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Five years separate Disney’s last entertaining film and this one. What Meet the Robinsons lacks in coherent narrative and character development it makes up for in high doses of eccentricity. There’s low energy dramatics here, and it beats the audience over the head with its themes and moral lessons. No, it doesn’t beat you over the head with it, it presents over and over again with all the subtlety of a chainsaw through Jell-O.
Having met the Robinsons, I couldn’t tell you any of their names. Apart from main characters Wilbur and Lewis, the rest are just a random name added on to a defining quirk. There’s a grandpa with a backwards head, a housewife who conducts a frog orchestra, a guy obsessed with a meatball cannon, a girl obsessed with trains and a weird accent, and a dog with glasses. This is but a small collection of the ensemble, and we haven’t even gotten to the villains yet.
Disney adds another gay-coded villain to their collection, a gangly, tall creep with bad teeth, a skintight suit, high-heeled ankle boots, and a spectacular comb over. Bowler Hat Guy isn’t a very good villain, but he’s mildly diverting. He’s good for a laugh, but his epic plan is stupid, and the reveal is obvious in a scene towards the end of the first act. Even for a children’s film, Meet the Robinsons distrusts in our intelligence to follow the story.
Where Meet the Robinsons excels is in crafting imaginative images. Granted, there’s not much of a story to go along with them. The story is cobbled together from disparate parts of Back to the Future franchise, The Jetsons, and a dash of The Matrix. But Meet the Robinsons taps into a child’s imagination for a vision of the future in which people travel in bubbles, squids are butlers, robots are personal assistants and made of rubber, and there’s some cute and charming stuff involving a displaced T-Rex. I’m not sure it adds up to a satisfying conclusion, but it’s entertaining in the moment.
No shocker to learn that this was the first film, partially, overseen by John Lasseter. It plays as a bit of a course correction, and the growing pains to the modern day revival are evident. It’s an warm bit of fluff, and nothing more. I’ll take this minor success after so many unsatisfying viewing experiences. It doesn’t bring anything new to the Disney stable, but it is good enough as a corrective and pleasant way to spend 90 minutes. I can’t imagine too many people want to return to it again and again, though.
