Movie Thoughts: Meet the Robinsons (2007)

• Released: 30 March 2007
• Directed by: Stephen J. Anderson
• Running time: 1 h 35 min
• Rating 3.5/5

Synopsis

A boy meets another boy from the future and they embark on a quest to stop an evil man with a cybernetic bowler hat.

My Thoughts

This movie is... pretty good? Okay, so in comparison to their first CGI endeavor (Chicken Little), pretty much everything is better. But this one improves on it on a lot of fronts.

First of all, the characters are actually likable in this. Chicken Little had a huge cast, but almost none of the characters were even remotely redeemable. Here, we have a likable protagonist and likable side characters. Heck, even the villain (the Bowler Hat Guy) is very enjoyable because he's a big flop at being an actual bad guy. There is a minor twist villain, but it's glanced over so quickly that I can honestly forgive it. It's mostly just there to show the consequences of messing with timelines.

My main criticism for the characters is honestly similar to Encanto, though, regarding the main family that is featured. There are simply too many characters to give them all a proper appearance. Most of them are just relegated to one or two (or even no) lines or jokes. And I get that it's a movie, so they can't feature every single character for a long time, but an easy solution to this would've been to cut a few characters. We can still have a large family, but make it a bit more digestible for the audience without being confused who is who.

The visuals are still not great by today's standards, but honestly they're already leagues better than in Chicken Little. The textures look better, there's much more variety in character models and the world looks better, too. There's still some slightly awkward character designs you see less of today (e.g. Lewis' very small widely set-apart eyes) but overall it looks decent still. You can definitely tell it's on the older side, but that doesn't make it bad.

The plot is also quite fun. I am not the biggest fan of time travel stories in general, but I like how things were handled here. It never becomes too convoluted or messy, it's a pretty straightforward tale of fixing the past after the Bowler Hat Guy mixed things up. There's also the reveal of Lewis being Wilbur's father, which was unexpected but a good twist. They definitely get along really well and I like their interactions.

Overall this isn't a perfect movie, but I definitely had fun watching it. It also holds up much better nowadays than Chicken Little. See you in the next (Disney) Thoughts.