Meet The Robinsons (Disney, 2007)

At some point along the way, I got sucked into this mostly typical story of an orphan who makes good.

On the surface, there's not much going on in Meet The Robinsons, the story of Lewis, a kid who likes inventing things. After 12 years and 124 interviews at the orphanage, he still hasn't found a family. After a curious series of events, Lewis finds himself in the future with a kid named Wilbur Robinson who seems to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist. I'm not giving you more than three guesses as to who has to save the day but, as I say, at some point I got sucked in enough to get choked up when Lewis inevitably finds the people who adopt him.

While there's a lot of Disney crammed into this movie, there's also a whole lot of William Joyce, who wrote the book on which the film is based. Joyce is all too familiar to parents as the creator of Rolie Polie Olie and George Shrinks, among others. Film buffs might also recognize his name as a concept artist for Toy Story and a producer for Robots. Joyce regularly visits the "world of tomorrow" in his books -- the 1950s version of the future with round swoopy lines, zeppelin-inspired ships, and helpful robots, all in technicolour -- and all of these themes are found throughout The Robinsons.

There are some obvious flaws with the movie. Some of the sequences are too jumpy even for short-attention-span kids, and there might be a few scenes too scary for very young kids. Overall though, it is a family film -- aimed at kids but with a bucketful of tongue in cheek jokes for the parents -- and I was as entertained as my six-year-old. Fans of Joyce's book or his other work will no doubt enjoy Meet the Robinsons.

*** 1/2