What we have here is a movie with too many ideas, but nowhere near enough time to fit them all in. With
Meet the Robinsons, you get the sense that filmmaker Stephen J. Anderson and his crew had a lot of inventive and funny ideas, and tried their best to squeeze them all in. The end result is a frustrating movie that seems constantly on the verge of clicking, but the tone is too scattered and chaotic for it to do so. When your movie has singing frogs, evil hats bent on world domination and an alien octopus-like creature, and these are minor cameo characters that the film barely touches on, you know your movie is a little too full in the ideas department.
12-year-old child genius Lewis (voice by Daniel Hansen) has been living at the local orphanage ever since his mom dropped him on the doorstep of the building when he was a baby. Wanting to know who his real mother was, Lewis decides to invent a device that can scan a person's brain for forgotten memories and display them on a monitor for the school's Science Fair. At the Fair, Lewis finds himself followed by a strange kid named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who claims to be from the future, and is tracking a mysterious villain that has traveled back in time and is after Lewis and his invention. The villain in question is an odd fellow who goes by the name of "Bowler Hat Guy" (director Stephen J. Anderson), and wants to steal Lewis' brain scanning invention and claim it as his own for reasons unknown initially. Using Wilbur's time machine, Lewis gets to visit the World of Tomorrow, and meets Wilbur's large and eccentric family. The Robinson family may be bizarre, but they genuinely come to love Lewis, and are the closest thing to a family he's ever known. But with the Bowler Hat Guy in constant pursuit and Wilbur's time machine damaged during the trip to the future, it will take everything young Lewis has to make it back to his own time.
Meet the Robinsons has a lot of ideas that would work independently and on their own, but combined together, just don't add up to a whole lot. The film is frequently disjointed and often seems confused. There are a lot of characters and thoughts that seem intriguing, but the movie does nothing with them, so they come across as being mere oddities instead of fleshed out characters we can care about. The bizarre Robinson family include a mother who has taught frogs how to sing and perform Big Band-style music, a man who lets a crude puppet do most of the talking for him, and a guy who dresses like a superhero but has a job delivering pizzas. Because these characters are used mainly for throwaway sight gags or are restricted to stand in the background in every scene, they seem to be weird just for the sake of being weird. One of the messages the film seems to want to impart to children is to be proud of who you are, no matter how others may see you. This message is mainly lost in the chaos that is this movie, because we never get to truly meet the Robinsons, despite the title. They're props and easy visual gags, and not much else. We've got all these bizarre characters who probably all could have an entire movie built solely around each individual one. Instead, they're forced to compete with time travel and world domination plots. Everything is competing for screen time, and we wind up feeling exhausted instead of entertained by the time it's all over. The filmmakers seem to try to throw everything but the kitchen sink up there on the screen, when I think a "less is more" approach would have suited the material best.
That's not to say the film doesn't work, because there are a lot of times when it does. The whole time travel aspect of the story leads to some genuinely touching moments. Yes, the outcome and revelations are very predictable, but they are also effective. I also liked the look of the film quite a lot. The depiction of the future in this movie is bright and colorful, and seems to be ripped right out of the pages of a 1940s sci-fi magazine. It's a shame we get to see so little of the world, outside of the Robinsons' massive house. We get some tantalizing shots of the society as Lewis and Wilbur fly overhead in the time machine, but then we never see any of these things again. Still, there is some stunning animation on display, and some very strong character designs. A key standout is the Bowler Hat Guy, who is a charmingly retro villain. Dressed all in black and with a curly handlebar mustache, he is a big, gaudy villain who seems to have stepped right out of an 1890s melodrama. The Bowler Hat Guy is fascinating in his design. With his long, spider-like hands and legs, and his bizarre movement patterns (he almost seems to zip from one part of the room to another at times), he is a testament to the sort of freedom that animation can provide. There's no way a character such as him could have been created in live action; His movements and mannerisms are simply too bizarre, but a joy to watch. The film's secondary villain is his trademark bowler hat, which is robotic and has a mind of its own, as well as the ability to move about at will either by flying or by sprouting metallic spider-like legs. The animators also do a great job bringing life to an inanimate object here (especially since the thing "talks" in a series of R2-D2 style beeps and clicks), but its big moment near the end seems anticlimactic. It seems as if most of the hat's material that the film's been leading up to was left behind in the editing room. I was left feeling like there should have been more.
I had that feeling a lot while watching
Meet the Robinsons. I wanted more on the Robinsons themselves. I wanted more of these grand ideas that the movie kept on hinting at, but never acting upon. Most of all, I wanted the movie to slow down. The film is rapid-fire in its storytelling and even more so in the telling of its jokes. There are scenes where everyone talks so fast, it sounds like the actors were being rushed through their lines in the recording studio. This gives the film an unnecessarily chaotic tone. Things calm down quite a bit during the last 15 minutes or so, as this is the supposed to be the poignant "message" part of the film. Unfortunately, by then, it is too little too late. The film had already failed to captivate me the way I thought it wanted to. It also doesn't earn its own poignancy, because it doesn't care about its characters enough. When Lewis has a chance to actually find out about his past, the scene does not stick with us, simply because we know so little about Lewis himself other than he's an orphan and likes to invent things. Everyone in this movie fails to impress in the slightest, except for the Bowler Hat Guy, and that's only because of his interesting character design. The way I see it, just because a movie was animated with computers does not mean the film itself has to be as cold and emotionless as the machines that made it. Someone should have passed that note along to the Disney Studio before this film went into production.
Will kids like this movie? Hard to say. This is one of those movies where I kept on trying to like it. I was practically forcing myself to fall for its offbeat charm and characters, but the movie's many flaws kept on holding me back. It's not a terrible movie, and it's certainly a big step up from Disney's last in-house computer animated film,
Chicken Little.
Meet the Robinsons is just too interested on being weird and quirky simply because it feels like it should be in order to stand out. If there was a method to the madness, I would have embraced this film with open arms. As it stands, the movie comes across as a bunch of half-baked ideas running around on the screen looking for a story worthy enough to contain them. The story within
Meet the Robinsons is not the one.
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What we have here is a movie with too many ideas, but nowhere near enough time to fit them all in. With Meet the Robinsons, you get the sense that filmmaker Stephen J. Anderson and his crew had a lot of inventive and funny ideas, and tried their best to squeeze them all in. The end result is a frustrating movie that seems constantly on the verge of clicking, but the tone is too scattered and chaotic for it to do so. When your movie has singing frogs, evil hats bent on world domination and an alien octopus-like creature, and these are minor cameo characters that the film barely touches on, you know your movie is a little too full in the ideas department.
12-year-old child genius Lewis (voice by Daniel Hansen) has been living at the local orphanage ever since his mom dropped him on the doorstep of the building when he was a baby. Wanting to know who his real mother was, Lewis decides to invent a device that can scan a person's brain for forgotten memories and display them on a monitor for the school's Science Fair. At the Fair, Lewis finds himself followed by a strange kid named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who claims to be from the future, and is tracking a mysterious villain that has traveled back in time and is after Lewis and his invention. The villain in question is an odd fellow who goes by the name of "Bowler Hat Guy" (director Stephen J. Anderson), and wants to steal Lewis' brain scanning invention and claim it as his own for reasons unknown initially. Using Wilbur's time machine, Lewis gets to visit the World of Tomorrow, and meets Wilbur's large and eccentric family. The Robinson family may be bizarre, but they genuinely come to love Lewis, and are the closest thing to a family he's ever known. But with the Bowler Hat Guy in constant pursuit and Wilbur's time machine damaged during the trip to the future, it will take everything young Lewis has to make it back to his own time.
Meet the Robinsons has a lot of ideas that would work independently and on their own, but combined together, just don't add up to a whole lot. The film is frequently disjointed and often seems confused. There are a lot of characters and thoughts that seem intriguing, but the movie does nothing with them, so they come across as being mere oddities instead of fleshed out characters we can care about. The bizarre Robinson family include a mother who has taught frogs how to sing and perform Big Band-style music, a man who lets a crude puppet do most of the talking for him, and a guy who dresses like a superhero but has a job delivering pizzas. Because these characters are used mainly for throwaway sight gags or are restricted to stand in the background in every scene, they seem to be weird just for the sake of being weird. One of the messages the film seems to want to impart to children is to be proud of who you are, no matter how others may see you. This message is mainly lost in the chaos that is this movie, because we never get to truly meet the Robinsons, despite the title. They're props and easy visual gags, and not much else. We've got all these bizarre characters who probably all could have an entire movie built solely around each individual one. Instead, they're forced to compete with time travel and world domination plots. Everything is competing for screen time, and we wind up feeling exhausted instead of entertained by the time it's all over. The filmmakers seem to try to throw everything but the kitchen sink up there on the screen, when I think a "less is more" approach would have suited the material best.
That's not to say the film doesn't work, because there are a lot of times when it does. The whole time travel aspect of the story leads to some genuinely touching moments. Yes, the outcome and revelations are very predictable, but they are also effective. I also liked the look of the film quite a lot. The depiction of the future in this movie is bright and colorful, and seems to be ripped right out of the pages of a 1940s sci-fi magazine. It's a shame we get to see so little of the world, outside of the Robinsons' massive house. We get some tantalizing shots of the society as Lewis and Wilbur fly overhead in the time machine, but then we never see any of these things again. Still, there is some stunning animation on display, and some very strong character designs. A key standout is the Bowler Hat Guy, who is a charmingly retro villain. Dressed all in black and with a curly handlebar mustache, he is a big, gaudy villain who seems to have stepped right out of an 1890s melodrama. The Bowler Hat Guy is fascinating in his design. With his long, spider-like hands and legs, and his bizarre movement patterns (he almost seems to zip from one part of the room to another at times), he is a testament to the sort of freedom that animation can provide. There's no way a character such as him could have been created in live action; His movements and mannerisms are simply too bizarre, but a joy to watch. The film's secondary villain is his trademark bowler hat, which is robotic and has a mind of its own, as well as the ability to move about at will either by flying or by sprouting metallic spider-like legs. The animators also do a great job bringing life to an inanimate object here (especially since the thing "talks" in a series of R2-D2 style beeps and clicks), but its big moment near the end seems anticlimactic. It seems as if most of the hat's material that the film's been leading up to was left behind in the editing room. I was left feeling like there should have been more.
I had that feeling a lot while watching Meet the Robinsons. I wanted more on the Robinsons themselves. I wanted more of these grand ideas that the movie kept on hinting at, but never acting upon. Most of all, I wanted the movie to slow down. The film is rapid-fire in its storytelling and even more so in the telling of its jokes. There are scenes where everyone talks so fast, it sounds like the actors were being rushed through their lines in the recording studio. This gives the film an unnecessarily chaotic tone. Things calm down quite a bit during the last 15 minutes or so, as this is the supposed to be the poignant "message" part of the film. Unfortunately, by then, it is too little too late. The film had already failed to captivate me the way I thought it wanted to. It also doesn't earn its own poignancy, because it doesn't care about its characters enough. When Lewis has a chance to actually find out about his past, the scene does not stick with us, simply because we know so little about Lewis himself other than he's an orphan and likes to invent things. Everyone in this movie fails to impress in the slightest, except for the Bowler Hat Guy, and that's only because of his interesting character design. The way I see it, just because a movie was animated with computers does not mean the film itself has to be as cold and emotionless as the machines that made it. Someone should have passed that note along to the Disney Studio before this film went into production.
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