Lewis is a brilliant inventor who meets mysterious stranger named Wilbur Robinson, whisking Lewis away in a time machine and together they team up to track down Bowler Hat Guy in a showdown that ends with an unexpected twist of fate.
Lewis an orphan wants to see what his mother looked like. So he invents a machine that looks through your brain so you can see your memories. But this weird kid says he's from the future and warns him about a guy in a bowler hat. The bowler hat guy messes with his invention and it fails. He decides that he's a failure and no one wants him. But the kid that warned him about the guy is here on a mission to find the bowler hat guy that wants to destroy Lewis. To prove he's from the future he takes lewis to the future. But the time machine breaks and he's stuck in the future until he fixes it. In the meantime he spends quality time with the family. But the bowler hat guy is about to alter time and it's up to Lewis to save the future.
Taglines: Witness the future of hip-hop.
Continuity: During the memory scanner's wedding scene, Lewis recognizes Grandpa Bud because of the smile on the back of his balding head. In the next few glimpses, Bud has no hair on the back of his head, but when they get in the car together he does.
) Most importantly, this film does not contain a single fart joke nor any talking animals or even animal sidekicks (except for those singing frogs you might have seen in the trailers, but they're really not the same thing). I don't know how close this adaptation is to William Joyce's novel "A Day With Wilbur Robinson", as I've never read anything Joyce has written, but it all works pretty well and manages to be an exiting and entertaining family adventure movie.
One aspect of the movie that works particularly well is the design. The buildings, machines and landscapes of the future really look totally cool and have a very own look that is inspired by Joyce's illustrations and various visions of the future from the 50ies and 60ies. They're beautifully rendered, too. Furthermore, the animation is pretty awesome. The movements of the quirky characters are very fast but funny and cleverly stylized. The best example for this is the Bowler Hat Guy who moves in a unique style that makes him look like a giant Spider. This really is a welcome change from the hyper-realistic motion capturing stuff we've been seeing in a lot of movies lately. The character design isn't so bad either. However, the humans don't look quite as good as the ones in The Incredibles, the stylization of some characters makes them look a little too artificial for my taste. The voice-acting, which relies on solid voice actors and luckily doesn't involve any fancy stunt casting, leaves nothing to be desired. Danny Elfman's score is pretty fine, too. I could have done without the cheesy pop songs that were played at some parts of the film, though.
Altogether, I highly recommend seeing this warmhearted family film to any animation fan. It might not be as good as my Pixar favorites The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, but it sure is a lot better than most of the other studios' wisecracking-and-farting-animal flicks. With Pixar's John Lasseter pulling the strings at Disney's animation unit now, they finally seem to be getting back on the right track and I'm looking forward to their next projects, especially the traditionally animated The Frog Princess.
One last thing: as some of you might have heard, Disney wants to start putting original animated shorts in front of their feature films again. Meet the Robinsons kind of makes a start by showing the old Mickey, Donald & Goofy short Boat Builders in the beginning. It's a great experience to see one of those on the big screen again and the kids in the audience apparently loved it.