Meet the Robinsons

Meet the Robinsons (2007) is about a boy raised in an orphanage who invents things and travels to the future. Lewis is twelve and constantly building. His inventions always explode, which is why no family adopts him. He builds a memory scanner to find his mother. At the science fair the machine is stolen. Then a boy named Wilbur arrives in a time machine and takes him thirty years forward. The Robinson family of the future is entirely chaotic: flying trains, talking frogs, an octopus butler. The real subject is failure. Lewis blows up everything he tries, and what the family tells him is the whole idea of the film: you learn from failing and very little from succeeding. The last frame carries a line from Walt Disney about keeping moving forward. The production matches the subject. After Disney bought Pixar, John Lasseter took over the animation division, and this film was nearly finished. He pushed the date back and had much of it remade; the ending and some of the characters changed then. The time travel plotting is complicated for a children's film and the first half hour is scattered. It did moderately. It runs 95 minutes. Good for: family animation, time travel, and Disney. Less good for: the story is confusing early on and the humour moves very fast.