Keep Moving Forward - Meet the Robinsons

47 – Meet the Robinsons

The first thing I thought when I started watching 2007's Meet the Robinsons was “oh great. This is just going to be another movie with a dumb story and bloated with too many side characters.” I was, honestly, pleasantly surprised. The story is about a young orphan kid (I know, I know. Not terribly original.) named Lewis who continuously scares off potential parents with his crazy inventions. He decides to build an invention to look into his memories to find memories of his mother so that he can find his real parents. On the day of the science fair, he decides to test this invention when he meets a mysterious boy named Wilbur who warns Lewis to watch out for a guy in a bowler hat. It turns out that Wilbur is from the future and is trying to prevent something horrible from happening to Lewis. The bowler hat guy, as they refer to him, sabotages Lewis' invention and steals it. From there, the movie takes us on a crazy adventure where Lewis gets to go to the future and meet the crazy Robinson family where he thinks he might finally have a family. Unfortunately, the situation is a bit more complex than that.

Lewis is shown immediately as a kid with a really great mind and great goals. He wants to change with world with his inventions but he just can't seem to get them to work correctly. He's really hurt when he keeps screwing up his chances at being adopted and resolves to find his real mother instead by searching his memory. He really puts his heart and soul into building the memory machine, which unfortunately keeps his roommate, Mike Yagoobian, up all night. Lewis' failure at the science fair really gets to him and he feels like a complete failure and almost gives up on his inventions. The idea of the inventive kid is definitely not new and sometimes overplayed but Lewis is really different. You feel bad for him, sure, but he's a really good kid who just keeps getting knocked down by life.

Our villain turns out to be part of a duo. The bowler hat guy is assisted by a high tech bowler hat called Doris. Bowler hat guy can be pretty stupid and silly sometimes but he gets a ton of funny scenes. It's great seeing that Doris is actually much smarter than him and he seems to get in the way more than help. Doris is the real brains of the operation and it shows that Doris might be the real villain of the story. They're both from the future and they're trying, for reasons I won't spoil, to steal Lewis' memory machine and sell it to an invention company to alter time.

The Robinsons themselves turned out to be some pretty fantastic characters. Wilbur is a boy from the future family who stole his father's time machine to chase down the bowler hat guy who stole the only other time machine they had. He's a very weird kid and they make sure to show that he doesn't really fit in to modern time. I do kind of wish that they had defined his character a bit better. He just doesn't get the attention that Lewis does with Lewis' clear goals and dreams. The rest of the family is way too big to mention. Unlike most side characters, I really didn't mind them. They really helped show how different and crazy the future world is and were also the perfect example of the kind of family that Lewis wants. They're all supportive and care about Lewis, even though they just met him.

The computer animation in this movie looks way better here than Chicken Little. This movie really benefited from it with the crazy futuristic sci fi ideas. That crazy future, by the way, is really well designed and looks really unique. I love the reference to Disney World's Tomorrow Land and the design of the future city really borrows from those ideas as well. The music in this movie really works well, which includes the songs which are legitimately good. The tone of the movie was really spot on too, with some really funny scenes that reminded me of The Emperor's New Groove. The jokes were actually intelligent too, not just someone getting bonked on the head. I also really liked that the story kept hinting at, but never quite giving away, why Lewis is so important to the future.

The themes in this movie were really great too. Way better than the past few movies. Letting go of the past is a big one, with Lewis and the bowler hat guy both being unable to. Lewis also has to learn that failing is ok, as long as you learn from it. The biggest theme comes from a phrase that gets repeated a ton. “Keep moving forward.” The idea that, no matter what, you have to keep striving to look to the future, no matter what speed bumps you hit along the way. Even though they state that phrase a ton, I don't think they did it because they thought the audience wouldn't understand. They used is as more of an overarching theme that hints at deeper meaning in the story. I really love that this movie doesn't talk down to its audience and explores some really great themes.

So if you can't tell, I really liked this one a lot. This is still a short review but not at all because it was a bad movie. It's short simply because I don't want to spoil anything. There are some really great revelations and twists at the end. It's fantastic to see Disney striving for deeper stories and creating interesting characters.

47 down. 6 to go.