I had doubts about this movie. From the trailers it seemed like the best part of the movie was a partially intelligent dinosaur complaining that it's arms were too small. Plus it was from Disney which hasn't done a good cartoon since "Aladdin". But then I remembered that Pixar just took over Disney. The first thing John Lasseter did was kill "Toy Story 3: Straight to DVD". Suddenly Disney has standards. So I went.
It starts with an old Mickey Mouse cartoon, which tells me that Lasseter had his hands in this movie even if only at the end. Pixar likes having short cartoons before their movies.
"Meet The Robinsons" is a brilliantly strange movie. Instead of cobbling together something to fill 90 minutes of animation time with pop culture references, celebrity voices, and action scenes set to remakes of once popular songs they found a good book and made it a cartoon. The jokes are well timed and fast paced and actually pretty funny.
The story is about a orphan (it's still Disney. Living mothers aren't permitted.) who is also a brilliant if unsuccessful inventor. A boy from the future shows up to tell him to beware a man in a bowler hat who wants to sabotage the science fair. To prove he's from the future the boy has to take our hero to his own time where they crash the time machine. Our hero tries to fix the time machine until he meets the boy's family who instantly treat him like one of their own. Having found the family he's always wanted he doesn't want to go home. This leads to a variation on the standard time traveler Grandfather Paradox.
The man in the bowler hat turns out to be an idiot in cohorts with a robotic bowler that is much more intelligent than the man.
I can't tell you much more than than other than the hero learns that failure is ok as long as he keeps trying, goes home, wins the science fair, and gets adopted.
It was a great movie but I doubt I'll get it on DVD.
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