The people who made “Meet the Robinsons” seem certain that most of their audience has ADD, and for those viewers who don’t yet have ADD, they are determined that their movie should induce it.
The heart of Disney’s “Meet the Robinsons” is a frenetic, stomach-churning sequence of poor filmmaking and overt pandering.
Don’t like the boy orphan? Try the dinosaurs!
Afraid of dinosaurs? We have robots!
Bored by robots? We have singing frogs!
We may all have ADD in the age of text-messaging and fast-forwarding, but surely the most challenged among us can still sustain a narrative thread that lasts more than 5 minutes. “Meet the Robinsons” begins as an intriguing, beautifully illustrated animation about an orphan who seeks solace in inventive tinkering. Then the movie deteriorates into a freakish time-travel smorgasbord, as if Tim Burton remade “The Jetsons.”
Two windy bouts of exposition given in monologue, words sure to go over the heads of all the 6-year-olds at whom the pretty pictures are aimed, are meant to weave back together all these narrative tangents. But we feel cheated. The octopus answering the door, the evil robot bowler hat, the memory-amplifying machine, all came to this?
A year of disappointment in American animation leads me to this advice: Write a simple story. Read your dialogue out loud and hear if it rings true. Draw nice pictures to tell it. Leave “Mission Impossible 4” to others.
“Meet the Robinsons,” directed by Steve Anderson, is the first Disney animation reworked by Pixar’s John Lasseter after the two cartoon studios merged. News stories said Lasseter saw an early version and asked for major additions and rewrites, leaving a movie “60 percent” different from the first draft, and resulting in those dinosaurs and monstrous hats tacked on like so many fridge magnets.
Many people will see “Meet the Robinsons” in 3-D, but you won’t miss much if you don’t. The extra dimension is used primarily to make the backgrounds float a little, creating nothing so much as a formal distraction.
Orphan baby Lewis is left with matron Mildred (voiced by Angela Bassett) in a kind but deprived foundling home. He and his friend, baseball-loving Goob, invent peanut-butter-sandwich machines and other whimsical gadgets amid dozens of fruitless and heartbreaking interviews with prospective adoptive parents.
Just when Lewis again has ruined his school science fair with a misbehaving invention, another boy appears to tell him he’s from the future, and Lewis had better come with him to fix one of those inexplicable rifts in the space-
time continuum. Could Lewis be getting a glimpse at some form of a future family life? Have they been re-making “Back to the Future” since back in the day? Yes to both.
The audience with which I saw this mixed salad seemed far more stunned than amused at the pureed plot. Most of the jokes in “Robinsons” are pitched for parents, yet aren’t funny. The filmmakers periodically forget they’re trying for 3-D, with exceptions for science fair explosions and dizzying – some will say nauseating – space-ship rides through future cityscapes.
When I finally gave up on the plot, “Robinsons” tried to redeem itself with a warm ending. I did feel warmed, but not hands-over-the-campfire warmed, more like sitting-on-a-
hot-car-hood warmed. Something artificial and forced was in the air, like lingering exhaust.
It appears that Pixar remains the creative force in the Disney-Pixar merger, so we’ll have to wait for this summer’s “Rattatouille” from Brad Bird to see if the Pixar half can still bring it. Before I beg a sabbatical from animation, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or at mbooth@denverpost.com; keep up with film at denverpost.com/movies.
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| “Meet the Robinsons”
G for the whole family|1 hour, 30 minutes|ANIMATED|Directed by Steve Anderson; written by Jon Bernstein, Robert L. Baird, Michelle Bochner and Daniel Gerson, based on the book by William Joyce; featuring the voices of Angela Bassett, Adam West, Steve Zahn, Tom Selleck and Ethan Sandler|Opens today at area theaters.
