ANI-MOVIES, *Meet The Robinsons

Unless your movie has Feebles in it, any film titled Meet The...." should be avoided at all costs, and yes that includes any Robert De Niro outing. Meet The Robinsons was Disney's 47th full-length animated theatrical release, as well as only the third one to be fully CGI that wasn't done by Pixar, and even though their previous 3D animated movie Chicken Little made twice of its budget back, this film only broke two million making it a serious dud by Disney standards. Based on William Joyce's children's book, A Day With Wilbur Robinson, this is almost a spiritual spinoff to Joyce's previous work on Fox's Robots movie as it involves atompunk elements which you might find in titles like Astro Boy or The Jetsons. For a mid-2000s all CGI production, Meet The Robinsons suffers from seriously dated graphics which Pixar had on its own perfected with their first release of Toy Story. Even Mainframe's work on Reboot and Beast Wars had better animation than this movie, and they came out over a decade before this. Another thing is that the story is stupefyingly sporadic going from one cliched cartoon gag after another following a paper-thin plot, so it's more like a tilt-a-whirl of cartoon gags sewed together in a time travel tale. The best way to describe this is that it is like watching Back To The Future: Part II without ever seeing the original chapter, but even lovers of non-linear narration won't appreciate it.

An orphaned boy named Lewis has been living in the orphanage for 12 years and still never got an adopted family, mostly because he's obsessed with learning who his real mother was and why she abandoned him. This fixation has Lewis diving into science and cobbling together whatever kind of contraption he can get from everyday objects, all of which seriously ticks off his roommate Goob who he keeps up every night with his constant tinkering. Lewis makes a memory scanner to see what his mother originally looked like from within his own memories as a baby and decides to premiere this at a school science fair, although a strange man with a bowler hat sabotages his efforts. A boy Lewis' age named Wilbur claims he's from the future and they journey several years to meet Wilbur's extensively bizarre family of the Robinsons most of which were also orphans and profoundly eccentric. Without getting into spoilers, it becomes obvious how each of these characters are relative to another across the past and the future, even though you don't have to be a Time Lord to realize that time travel doesn't work that way.

Meet The Robinsons is a mismanaged mess of a film that strings together a succession of unfunny non-sequitur cliches. The animation is rank and it's like the Mouse Mansion really didn't give a darn about making anything of genuine quality which is why Disney bought up Pixar just so they could have some type of decent 3D production. Aside from the extensive star-studded cast who make up the whole of the Robinson family which includes everyone from Tom Selleck to Adam West, there isn't any major pull for this as a large portion of the cast is made of different Disney animators and staff. Even with a time travel plot, this disorganized feature isn't worth of being a major Disney cinematic release, so don't even bother.