Meet the Robinsons is the first (and possibly last?) film from Walt Disney Feature Animation, a Disney unit that wanted
to distinguish itself from Pixar. It really shouldn''t have, as this poorly titled comedy is a muddled mess.
It''s not that Meet the Robinsons won''t appeal to younger kids. The movie is visually fun, with plenty of Jetsons -like elements, singing frogs and so on and so forth. The story is cute enough, and the presentation is certainly watchable. But I''m not a little kid, and I have higher standards for films, even animated films. This is just another piece of evidence that traditional animation was not killed because of the visuals, but because the writing at a certain company has gone downhill. Do you think that when the creators of this movie were sitting down and shelling out the story, the dialogue and the visuals that they were expecting this to be the next Snow White or Bambi or The Lion King ? I sure hope not.
Meet the Robinsons'' flaw is that it just has too much going out without much actually going on. The plot is about some genius kid who hasn''t quite managed to get his first invention working. When an evil villain from the future shows up and steals his contraption, the kid is whisked away to a glorious future full of all kinds of weird things, from flying cars to... yes, singing frogs. Stranger yet is that he gets "adopted" into a family of mental patients, all of whom are loving but quite off their rockers. Hence, meet the Robinsons.