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Meet the Robinsons
Jan. 21st, 2022 08:33 amI actually quite liked Meet the Robinsons! I didn’t expect to, as most of the forgotten Disney movies have been forgotten for a reason, and okay, I can see the reasons why this one has gone down the memory hole… but I still really enjoyed it.
Our hero is Lewis, a young inventor who lives in an orphanage, where his inventing sprees scare off potential adoptive families and keep his long-suffering roommate Goob up late. Despairing of ever being adopted, Lewis becomes fixated on the idea of meeting his mother and invents a machine that will project his memory of her face onto a screen, which he just barely finishes the night before the science fair.
At the science fair, however, things rapidly go wrong. A “time cop” (who is very clearly a boy Lewis’s own age) insists that a man with a bowler hat has come from the future to try to sabotage Lewis’s experiment… and indeed, soon a bowler hat with spider-like metal appendages sneaks over to Lewis’s table and takes a screw out of his machine.
( Spoilers from here on out )
I think the reason this movie has drifted so far out of the public consciousness - indeed, perhaps the reason many of these Disney movies have so drifted - is that it lacks an easily explained hook. There’s so much going on: inventions! Orphans! Time travel! A zany family! Bizarre time travel villainy! Lots of things to enjoy, but not easily summed up in a phrase that will bring the movie-goers to the yard.
Our hero is Lewis, a young inventor who lives in an orphanage, where his inventing sprees scare off potential adoptive families and keep his long-suffering roommate Goob up late. Despairing of ever being adopted, Lewis becomes fixated on the idea of meeting his mother and invents a machine that will project his memory of her face onto a screen, which he just barely finishes the night before the science fair.
At the science fair, however, things rapidly go wrong. A “time cop” (who is very clearly a boy Lewis’s own age) insists that a man with a bowler hat has come from the future to try to sabotage Lewis’s experiment… and indeed, soon a bowler hat with spider-like metal appendages sneaks over to Lewis’s table and takes a screw out of his machine.
( Spoilers from here on out )
I think the reason this movie has drifted so far out of the public consciousness - indeed, perhaps the reason many of these Disney movies have so drifted - is that it lacks an easily explained hook. There’s so much going on: inventions! Orphans! Time travel! A zany family! Bizarre time travel villainy! Lots of things to enjoy, but not easily summed up in a phrase that will bring the movie-goers to the yard.
