Review of Meet the Robinsons (2007) by Markb. — 09 Apr 2007

Rarely has any movie--any genre, animated or not--so completely, frustratingly, maddeningly self-destructed in so many different ways after such a promising, enjoyable start. Lewis, an orphaned child who grows up to be a pre-adolescent would-be inventor (with a hairstyle that's probably meant to evoke Back to the Future's Doc Brown but put me more uncomfortably in mind of There's Something About Mary) builds a portable time machine in hopes of visiting the past and discovering his real parentage.

..until his plans get interrupted by a slightly older boy from the future who needs his help and a stereotypical, Oil Can Harry-type villainous figure looking to throw several monkey wrenches into the works.

This Disney-produced CGI film's early scenes--set in Lewis's orphanage and at his school's science fair--are fun, and feature several amusing characters: an overcaffeinated teacher, a dimly self-important coach (who wears the most potentially obscene pair of shorts ever seen in a G-rated feature) and the orphanage's appealingly levelheaded director (warmly voiced by Angela Bassett).

Once the time travel begins, everything falls apart. The futuristic Robinson family that Lewis encounters in his adventure is apparently three parts the Sycamore clan from Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You and two parts the Addams family; they (and this picture) suffer from the same malady that thoroughly wrecked Madagascar, Robots, Shark Tale, nearly every Simpsons episode of the last ten years and every Family Guy episode period--a willful lack of comic discipline on the part of the filmmakers and writers that allows them self-permitted carte blanche to throw every joke they came up with in script conferences (no matter how unfunny, tasteless or character-inappropriate), guaranteeing a singularly annoying moviegoing experience to be followed in three months by a DVD with no deleted scenes.

Worst of all is this movie's astonishingly heartless climax, in which a peripheral character we care about is left out in the cold and the only plot element in which we had any emotional stake is cavalierly dismissed.

The movie's theme, delivered with predictable sledgehammer subtlety, is to forget the past and look to the future--a philosophy the movie ascribes to Walt Disney himself--but all the brightly-colored if unimaginative design, 3-D gimmickry and the apparent eleventh-hour participation of Pixar genius John Lassiter in a futile attempt to patch this mess together doesn't change the fact that the kids in my audience (who spent a lot of Meet the Robinsons' running time chasing each other up and down the aisles and throwing popcorn) were far more interested in the vintage Mickey Mouse cartoon that preceded this.

Roger Ebert once postulated that it's impossible to make a good movie that features a hot air balloon (and later admitted that he forgot The Wizard of Oz). Well, repeated viewings of It's A Wonderful Life, the Back to the Future movies, the Terminator films, Time After Time and (of course) the 1960 version of The Time Machine could convince many moviegoers that it's equally impossible to make a BAD film that features a time-travel device.

No, it isn't.