Eventually you find yourself so eager to see Walt Disney Feature Animation hit one out of the park that you start to question yourself (“Maybe I’m just being too hard on them”). On the other hand, I recently read a story where experienced wine tasters were presented with a mediocre wine but poured out of a very high-end bottle. In their tasting notes they tended to blame themselves for any flaws in the wine.
© Disney.
Finding that fine line between overblown confidence in your own opinion and deference to presentation is difficult. The fact is that while there are many good things about Meet the Robinsons, in the end I wasn’t particularly entertained by it.
Meet the Robinsons is a story about family, and living in the future rather than the past. Young Lewis is a mechanically talented orphan living in our current time (though apparently a version of our current time where babies are dropped off in orphanages and children are still allowed to roam freely in the back seats of moving cars).
After more than 150 unsuccessful adoption interviews, Lewis becomes obsesses with finding his real mom, who will undoubtedly love him and want him back. Towards that end he begins building a machine that will extract from his mind the memory of the only time he saw his mother as an infant.
Those plans are interrupted, however, by a villain—straight out of Central Casting—in possession of a robotic bowler hat. For some reason Bowler Hat Guy wants to steal Lewis’s invention and claim it for himself. On Lewis’s side is the sudden appearance of Wilbur Robinson, a boy claiming to be from the future and insisting that Lewis finish his mind-scanning invention.
Lewis is naturally skeptical of this claim and when he insists on proof, is taken to an unknown point in the future. Things, of course, don’t go smoothly and soon Lewis has met Wilbur’s vast and eccentric family. Bowler Hat Guy is still after him, and the correct timeline is put in peril (a la Back to the Future).
The movie has two major problems, and I suspect that they both derive from the same place. Take a look this section from the official movie credits:
Screenplay by Jon Bernstein, Michelle Spitz, Don Hall, Nathan Greno, Aurian Redson, Joe Mateo, and Stephen Anderson. Based on a book by William Joyce.
This is a screenshot from the official press kit for Meet the Robinsons since IMDb doesn’t list all of these people.
Eight people with a fair amount of input on the story is a lot. Add to that John Lasseter, who with the Disney Pixar merger, came on board Meet the Robinsons as its executive producer—and made suggestions for changes. He related at a recent investor’s conference how he first saw the movie (about 80 percent) done and gave director Anderson some very strong notes about the story.
Although some were obviously much more involved and important than others, that is a lot of chefs—and it causes the movie to suffer from needless complexity and odd tone changes.
These odd tone changes really get moving with a montage sequence where Lewis stumbles across all of the oddballs in Wilbur Robinson’s extended family. In the course of five minutes the audience is introduced to what seems like two dozen characters, each of whom is a caricature sight gag. The movie has the good humor to acknowledge this with a joke where Lewis is quizzed at the end of the sequence, but it was simply too fast and rapidfire to have much impact.
One five-minute sequence like this would be fine but it recurs at a family dinner and then again during the T-Rex scene so prominently played up in the commercials and trailers.
So that is the bad—and ultimately it sank the whole enterprise for me. There is good, though, and I expect Meet the Robinsons to have many champions. We live in an ironic world and for many people, Disney animated movies are expected to be bastions against irony, a last holdout of earnestness. Chicken Little (review), Feature Animation’s first foray into all-computer animation, indicated a move towards the all-irony and pop references of Shrek and away from the sincerity and earnestness of the Pixar titles.
Fortunately Meet the Robinsons mostly steers away from that aloof cynicism. And when there are pop cultural references, they seem aimed more at the parents in the audience (a Tom Selleck joke) or even the grandparents (a moderately funny “Frank Sinatra had mob connections” joke). The humor is generally more subtle than what we’ve come to expect from recent releases (not a single fart joke that I remember) with layers, repetition, and back references.
The drawback of this increased subtlety, though, is that many of the younger kids in the audience seemed to be missing it. Any time the movie slowed down, there was a fair amount of restlessness among them.
© Disney.
It was also nice to watch, for the first time in years, an animated feature without playing a constant game of “whose voice is that?” The few recognizable names (Adam West, Angela Bassett, Laurie Metcalf) are all relegated to minor characters and don’t have particularly distinctive qualities. The one “voice cameo” I recognized I won’t spoil, and it worked to good effect. As much as I enjoy the traditions developing with the Pixar movies, it was nice to not be waiting for John Ratzenberger to make a vocal appearance.
Since I don’t necessarily buy into the idea that big name actors draw audiences to animated movies, this is a very welcome decision by Disney and director Stephen Anderson. Here’s hoping it becomes a trend.
As far as the animation goes, it can almost pass without comment. There wasn’t anything mind-blowing about it and yet nothing seemed second rate. This is surely a sign of just how ubiquitous computer-generated feature animation has become that what is surely first rate work seems pedestrian and only the truly spectacular is still noteworthy.
© Disney.
Where available, the movie is also being presented in Disney Digital 3-D (which is how I saw it). As I noted for last year’s release of The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D (review), the new technology is pretty impressive and magnitudes better than the presentations from the last time 3-D became a fad. The oversize horn-rimmed glasses are reasonably comfortable to wear (even, according to the woman behind me, if you’re already wearing glasses). For the most part, the use of 3-D simply gives depth to scenes, but there are a couple scenes that seem designed to pop out at the audience. The only flaw I see with it is when things move rapidly from close up to a distance, and I see distracting ghosting and splits in the image.
If you haven’t experienced Disney 3-D, you should probably go out of your way—but otherwise I wouldn’t drive much farther to get to a theater offering it.
It is really too bad that the movie isn’t able to settle down and just be one thing and instead bounces from point to point. There is much to be pleased with but only in pieces, somehow the total is less than the sum of the parts.
Meet the Robinsons is a Walt Disney Pictures release.
Wide theatrical release March 30
Directed by Stephen Anderson
Screenplay by Jon Bernstein and Michelle Spitz
Starring Daniel Hansen, Matthew Josten, Wesley Singerman, Stephen John Anderson
Running Time: 102 minutes
Rated G
Alex’s Rating: 7 out of 10.
