You can spend 10 bucks to see this, or you can just use that to pay the neighbor kid to babysit while you watch 300 or something.
"Meet the Robinsons" opens March 30, 2007 and is rated G. Anime, Children & Family, Comedy. Written by Jon Bernstein, Michelle Bochner Spitz, Don Hall (II), Nathan Greno, Aurian Redson.
