Susan Granger’s review of “Meet the Robinsons” (Disney)
When the New York Times ran a story about how Pixar’s John Lasseter (“Toy Story,” “Cars”), now the chief of animation for the Walt Disney Company, had restructured Stephen Anderson’s “Meet the Robinsons,” I realized the film must have had serious inherent problems – although, years ago, astute movie moguls, like Darryl F. Zanuck, routinely re-cut studio features that they felt didn’t quite make the grade. Indeed, in an era when we’ve come to expect animated features to entertain adults as well as children, this story of an orphan who builds a time machine in order to find his mother falls short. I suspect much of the confusion can be traced to seven – count ’em – screenwriters who tinkered around with a complex “moving forward” plot that encompasses abandonment, adoption, embarrassment and vengeance – in the past and present. The hero, 12 year-old Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen), was left at an orphanage when he was an infant. Since he’s a science geek (but not as cool as Jimmy Neutron), he tries to trace the mother he never knew. (Who his biological father was is hard to ascertain, kinda like with Anna Nicole Smith’s baby daughter.) Instead, Lewis is abruptly catapulted into a retro’ish, candy-colored Future World by friendly Wilbur Robinson (voiced by Wesley Singerman), whose eccentric, gregarious extended family takes him in. There’s a fiendish villain, of course, a sinister, mustache-twirling man wearing a malevolent bowler hat – known as the Bowler Hat Guy. The supporting vocal cast includes Angela Bassett, Tom Selleck, Ethan Sandler and Adam West. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Meet the Robinsons” is a frenetic, fanciful 5. When taking tots to see this G-rated ‘toon, go for Disney’s Digital 3-D and get those cool, dark glasses.
