Walt Disney, part LXV: Keep moving forward

MEET THE ROBINSONS

2007

Directed by Stephen Anderson

Written by more people than I'd prefer to list (based on the book A Day With Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce)

Spoilers: high

With Meet the Robinsons, I have arrived upon a personal milestone: until earlier today, it had been the very last film in the Walt Disney animated "canon" (numbering 47th, out of, at the time of this writing, 63) that I'd never actually seen.  It also represents, rather more importantly, a milestone in Walt Disney animation's own history: for the first time, I won't have to worry about getting tripped up on the name of the institution anymore, for at long last we're talking about the Walt Disney Animation Studios "canon," complete with the first deployment of the WDAS studio logo still in use today, that neat "Steamboat Willie" clip that's been jazzed up to look like Mickey is being animated by invisible hands before our eyes.  There was more than just a rebranding at work, for between the release of Disney's previous film, Chicken Little, and Meet the Robinsons, one of the pivotal events in the history of Disney animation—so I suppose one would have to agree, animation generally—had occurred.

This was, of course, Disney's purchase of Pixar: two decades earlier, Pixar had built CAPS and sold it to Disney, and we all know how that worked out; one decade earlier, they had been an upstart that had struck a distribution deal with Disney; and by no later than half a decade earlier, they'd emerged as Disney's greatest rival and the biggest studio in American cartoons, exploiting a little innovation called "fully-rendered CGI."  The relationship between the two companies had soured immensely over the previous several years for all the reasons you'd think it would, and eventually it seemed like the easiest way to reconcile their divisions was for Disney to just absorb Pixar in an all-stock deal worth about $7.4 billion, which nevertheless came with strings attached, negotiated on Pixar's behalf by its biggest shareholder (and for a while, thanks to the magic of that all-stock purchase, Disney's biggest shareholder), Steve Jobs: Pixar would not only retain significant independence (a status that has suffered natural erosion ever since), but in fact Pixar would, in a way, be the one absorbing WDAS—or at least the two animation studios would be ruled in personal union by one John Lasseter, a figure of great importance who oversaw the Golden Age of Pixar and what I would term the Second Disney Renaissance, and also a figure regarding whom you wish you didn't have to say, now, "and then all the lechery caught up with him."  I've never been as overawed by Lasseter as some were: I've always thought that the Golden Age of Pixar was a trifle overrated, and, later on, Pixar's lurch towards middlingness and WDAS's current state of complete artistic collapse were each to begin on Lasseter's watch (even if WDAS's subsequent heads, Jennifer Lee and Jared Bush, have done exactly nothing to stop Disney animation's freefall).  But even so, Lasseter, when still in his state of grace, clearly had a pretty good sense for what an animation studio (or two) ought to be doing.

This is not very apparent from the first WDAS film to bear his executive producer credit, and everything I just said is entirely hindsight talking.  If you'd seen Chicken Little in 2005 and then you came back two years later, perhaps because you were a glutton for punishment, and you didn't know who John Lasseter was or who David Stainton had been, I don't believe you could have noticed that anything had changed since Disney's first attempt at a CGI cartoon.  It's probably a little too far to say it's the exact same mentality ("Pixar is hard, and DreamWorks is popular, so let's do that"); but it's really close, and if Meet the Robinsons is the better movie, it's not by much.  (For what it's worth, of all the CGI cartoons from the mid-00s to have any association with the Disney "canon," I would declare The Wild—the one actually made at C.O.R.E., the VFX studio that Disney had strung along as a back-up for Pixar and which only ever made that solitary feature film—as the most successful by a pretty wide margin, not only as a cartoon comedy but as a work of fully-rendered CGI animation.  I would declare this even though The Wild wasn't good, either.)

What we have is based on, and thoroughly reworked from, William Joyce's incredibly boring and slight children's picturebook (by this I mean it's boring and slight for a children's picturebook), A Day With Wilbur Robinson.  It began development in 2003-ish while Stainton was still president of Disney animation, and was in production early enough to aim for a 2006 release date.  Evidently one of the first things Lasseter did as WDAS's new chief creative officer was to reject it as it stood, dictating sufficient changes that more than half of the film was re-developed and re-animated, and I think the mere ten months afforded to this process shows.  I can't tell you exactly what the original version entailed, but even from the very first screenplay draft it was still about time travel, which is "based on" A Day With Wilbur Robinson to the extent that the book casually alludes to the Robinsons owning a time machine, though, so far as the book goes, I don't believe I could confidently assert that the Robinsons actually live in "the future."  (And of course what I mean to imply by all this is that "A Day With Wilbur Robinson has no plot or story whatsoever, just illustrated scenes of the large and wacky Robinson science clan having a fun day entertaining their guest, and for some reason Disney decided to throw money at Joyce for the rights to essentially nothing besides a vibe, which is arguably never a vibe the movie actually taps.")  Well, nevertheless, the movie begins in "the past," in a literal, chronological sense, even though when we catch up to "the present" it's still more like a neverwhen of the immediate post-war period—it hardly could be later than 1959—with a few suggestions here or there that maybe, despite appearances, it's the early 21st century.  This is appropriate enough, given that Meet the Robinsons' whole deal is future-of-the-past pulp science fiction optimism, with a few pulp science fiction challenges to overcome, the undramatic nature of those challenges being what Lasseter had initially found so lacking, though it's downright shocking to learn this, given that the Meet the Robinsons we got was somehow deemed to have solved that problem.

I'm getting ahead of myself.  We begin several years before the main action begins, when a young child is left by his mother on the doorstep of the kind of orphanage that, going to the "neverwhen" thing, had long since become an anachronism by 2007.  He'll be given the name Lewis (Jordan Fry, then Daniel Hansen, due to puberty*), and by age 12, Lewis's scientific genius has manifested, the lad having become a nascent inventor, with ideas that range from the silly, like a PB&J-dispensing helmet, to the tremendously ambitious, like a brain-mapping memory scanner that, amusingly enough, works better than the stupid condiment-shooter did.  On the minus side, Lewis seems to lack the firm grasp on the scientific method that you'd expect him to have, considering that we learn he's managed to get himself rejected by over one hundred pairs of prospective adoptive parents, seemingly by doing the same shit the same way ("HEY I'M ONE HIGH-VALUE KID, LOOK AT MY HALF-FUNCTIONAL INVENTION!") over and over, always to the same sad effect.  He's also a fairly annoying fixture in the life of his roommate, Michael "Goob" Yagoobian (Matthew Josten); the orphanage's headmistress (Angela Bassett) does continue to root for Lewis despite his high-maintenance style, though it's only by accident of a peptalk that she inspires his new memory scanner so that he can recall the face of his biological mother, a device that he hopes to unveil at the impending science fair and which he somehow refrains from, you know, using for its declared, emotionally-vital purpose until then.

Too bad for Lewis, because what he doesn't know is that he has an adversary from the future, at present known only as the "Bowler Hat Guy" (because he is a tall skinny guy with a mustache who wears a bowler hat that's more than meets the eye; this is director Stephen Anderson, who took up the role when Jim Carrey said no, and I feel like this must say something about Anderson, hubris-wise).  The Bowler Hat Guy surreptitiously ruins the science fair, and steals the memory scanner, but fortunately Lewis has an ally from the future as well, a certain Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman**), who'd been posing as a regular kid to protect Lewis's important contribution to his timeline, but now that he's failed his mission, he needs Lewis's help; to secure his help he needs to convince him he's from the future; and what better way than to just show it to him?  He gets this far but then they accidentally bust his (dad's) time machine, leaving the only working time machine in existence in the hands of the Bowler Hat Guy, who'd stolen the other one due to Wilbur's mistake, and stranding the two kids at Wilbur's house with his huge, weird family.  Meanwhile, the Bowler Hat Guy needs Lewis after all because he can't figure out how to even turn on the invention he stole, so he can take the credit for its creation.

I will politely abstain from poking the plotting too hard; I assume you will notice that it requires some pretty stupid stuff to happen to get to where it needs to go, and I would further imagine that you will probably get ahead of its reveals long before they happen, though the obvious time travel story stuff that Meet the Robinsons gets up to is reasonably well-done, if we grade on a curve that's been set, after all, by the average six year old watching this back in 2007.  What I'm not willing to accept is how badly-structured and badly-conceived it is outside of that, but Meet the Robinsons is frustrating because there is a lot of good in it.  Just to start, we could mention Danny Elfman's extremely characteristic score—in the middle of the movie, I said to myself, "someone sure is doing an Elfman, but a good one, in pursuit of faintly Burtonesque whimsy, much like in Chicken Little," without realizing that I'd actually only correctly identified the composer himself—and it also supplies that faintly Burtonesque whimsy with an appropriate sensawunda.

There is, also, and this is more important, the protagonists: Fry and/or Hansen are pretty good, especially against Singerman, who's even modestly great as a shitheeled but charismatic youngster, and to the extent Meet the Robinsons actually allows its comedy to be founded on their fractious buddy dynamic, Singerman in particular is selling a delightful fast-talking and condescending liar, even when Fry or Hansen is generally less-than-eager to buy what he's selling, because those lies are typically transparent and terrible, thereby making the true parts of Wilbur's spiel sound stupid, too.  It's a curious thing, because the two/three children are outpacing every adult VA by miles; even the third/fourth-best performer in the film is clearly Josten, as the put-upon normie roommate at the orphanage, so what we get is that whenever the adult actors are forwarded, which is unfortunately quite often, their overwhelming shtick only interrupts the flow and wrecks the rapport.  The actual plot itself is, as noted, perfectly serviceable: it's "what if Back To the Future had twists and the time-displaced kid actually got to lawfully fuck his mother figure?", and as I warned you up top that I was going to spoil things, let's just say it: obviously, Lewis shall be revealed as the Robinsons' patriarch and Wilbur's dad, and—only a little less obviously—the villain shall be revealed as the resentful grown-up loser version of Goob, who blames all his problems on Lewis.  And let's give credit where it's due, this is a marked improvement on Chicken Little as a Disney cartoon, in that it is at least better at telling its story and engaging your feelings, having identified a meaningful emotional throughline for Lewis, which is the whole reason Anderson muscled his way into directing it.  On Anderson's watch, you see, it almost became an outright autobiography, reflecting the same journey he undertook as an adopted kid who determined, in his childhood, that he'd seek out his birth mother to obtain the same answers that Lewis is seeking—hoping that he'd been surrendered out of necessity, not out of indifference—then realizing, after he'd grown up, that he didn't need to know this anymore.

That's genuinely sweet enough that I feel like an asshole saying his movie's terrible, but at least it's not 100% terrible, as I've tried to indicate, and we maybe haven't even touched on the best part: for there is the sheer pleasure of the Robinsons' future, a tomorrowland*** decked out in the most saturated colors available and full of wacky inventions.  For instance, transport through the metropolis neighboring the Robinson estate appears to be effected by publicly-available but privately-directed soap bubbles, and isn't that freaking cute?  All told, it's one swell evocation of kid's utopian splendor, dedicated wholly to mid-20th century modernism as translated through mid-20th century pulp aesthetics, complete with an EPCOT-like faith in technology that borders on the religious, even as it's cannily working entirely within the limitations of its not-so-futuristic technology (for WDAS is still trailing Pixar's capabilities by almost a decade, and The Incredibles already did a lot of what Meet the Robinsons does infinitely better), with a world that benefits from textures that are almost uniformly shiny, brazenly overlit, and featurelessly smooth, juxtaposed against a "past" that's pretty similar texture-wise but enjoys a smartly-desaturated color style to let us know that it's much more grinding and dull than the explosion of joy that is the future designed from the ground up by an orphan boy dedicated to improving the lives of the people around him.  And it finds as much of a contrast as possible against the future that the villain creates, an industrial hellscape dystopia that's all apocalyptic oranges and browns, mediated by a transition with some really lovely effects animations that render the now-clouded night skies into something akin to swirling watertank effects.

That all sounds really nice, and in some ways, of course, it's pitched directly at my sensibilities.  (The final frame is a Walt Disney quote without context—he's probably talking about, like, Disneyland rides or somesuch nonsense—that Anderson implies, rather dubiously, only coincidentally repeated verbatim the theme words of the movie Anderson had made, "keep moving forward.")  But then, that whole bright, shiny, smooth future (and let's not pretend they don't exceed their technical capabilities: there's some stuff during the denouement, for example, where they let you really focus on how they're experimenting with reflected light, in this case from the Robinsons' yard, and the pixelated splotches of green on Lewis and Wilbur are just awful-looking) is basically only a backdrop, and a briefly-seen one at that, for a movie that once we enter the Robinsons' estate gets stuck inside its boundaries as firmly as any given fucking horror movie, and even more unpleasantly.  Meet the Robinsons has not been outstanding till now, to be sure.  Lewis is as likely to be irritating as ingratiating.  There's a desperately lame original Rufus Wainwright song inflicted upon us over a montage (thereby sandbagging the film's single best visual joke, Lewis's gorge rising while he attends a brain surgery).  The adult comic relief is mostly ineffective (Laurie Metcalf's visiting scientist is just boring, but story supervisor Don Hall's pinch-hitting, poorly-imitated performance as the coach overseeing the use of his high school gym for the science fair might actually gall you with how obvious it is that this character was created for an evidently-unavailable Patrick Warburton).  But the movie has been okay, and probably more likeable than obnoxious.  As soon as Lewis accidentally completes the verb phrase indicated by his film's title, though, the story shudders to a complete halt; the exploration of this world concludes; the pain begins.

The nutty thing is that this was all A Day With Wilbur Robinson even was, except so much more gently.  But once we arrive at the part of this movie that actually adapts its source material, the adaptation immediately ruins the movie in progress: the Robinsons are a crowd of crazed one-note comic ideas, sometimes but not even always sci-fi inflected, and for what I think has to be at least half an hour, it's just "Robinson family member or hanger-on does X, which is supposed to be funny," at a Tex Averyish pace of like seven or eight gags per minute, and it is not usually funny (it is not Tex Averyish material), and even if it were, it would still wear you to a nub.  I don't even know why most of these people live here.  But then, maybe I just missed it: the only legitimately good parts of this entire middle are exclusively down to Singerman; the best of them even appropriately uses speed as an element of its humor, wherein Wilbur quizzes Lewis on the names and relationships of all the weirdos we've just met, and the funniest part of it is that, as a "recap," it might honestly be worse than useless.  (Though the button on the end of this sequence, the mid-00s surrealism of the Tom Selleck gag, is also pretty rewarding.)

The rest of it is just madness, like a Robinson whom we only recall because she's dressed with a skyscraper hat on her head, like a chorine in a Busby Berkeley number about cities—why is never very clear—or the guy who's married to his puppet.  I don't think there's a way to describe it without it sounding better than it is, but probably the only good Robinson is the one attired like a space ranger whose job, it turns out, is interplanetary pizza delivery, but he still approaches this task with all the pomp and seriousness of a superhero (he is, accordingly, played by Adam West); and I wish there was ten times as much of him, and ten times less of grandpa (also Anderson) searching for his teeth, or of Lewis apparently Mario Bros-ing through the pipes and toilets of the Robinson house.  The closest any of them get to resolving into a character is Franny (Nicole Sullivan), Wilbur's mom—it's maybe even a little annoying that they provide just enough hinted-at detail for you to guess ahead-of-time that she's one of the little girls we previously saw at the science fair, because it means that Anderson was capable of subtlety—but, in any case, her weird thing is that she teaches frogs to sing, and the star of her little animal show is Frankie (Aurian Redson), a creature embodying a pop culture reference appropriately pegged to the 50s but seemingly executed by people who had only ever had Frank Sinatra described to them by their grandparents, and despite the vast amount of recorded media involving Sinatra, had collectively decided that actually knowing how he sounded or spoke would ruin the fun.  The middle half bottoms out with a shockingly-dedicated kung fu film parody—complete with a digital "film grain," a desaturation of color, and poor audio synch—involving the launching of meatballs and sausages at dinner.  It's just exhausting.

If it were just a middle that you wish would stop flailing at you, I could probably accommodate Meet the Robinsons, but there's also that villain, and it's very difficult to imagine what it was like before Lasseter had determined that there was an insufficiently threatening antagonist, given that this might be the most unthreatening antagonist in the Disney canon—possibly up to and including Edgar the Butler in The Aristocats—except you can see how they thought they'd "fixed" it.  It's a drag, because this "Bowler Hat Guy" (and I daresay it would already be impossible to take him seriously) is actually, at turns, an enjoyable creation.  This is a film that is, hard as it is to say, probably worse-animated than Chicken Little already was: the whole film is riddled with extraordinarily stiff movement—there's a significant tendency towards the characters turning into marionettes—so, just as a representative, let's take Nik Ranieri, whose work back on Chicken Little was depressingly unlike his traditional animated characters (it makes me very sad, but this guy did Hades).

Ranieri was promoted up to hero duty on this, and his Lewis kind of stinks, rather inflexible and inexpressive (and when he is expressive, he's as liable to be so via a gaping mouth that looks like he's about to start drooling).  But Dick Zondag, supervising Bowler Hat Guy, gets an enormous amount out of his melodrammer villain design, giving his spindly limbs a cartoonish stretchiness alongside finding a lot of jokey poses to put our comic antagonist through.  He's very fun to watch; he is not fun to follow through this story, unfortunately, and the actual conception of the Bowler Hat Guy whipsaws back-and-forth from a grandiloquent-if-prone-to-failure type to a full-bore braindead moron, so that the same guy who spends every scene monologuing about his own evil schemes also can't give (can't even begin) a sixty-second presentation about the subject of his evil schemes, the memory scanner, to the capitalists he's trying to sell it to.  Very quickly he becomes completely impotent, and hence tedious—you'd think the goal was "offended dignity and a being of self-destructive hate" rather than "complete waste of time," but I also wondered if this would somehow tie together better if he weren't grown-up Goob but a further-future Wilbur—but as that does leave a void in our story, the actual villainous function is taken up, instead, by the bowler hat itself.  So: the villain of this movie is a flying, duplicitous hat.  I'm sorry, I just can't offer that my approval.

As for why the Bowler Hat Guy is a melodrammer villain... I don't know that that has an answer beyond "we thought it'd be cool, because we're dorks."  It doesn't really fit with the mid-century pulp aesthetic, or anything else about the movie, and once we do learn that he's just the older Goob, I don't know that that's sensible, either—for one, the younger Goob isn't nearly this fucking stupid, and for two, I might idly ask how late in production that second twist came (I know it wasn't early), because Goob and the Bowler Hat Guy share approximately zero design affinities, and the time-compressing flashback montage they deploy to brute-force their resemblance doesn't succeed.  ("Why, or even how, the mustache?" goes unaddressed.)  But now we're on character design, generally, and there's not a lot of improvement from Chicken Little's legendarily bad character design, especially when Chicken Little was, at least, being off-putting-on-purpose.  The orphanage headmistress, for example, sure is the "head" mistress—her noggin is so grotesquely bulbous I operated for a long time under the assumption that she harbored some twist of her own, possibly a cerebrally-advantaged freak from even further down the timeline—and there's a lot of just annoying silliness with the Robinsons, though the Robinsons' robot valet, Carl (Harland Williams), triggers a real abhorrence in me; I'm not saying that to be funny.  The mobile lips of the robot, which appear to be some manner of preserved flesh, flap about under an immobile metal faceplate, and I could barely look at him, this figure of actual body horror who's worse than real body horror because it's clear that nobody realized how repulsive he was.

But I digressed: the truly damaging thing about the Day With Wilbur Robinson middle of Meet the Robinsons is that it preempts actually telling a story with these elements, which aren't necessarily all first-rate (the villain is a motherfucking hat!), but are generally functional.  There's no adventure to be had here—they fall under attack, but don't even realize they are under attack until, like, the last twenty minutes of the movie—and because half an hour of the film is basically just a long, drawn-out dramatis personae, the narrative need for the Robinsons and Lewis to become emotionally close is accelerated to the point where they just have to declare by fiat that it's happened, though their interactions have been limited to a small part of an afternoon and a dinner with Wilbur's new pal.  If I could forgive a movie that spends its entire central third being an unbearable screech—and I don't know why I'd do that, but maybe I could—even the remaining material, even if it's "fine," is still too damned clumsy to give Meet the Robinsons anything like a pass.

Score: 4/10

*This is the official line, though I've also seen it declared that the latter is how you'd be able to tell that the scene or line in question was a Lasseter re-do.  That is, you would be able to tell, if you could tell them apart, as their vocal similarity is of such a profound nature that I'd have never known there were two kids at all if the movie didn't say so.

**Funnily enough, they couldn't find as a close stand-in for Singerman as they had for Fry, so they just allowed the seventeen-year-old-by-2007 to re-record his entire performance.

***They make the joke, yes.