Meet the Robinsons

In 2007, the first film to be released under the direction of new CEO John Lasseter hit theaters. Starring Jordan Fry, Wesley Singerman, Harland Williams, Tom Kenny, Steve Anderson, Angela Bassett, Laurie Metcalf, Adam West, Tom Selleck, and Nicole Sullivan, Meet the Robinsons grossed $169.3 million worldwide. It also got its own video game.

Twelve year old orphan inventor Lewis (Fry) is attempting to find a family. However, he has a breakthrough that allows him to invent a machine that can illustrate forgotten memories. However, a tall man in a bowler hat (Anderson) breaks and steals the machine, which leads Lewis to travel into the future to meet the Robinsons (Singerman, Anderson, Sullivean, Williams, Bassett, Metcalf, West, Selleck, Ethan Sandler, Paul Butcher and Don Hall).

With this film, the darkness of the Eisner era ended and the Lasseter era begun. And what a film to start off with.

Meet the Robinsons  is basically what Chicken Little should have been, with humor that has good follow up, fun characters and story with quite a bit of heart.

The film, while not a straight up comedy, has lots of humorous moments, with some of the funniest involving Little DOR-15. Possessing the Frank Sinatra frog and the T-Rex is great in and of itself, but the joke that comes from it where what Bowler Hat Guy (BHG) doesn’t’ think his plans through is perfect. And nearly all of BHG’s mannerisms have their ways of getting at least a chuckle.

The humor is also what makes the characters, and their quirks, so much fun. An interstellar pizza guy? Life size toy trains? Wooden puppet wife? Teaching frogs to sing? Every Robinson has a quirk and while there are time where it’s overdone, those times are few and far between. Fact is, this is one of Disney’s best character driven films.

And the characters and their interactions with each other is what gives the story so much heart. The family congratulating each other in their failures and helping Lewis to realize that failure isn’t the end, but just a way to not do something was a theme long missing in Disney lore until now. In fact, this film’s story in and of itself could possibly be an apology from the studio about everything it released post-renaissance up til this point in time.

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