Meet the Robinsons

Meet the Robinsons is an interesting film. Now...I'm going to say this upfront, Time Travel confuses me. A lot. So we're going to avoid that whole sticky mess in this review and in future reviews where Time Travel is featured. Unless you want 10 paragraphs of me rambling and trying to figure things out. No? OK! On with the review.

This film can easily be divided up into three main parts. The first part, which is easily the best, helps to set up our story and main character. We get to spend some time with Louis, learn who he is and what motivates him. It also helps to set up the world around him, and lays the ground work for the rest of the film. From this solid first act we then move into the second.

This middle portion when Louis arrives in the future is....where things go downhill. From start to finish it feels very hectic, the entire sequence at the Robinson's home feels like a constant onslaught of gags that sometimes just fall flat. We barely get any time to really know who these people are, especially because there is so many of them. The one thing we do learn is that they are a close knit group who love and support each other. Once we do see this support in action though we begin to shift into our final act.

From here the film starts to get it's steam back. Things go downhill for our hero and he has to start making things right again, culminating in a showdown with our villain. Once he has accomplished that, there is still time to wrap up all the things started from the first act, and hinted at in the middle.

So. The animation is really great here, the backgrounds are fun and pleasing to the eye. While there is a huge cast of characters, the ones we do get to spend more time with are pretty well developed or at least enough to play their part in the story. Two of my favourites include the time lost T-Rex, and the female scientist who acts as a judge at the science fair.

Meet the Robinsons managed to reign in the pop culture aspect which was a bit rampant in Chicken Little. It also continued the trend of having background songs not being sung by our main characters, which would continue until Tangled. One of Disney's better CGI films for sure.

3 1/2 / 5

*EDIT* I did notice I missed out on a semi-important note for this review.  At the end of the film we get a quote from Walt Disney which slowly fades until only a portion of his message is left behind 'Keep Moving Forward.' This message was constantly used in the film. This film was still being made during a time when a lot of Disney fans were still wanting hand-drawn, and Disney was still wanting to put out CGI. So in a small way having this quote be used does feel like Disney trying to justify things with a portion of a Walt quote. Now, I don't want to start repeating my CGI vs Hand-Drawn ramble but I don't think Disney needed to justify anything and certainly not in this manner. Personally it came off heavy handed that they had to put it in there and fade out everything but what they wanted to say when leaving the whole quote up would have worked just fine.