[Frederica-l] NRO: Meet the Robinsons

[Frederica at aol.com]

this opens today -- I liked it a lot. I hadn't seen many movies yet this 
year, due to traveling, but I expect I'll be seeing fewer than I used to. Too many 
disappointments. 
 
_http://www.frederica.com/writings/meet-the-robinsons.html_ 
(http://www.frederica.com/writings/meet-the-robinsons.html) 
 
 
Meet the Robinsons 
If you see only one movie about Doris the Evil Hat this year, make it "Meet 
the Robinsons." Disney's 46th animation feature recaptures the old Walt magic; 
it's got spark, originality, and pure delight, qualities missing from the 
usual shallow, preachy kid fare recycling on DVD players today. (Some credit no 
doubt goes to Executive Producer John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar and now Chief 
Creative Officer of both Pixar and Disney, whose mark is seen on such 
solid-gold films as "Toy Story" and "The Incredibles.") If Disney can keep this kind 
of energy going, there could be a new golden age ahead.   
"Meet the Robinsons" is a time-travel story, which means there are some tasty 
plot surprises-though perhaps too twisty for younger kids to follow. The 
story opens on a rainy night as a woman leaves a baby on the doorstep of an 
orphanage. We then meet him twelve years later as Lewis (voice by Daniel Hansen), a 
kid with a wheatfield of upright yellow hair, who keeps so busy inventing 
gadgets that his low-key roommate, "Goob" (Matthew Josten) can't get any sleep.  
Lewis is determined to find his mother. The housemother, Mildred (sweetly 
voiced by Angela Bassett) cautions him that this is impossible: "But nobody ever 
saw her." Lewis replies, "Wrong. I did." He decides to invent a memory 
scanner, which can locate images stored in the mind and display them on a screen. He 
intends to recover his own memory of his mother's face.  
But one day while Lewis is working on the machine's design, a boy appears and 
introduces himself as Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman). Wilbur insists that 
he has come from the future, and asks anxiously if Lewis has seen "a tall man 
in a bowler hat." Lewis scoffs at this, and points out that the document 
Wilbur claims is his license as a "time cop" is actually a discount coupon for a 
tanning salon. But when Lewis takes his memory scanner to the Science Fair... 
And that's about where you have to stop trying to recount the plot of this 
movie, because it is going to go in some nutty directions.  So I'll just give a 
short list of the things I liked about the film, followed by a couple of 
cautions.  
First, the title of the movie, combined with the tagline "Wait till you meet 
the family of the future," made me roll my eyes. I figured this was going to 
be another one of those films (e.g., "Over the Hedge" or "Open Season") where 
"family" is redefined as any group of critters who are fond of each other, so 
stop being so judgmental. No, "the family of the future" turns out to be built 
on the same general lines as the family of the past: mom and dad, grandmom and 
granddad, aunts and uncles, and identical twins Lazlo and Dmitri who wear 
sunglasses and live in the flower pots outside the front door. It's a cheerfully 
unhinged family, recalling the Sycamore clan of "You Can't Take It With You." 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0030993/ (Grandpa, for example, wears his clothes 
backwards, and when we first meet him is looking for his false teeth by 
digging holes all over the yard.) The Robinsons live in a vast and 
modern-in-the-Jetsons-sense mansion-planetarium, attended by their loyal butler, a giant purple 
octopus named Spike. The Robinson family scenes can be so fast-paced that 
they're chaotic, but in a good way; you know that there are lots of good jokes 
buried in there, that will make repeated viewing worthwhile.  
The film gets good marks as well for its message. Kids' films in recent 
decades have reduced their aim to a handful of simple, safe, predictable messages: 
Follow Your Dreams, Be Yourself, Everybody Needs a Family, Hug Your Teammates, 
Humiliate Bad Guys, and Don't Be a Hater. (There seem to be some inescapable 
conflicts there, for example between "be a lone wolf" and "fit into a family," 
or between "accept others" and "hate your enemies," but I guess it doesn't 
matter. These movies are only forming the way the next generation will view the 
world.)  
The theme in "Meet the Robinsons" is Keep Moving Forward. Don't hang onto 
resentments, don't brood and blame, don't let failure throw you-just pick 
yourself up and keep going. When a bad guy says, "Let's see, take responsibility for 
my actions or blame you...Ding ding ding! Blame you!" we're expected to get 
that that is a bad idea. Likewise, we see him moping in school hallways while 
kids greet him cheerfully and ask him to come over, but he says in gloomy 
voice-over, "Everybody hated me." Any movie that combats victim-thinking and 
competitive grievance-counting gets my hearty approval.  
"Meet the Robinsons" deserves applause as well for showing that a popular 
kids' movie doesn't have to include vomiting, defecation, and other body 
functions (I was going to say "see 'Open Season,' but I hope you won't). And it's 
refreshing that the film chose the best actors for the parts rather than 
prioritizing top-name, top-dollar stars and sculpting the images and story to fit. 
Voice talent is its own field, and when animated characters are too transparently 
representatives of famous folks, the wink and nudge unbalance the story. 
("Meet the Robinsons" has some fun with that, with the graceful cooperation of Tom 
Selleck.)    
What's not to like? Well, as I said, with a plot analogous to "Back to the 
Future," it will take some explaining for the littler kids. My six-year-old 
granddaughter found some sequences pretty frightening, especially toward the end. 
But the Snidely Whiplash bad guy is wonderfully stupid, and jots notes in a 
Pretty Ponies binder, and has a comb-over that swirls around his head like a 
vine climbing a tree, all of which temper his malignancy. (Doris the evil Bowler 
Hat is another matter.) And at the climactic moment there's a great example of 
how to dismiss bad and scary imaginations: "I won't ever invent you" makes it 
vanish like smoke.  
In many theaters "Meet the Robinson" is being screened in 3-D-a new process 
that uses glasses with plain gray lenses, not the old red/blue cardboard type 
from decades ago. Most of the time I forgot it was in 3-D, however; the effects 
are only noticeable when something comin' right at ya, and then it's *very* 
noticeable. I don't think that the effect adds much to the film, though it was 
no doubt a very expensive extra. I like the idea of it, though-that filmgoers 
can not only watch but participate in a Jetsons-modern-type invention as they 
watch the story unfold. "Meet the Robinsons" combines the best of old and new, 
and will be a classic even when we're old enough to go around the yard 
digging for our teeth. 
 
 
********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com



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