Meet the Robinsons Review: Disney Marathon

Spoilers

I went into Meet the Robinsons with the same dread I felt before watching the previous three Disney movies. I have never heard anyone talk about Meet the Robinsons just like I’ve never heard anyone talk about Brother Bear or Home on the Range. I remember watching the movie when it came out on DVD when I was nine but I never rewatched it. All screenshots from the movie look disgusting. The tagline is “Think your family’s weird” which is the most obvious tagline for a movie like this, I could have guessed the tagline before I even saw the movie. When even the tagline of the movie screams a lack of creativity you don’t exactly want to watch a movie. I sat down and reluctantly turned on Disney Plus to watch a movie I was confident I was going to hate. An hour and a half later I turned Disney Plus off and was pleasantly surprised. So why was I pleasantly surprised? Well, let’s get into that plot to find out.

We start with a woman dropping off a young boy at an orphanage. This is done in the most cliché way possible, of course it’s pouring down with rain, it’s a scene where we’re meant to be sad so of course it’s raining.

We skip forward around 12 years to the baby all grown up in the orphanage. This is Lewis, a genius who loves to invent stuff and who really wants a family. He builds a peanut butter and jam launcher (or peanut butter and jelly if you live in America) which can be used to make the perfect peanut butter and jam sandwich. Goob, Lewis’s roommate helps him build it before Lewis is called to meet a potential family. He demonstrates his invention to a woman and man who really don’t care, he ends up shooting peanut butter and jam on the family which gives the man an allergic reaction. The family complain about Lewis who runs up to the roof to cry about it. Mildred, the director of the orphanage goes up and says “Poor Mr Harrington” which makes Lewis think he killed him, I found that funny. Lewis comes to the conclusion that nobody would want him other than his biological parents so decides to build a device which lets him look at his past memories. This will allow him to find out who his biological parents are. Lewis spends ages building this device which keeps his roommate Goob up all night making Goob fail at a baseball game and get beaten up by everyone there. This will be important later.

Lewis has finally built his device and goes to the science fair to show it off. A boy called Wilbur Robinson tells Lewis that a man wearing a bowler hat has stolen a time machine and plans on doing something here that has something to do with Lewis so he should watch out. Lewis takes this as the ramblings of a crazy kid and just starts his presentation. Lewis shows off his device and the bowler hat guy sends DOR-15 his robotic bowler hat to damage Lewis’s device, the device is broken and doesn’t work. Lewis runs off back to the orphanage and the bowler hat guy steals the device. This is something the movie does well, it makes you ask questions. Who is the bowler hat guy? What makes Lewis important? Why is Wilbur there?

Wilbur arrives at the orphanage and tells Lewis that he needs to fix the device but Lewis refuses to do this. Wilbur says that he is from the future and there’s a big reason he needs to fix the device which Lewis doesn’t believe so Wilbur takes him to the future to prove it.

The future from this movie is really surreal. The endless fields surrounding it give it this dream like feeling. The empty areas that really should be bustling give it a feeling of liminality. The bad CGI gives it this plasticky look, everything looks so artificial because of it, almost like a toy. Is this surreal environment a purposeful design choice? No, of course not. The green fields are there just because they’re easy to make instead of a detailed environment beyond the city. The lack of people is because they don’t want to make more models. The artificial look is just because of bad CGI. This is meant to be an awesome future, not a surreal setting. The movie accidently creates this altered reality and I love it. There are some purposeful great design choices here though. The city is called Todayland which is a reference to Disney’s Tommorowland, I like that. The idea of instant buildings is a great one. I like the weird colour pallet; it makes the city really feel separate from our time.

When Lewis realises he has a time machine he decides that he doesn’t even need to build the memory device and can just go back in time to meet his mum. Wilbur doesn’t want him to do this for reasons that become clear later and they fight which ends up breaking the time machine. Wilbur tells Lewis that if he fixes the time machine and the memory device, he’ll take him back to see his mum. Lewis agrees and they hide in Wilbur’s family’s garage so Lewis can attempt to fix a time machine. It may seem like Wilbur is asking too much of Lewis here but it all makes sense in the end.

We cut to the bowler hat guy who tries to sell the memory invention as his own but since he doesn’t know how it works he gets kicked out of the place he was trying to sell it to.

Whilst in the garage trying to fix the time machine Lewis gets sucked into a transportation pipe and ends up meeting the Robinsons. And you think your family are weird? Honestly the worst part of this movie is the tagline. I guess I better tell you about the Robinsons, shouldn’t I? There are just so much characters, this is going to be like the Treasure Planet crew all over again. I might as well mention them here though because there is so little to all of them that it’s not like I’ll have a lot to talk about after the plot summary, they all have like one personality trait which is just something random which we’re meant to find funny apparently. We have Bud Robinson who is a crazy old man who draws a face on the back of his head for no reason other than to be random. We have Franny Robinson who is Wilbur’s mother and trains frogs to sing. Fritz Robinson is married to a puppet named Petunia Robinson. Joe Robinson is fat, dumb, and quiet. Tallulah Robinson, yeah, I’ve blanked on her personality trait. Spike and Dimitri Robinson just chill outside the Robinson’s house, I like it how nobody knows if they’re actually related to anyone. Billie Robinson loves trains. Laszlo Robinson loves painting and flying. Art Framagucci is an intergalactic pizza man. Gaston Framagucci loves cannons. Lefty is their butler who is also a giant octopus because you know, random. They’ve got a singling frog called Frankie, a dog called Buster and a robot called Carl. Two members of the family aren’t really explored because they’d spoil one of the twists so they are conveniently absent until after the twist.

Lewis returns to the garage and continues to work on the time machine until him and Wilbur are called for dinner. We get some a scene of the bowler hat guy trying to break into the house. He needs Lewis to tell him how to work the device. I love his break in scene, he uses a hat to mind control the frog who is of course too small to be able to kidnap Lewis. The bowler hat guy then goes back in time to grab a Tyrannosaurus who fails to capture Lewis as well with the Robinsons helping fight it off. The Robinsons offer to adopt Lewis but after they find out who he really is they tell him they won’t be able to and tell him and Wilbur to go build the time machine so he can go back to his own time. Lewis runs off upset that a family that he likes isn’t going to adopt him and can’t even say why. The bowler hat guy offers to help him if he can tell him how the memory machine works.

This is where we get all of the movie’s twists. It turns out that the bowler hat guy is… Goob. It turns out that Lewis causing Goob to lose his baseball game by keeping him awake caused him to become angry and depressed, never getting adopted. And the man who ruined his life grew up to become a world-famous inventor all starting with the invention of that memory device. Yeah Lewis is Wilbur’s dad. Now I forgot about both of these twists from when I was a kid but guessed both of them before they happened on this viewing, they hint towards them both very heavily throughout yet I can see many kids not guessing these twists. I can’t remember if I did or not when I watched it twelve year ago. With these twists in mind it all makes sense. Goob wanted to go back in time to take the credit for the device that ruined his life. It’s also why Franny can’t adopt Lewis; she’s married to future him. Goob of course ties up Lewis and refuses to take him to his biological mum.

Wilbur rescues Lewis in the broken time machine. Goob goes off to take credit for the device but when he does it, he also decides to sell duplicates of DOR-15 who it turns out is a twist villain. DOR-15’s hat minions take over the world erasing Wilbur from existence. Lewis fixes the time machine and goes back in time to when Goob was going to take credit for the memory device and shows Goob what his decision will lead to. Goob didn’t want DOR-15 to take over the world and apologises for his actions. Lewis tells DOR-15 that he’ll never invent him, stopping him from ever existing and putting everything back to normal. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention Lewis in the future built DOR-15. Time travel plots are so confusing to summarise.

Lewis goes back to the future (hey that’s the name of another movie) and meets up with himself from the future alongside the other Robinsons. He now knows why he has to go back in time and show off his memory machine at the science fair. They all say goodbye and Wilbur takes Lewis in the time machine. I love it how Bud says “goodbye son” to Lewis and Lewis doesn’t even notice what that means, it means that he will get adopted. Wilbur takes Lewis to the past to meet his biological mother, fulfilling his promise. Lewis can now pick between his biological family or eventually growing up and becoming a Robinson. Of course he picks the Robinsons and they both go back to Lewis’s present day. Lewis goes to the science fair but first wakes up Goob at his game which will prevent him from ever becoming the bowler hat guy. Lewis shows off his invention and the judge Lucille Krunklehorn and her husband Bud adopt Lewis. Lucille was coincidently the only family member we didn’t see in the movie’s future segment so the twist could work. He says goodbye to Goob who is also getting adopted at the same time and the pair take Lewis to their house which is the Robinsons house. The end.

Yeah, I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would. It’s got a lot of problems but I’ll get into those in a minute.

The main theme of the movie is biological family vs chosen family. Lewis’s biological family abandons him but even then he comes to the conclusion that they’re the only family for him. Eventually he learns that even if you don’t have a family or your family aren’t great you can find family elsewhere. It’s a nice but simple message.

Lewis is an alright protagonist. You want nothing but the best for him but that’s about all you feel for him.

Wilbur is weirdly the character they really tried to market. He’s presented as being Lewis’s equal in the marketing material and is the main character in the video game. He’s alright, I can’t really say much about him but yeah, he’s alright.

Goob is the most interesting character in the movie. When he is young he talks like someone much older than he should which is pretty funny. Seeing him get adopted later as he boasts about his baseball game to his new family is heart-warming. Like really heart-warming, one of the best moments in a Disney movie heart-warming and I will defend that till the day I die. Or you know my opinion changes with time which can also happen. Goob as an adult is pretty great, he has some of the funniest moments of the movie but also has some of the least funny. He has so many comical moments but a lot of them don’t land. You can’t help but love him though, no matter how many times he doesn’t make you laugh. To be honest the amount of times he fails to be funny kind of unintentionally adds to the idea that he’s pretty pathetic when he grows up.

The movie asks us many questions. Is destiny real? How much can you blame others for the life you are having? Is it healthy to live in the past? What are the answers that Meet the Robinsons come up with? Is destiny real? Nope. You have to put in effort to achieve your dreams. Goob spends him entire time wallowing in self-pity which results in him living a miserable life. The movie makes clear that the future Lewis sees isn’t set in stone and he’ll have to put in effort to get to it. You’re not destined for great things; you’ve got to put in the work to achieve it. How much can you blame others for the life you are having? The movie comes to the conclusion that they need to take some responsibility for what they’ve done to you, Lewis does do the right thing and wake Goob up after all. But you’ve got to do all you can to live a good life no matter what others do to you. Goob is criticised for doing nothing but blaming Lewis for what happened to him. Is it healthy to live in the past? Nope. Goob doesn’t get adopted in the first timeline, not because he lost that baseball game, it’s because he didn’t get over it and because of this was unlikable. Even when people made an effort to hang out with him he was so stuck in the past that he assumed they didn’t actually like him, I know that bit is played for laughs and I did find it funny but it is still an example of Goob being stuck in the past, and how that has negatively impacted him.

Ok, so what are the problems? I laughed semi-consistently in the movie but that was more so because there were so many jokes. I probably only laughed at about 1% of the jokes, it was just that they were so frequent you are probably going to laugh quite a bit due to the pure quantity of jokes. Some of the jokes were so bad I couldn’t help but laugh either. The characters look awful. Disney really didn’t get good human CGI down yet. Most of the characters are forgettable, for a movie called Meet the Robinsons I don’t think I know much about any of the Robinsons. Scenes often drag as well.

Meet the Robinson is a movie I think the internet would love. It has stupid jokes that you can’t help laugh at because they are so dumb, meme-worthy characters, and is actually pretty heart-warming which seems to be exactly what the internet likes. To be honest Meet the Robinsons reminds me a lot of the internet, full of comedy that only lands occasionally and you have no idea what is happening most of the time but you weirdly want to stay. It’s alright, definitely not up with Disney’s best but is a pretty entertaining experience despite its many flaws. Tomorrow I’ll be reviewing Bolt before going on holiday for ten days, after that I’ll be back to tackle the most recent Disney era, the Revival Era. Thanks for reading.

6 / 10