GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 3/28/07)

One would have to be very charitably inclined toward Meet the Robinsons to describe it as an overstuffed piñata, and there are times when watching it, such as a bit where a wobbly-limbed, ticker-tape-spouting robot expectorates a dozen or so miniatures of himself to serve dinner to the movie's titular family, when I chortled and experienced something enough like delight to feel charitably inclined. But fleeting feelings aren't facts, and the fact is Meet the Robinsons is a mess — a sometimes fun but mostly frustrating mess.

Adapted from the well-regarded children's book by William Joyce, Robinsons is the story of an orphan who uses his inventing talents to try to find the mother who abandoned him. The boy is subsequently, and mysteriously, befriended by a young visitor from the future. This film is the first computer-animated picture released in Disney 3-D, a process that uses polarized glasses just like non-Disney 3-D. That many parts of the picture don't even vaguely appear to have been designed with 3-D in mind is one clue as to why Robinsons is the mess it is.

Robinsons was put on Disney's production slate after which Pixar severed relations with Disney. Pixar and Disney subsequently mended fences, and Pixar majordomo John Lasseter became Disney's chief creative officer of animation. Lasseter then became intimately involved with this project; one report says that 60% of the original picture was scrapped.

At Pixar, when a Lasseter (Toy Story, Finding Nemo) or a Brad Bird (The Incredibles) is calling the shots, their individual voices ring loud and clear. But Robinsons, with its scattershot stabs at hip humor (what's with the little girl at the science fair who looks like Emily the Strange's twin?), weirdly non-sequiturish parody interludes (the screen is sepiaized at several junctures for faux-martial arts battles), and an anime-inspired world-of-doom scene that's so terrifyingly intense that it throws the movie even more off balance than it already was (and as it happens, is the most accomplished thing in the film), has a too-many-cooks quality that's literally head-spinning. Which is particularly nasty for you if those 3-D glasses give you a headache to begin with.

— Glenn Kenny