Meet the Robinsons (2007)

Let's take a look at Disney's follow-up to Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons.

The Movie:

Meet the Robinsons is the 47th movie in the Disney Animated Canon.  Though still considered a part of the Post-Renaissance/Pre-Revival era, the movie is considered a turning point for Disney, as it was the first film of the John Lasseter era, laying the foundation for the improved storytelling of the Revival Era.  Meet the Robinsons received fairly positive reviews, though it wasn't without its detractors, and the movie was a failure financially.

Meet the Robinsons is loosely based on a children's book by William Joyce entitled A Day With Wilbur Robinson.  The main character is Lewis, a highly intelligent 12-year-old boy living in an orphanage, where he was left by his mother as a baby.  Lewis is constantly rejected by potential adoptive parents, so he sets out to invent a memory scanner that he can use on himself to identify his birth mother in the hopes that she would take him back.  Lewis takes his invention to his school science fair, where a 13-year-old boy named Wilbur Robinson, claiming to be a time traveler, warns Lewis to be on the lookout for a man with a bowler hat.  In reality, the bowler hat is a sentient robot named Doris, and it sabotages Lewis's invention.  When the scanner fails, Lewis abandons the machine, which Bowler Hat Guy steals for himself.  Meanwhile, Wilbur, wanting to prove that his time machine is real, takes Lewis into the future, where he meets the Robinson family.  However, this threatens to destroy the timeline, and Wilbur must return Lewis and fix the timeline before it is too late.

Meet the Robinsons is a marked improvement over Chicken Little.  The story and tone, though they get bogged down and confused at times, are certainly more in line with the Disney spirit, as the recurring theme throughout the movie, "Keep Moving Forward," comes from an actual quote by Walt Disney.  The visuals in the future-set part of the movie are very similar to the futurism based designs of Tomorrowland in the Disney Parks.  The movie's biggest weakness is that it wants to be a sci-fi film with comedy elements (a la Back to the Future), but at time the comedy elements take over too much, making the movie feel more uneven.  And like many time travel movies, if you try to think about the paradoxes too long, it will probably make your head spin.

The score for Meet the Robinsons was done by Danny Elfman, which is appropriate given the quirky nature of this movie.  It's a fine score, though not one of Elfman's more iconic ones.  The movie also makes the use of a handful of pop songs, though more tastefully than, say, Chicken Little.  "Little Wonders" by Rob Thomas is the movie's signature single, used near the end of the movie.  Also of note, the single and the movie soundtrack also included a cover of "There's a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow" by They Might Be Giants.

Hilarious in hindsight, the opening line of "Little Wonders" is "Let it go," which is a phrase that also pops up a few times in the dialogue of the movie.

Presence in the Parks:

Though the movie references the parks, the parks don't really return the favor.  When the movie first opened you could find character greets, but not so much any more.  Doris, of all characters, gets a card in the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom, but that's about it.

For the record, the movie makes several references to Tomorrowland, as one of the shots of the future has a sign that says "Todayland" with Space Mountain and Disneyland's Rocket Rods in the background.  Also, as mentioned above, the soundtrack album includes "There's a Great, Big, Beautiful Tomorrow," which is the song from the Carousel of Progress.

Space Mountain, Magic Kingdom, January 2001

Space Mountain, Magic Kingdom, June 1995