CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
Profile continued . . .

ARCHIVES!
Review of Meet the Robinsons

Saturday, April 14, 2007

this entry brought to you by cold war kids, "we used to vacation"





I can't even remember when the last time that I saw a rated G movie in the theater was, and I certainly can't remember when I last saw one on opening day; you'd probably have to go all the way back to grade school for that. It's not that I have anything against animated films-- Finding Nemo made it onto my top twenty-five movies of all time, and if I were to do the list again today, The Incredibles would be on it as well. But who wants to be around the herds of kids that will show up on the first day of an animated movie? But the bigger reason I was hesitant to see Meet The Robinsons was because of the lack of quality output lately from the Disney brand. Pixar's movies are completely brilliant and they seem to be unable to make bad movies while Disney... well, not so much. Brother Bear, the last hand-animated movie I saw by them, was awful, and Chicken Little had a couple of good parts but was terribly corny and overall lacked anything worth remembering. Meet the Robinsons, Disney's second foray into making its own CGI animated feature (as opposed to just distributing Pixar movies), didn't show me anything in the trailer that made it look like it was going to be worth watching.

The movie opens up well, with main character Lewis, an orphan, asked to interview with some prospective parents at an orphanage. He thinks this will be an excellent time to show off his creativity with his latest invention, a gun that dispenses peanut butter and jelly simultaneously. Things go hilariously wrong. Yet the promising first act never missteps into predictability or banality once over the next two acts, which has been a major problem with Disney movies lately. They have been just too sweet in the end, and way too formulaic. You can still see what directions this movie is going to go to: Lewis is talented but no one can see it and he feels unwanted, is taken to the future where everything is fantastic and beyond imagination, is welcomed by the Robinsons and feels like he belongs to something for once. Yet the plot still moves in interesting places, has a surprisingly dark climax, and overall has that magic successful animated films are supposed to have. The supporting characters, the Robinsons, are hilariously eccentric, and spend just enough time on screen to garner genuine laughs but not so much that they become gimmicky (see: the entire supporting cast of Chicken Little). The villain, a character only known as Bowler Hat Guy, because, well, he wears a bowler hat, is a terrifically inept archetype of silent-movie type villains, a long black coat, curly mustache, and all bony, skeletal limbs, and is one of the better villains to show up in an animated feature lately, mostly because he is anything but generic.

To be sure, we're not talking about Pixar levels of enjoyment here. But what's so refreshing is just how close to Pixar levels of enjoyment Meet the Robinsons reaches. And as for how the show went on opening day with all the rugrats running around? My tip for watching rated G movies on opening day: go to the first showing at 10:30; most parents will be too lazy to take their kids that early, so you'll be fine.
-----



on this day last year funnily enough, last year I also did a review on a movie, which happened to be King Kong.
-----

with love from CRS @ 11:07 AM 

0 Comments:

Post a Comment