Meet the Robinsons turned 15 years old yesterday.
Yesterday marked the 15th anniversary of one of the most important Walt Disney animated films. It’s no secret that Meet the Robinsons is one of those films that I love more than almost anyone else on the planet, and that I consider it one of the more explicitly underrated Walt Disney toons, especially in recent years. However, in retrospect, in terms of when it was released and what it was about, it remains a skewed monument to hope through perseverance and the promise of a better tomorrow right when the studio needed such assurances. At a time when Walt Disney Animation was in a slump, right as DreamWorks Animation and Pixar were neck-and-neck in terms of Hollywood animation domination, Meet the Robinsons was a passionate plea to, well, to keep moving forward.
Based on William Joyce’s A Day With Will Robinson and featuring mostly voice-over artists (as opposed to celebrity vocals save for Angela Bassett and Adam West), the G-rated concerns a young orphan who ends up traveling to the future to meet, well, no spoilers. It is a story that was neither a fairy tale princess story, an animated epic or a talking animal comedy. In what seemed odd then and now feels unthinkable, Meet the Robinsons was a new big-budget Walt Disney Animated film that opened in theaters almost under the radar. It didn’t get the comparative pomp-and-circumstance that greeted an annual Pixar release, nor was it treated as even as much of an event as the previous year’s Chicken Little (the studio’s first 3-D/CGI toon and frankly an artistic low point).
Like the Pixar films of the era, Meet the Robinsons concerns someone who yearns to live dangerously even when merely existing would bring less strife. It is a tale of a young orphan scientist who needs to be loved by someone... anyone. It spins a dizzying time-travel adventure and introduces an entire futuristic family of wacky but grounded human beings. It earns laughs both through character interaction (young "Goob"'s encounter with the evil Bowler Hat Guy is kinda wonderful) and through applying logic to its farcical scenarios ("But I don't need a duck..."). The middle act contains most of the frantic action, the first act unblinkingly looks at the pain of orphanhood and the third act concerns the therapeutic power of forgiveness and overcoming the bad cards life deals you.
Meet the Robinsons is no princess fairy tale or talking animal toon.
Our hero is Lewis (Daniel Hansen), a young orphan who discovers the future and makes peace with his past to embrace a possible happy ending. In terms of insights and revelations, Meet the Robinsons makes for a worthwhile double-bill with Pixar's Up. While Up concerns a suicidal old man who discovers that he still has something to live for at the end of his life, Meet the Robinsons concerns a young man desperately trying not to give up as he faces one disappointment after another in the opening years of his existence. The brisk, 94-minute flick resolves its plot in a satisfactory fashion, one rooted in the time travel semantics of its story and Lewis's inherent intelligence. It’s laugh-out-loud funny and unquestionably clever, while always coherent for the youngest audience member.
The Bowler Hat Guy, introduced as the clownish villain (voiced by director Stephen J. Anderson), becomes the most sympathetic character in the film, a bitter man who cannot let go of a perceived wrong committed many years ago. He is given a final moment of incredible heartbreak and pathos, one that would probably play even better today when every big movie claims to be about trauma, grief and toxic reactions to genuine tragedy. Despite mostly playing the buffoonish foil, Bowler Hat Guy becomes one of the more complex and three-dimensional villains in the Disney library. In a time when Disney has mostly traded larger-than-life villains for subtextual screeds about compassion and forgiveness (see: Encanto, Raya and the Last Dragon, Frozen II), Meet the Robinsons has its cake and eats it too.
Meet the Robinsons also contains one of the all-time great animated epilogues; a stirring and emotionally wrenching montage set to Rob Thomas's "Little Wonders". In March of 2007, it was an affirmation (months after discovering that I was about to be a father) that there was an eventual pot of gold at the end of a terrifying rainbow. It has retroactively become a celebration of Walt Disney’s reemergence as an animation giant. Meet the Robinsons stands as a darkest-before-the-dawn declaration that Walt Disney Animation needed only to keep moving forward. It would fittingly arrive a year after Chicken Little and a year before the slow upswing (Bolt, Princess and the Frog, Tangled, etc.) which would culminate with the blockbuster ($1.276 billion worldwide) release of Frozen and Disney’s reemergence as a zeitgeist-defining powerhouse.
Meet the Robinsons put Disney back on the path to its Frozen-era animated resurgence.
"Keep Moving Forward” is the motto of Mr. Robinson, the patriarch of the futuristic clan. The origin of this phrase provides a lovely grace note to the very end of the picture, one that is oddly fitting for the time in which it was made. While the film was not a box office hit ($169 million on a $150 million budget), it has earned a cult audience over the last 15 years partially because of how little attention it attracted upon its initial release. That it didn’t fit the mold of a Disney toon then or now and wasn’t a theatrical success went together with its (before their time) themes about the value of taking chances and the importance of failure. Today, Disney seems too big to risk failing, but I digress.
Yes, sadly, the film’s positive legacy is (arguably) discolored by the choices that Disney has made with its recent monopolistic power as an entertainment company and a cultural force. Moreover, the last two years have shown constant evidence that making the right choices isn’t enough for a happy ending. Nonetheless, the movie is the movie and Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall’s Meet the Robinsons remains one of Disney’s most underrated gems. It remains a fantastical sci-fi comedy that never loses sight of the pain at its core while still filled with moments of unexpected goodness. Its release was ironic or fitting in terms of being the last speed bump on the path to Disney Animation’s creative and commercial revival. The path to Frozen began with Meet the Robinsons.
Meet the Robinsons is not the most monetized of modern Disney films. Lewis and Bowler Hat Guy merchandise do not fly off the shelves and there was (fortunately?) never a direct-to-DVD sequel despite initial plans for such. It is the very definition of, to quote that other Disney animated feature, a diamond in the rough. I'd argue that the imaginative and thoughtful Meet the Robinsons is every bit worth the label of 'Disney Classic' as the likes of The Lion King or Moana. Moreover, in terms of its story, its moral and its tear-jerking optimism, it was the movie Disney needed right when it needed it. Of course, one big reason I’m so damn fond of the film was that it was also the movie I needed right when I needed it.
