The Good

A fun, family film that shows how belief in yourself is all you really need.

The Bad

I think this movie might have been too short.

Meet the Robinsons is the heartfelt story of a boy trying to have a family. Lewis is an inventor with a big imagination and even bigger dreams. He travels in time to find his family and ends up having the adventure of his young lifetime when he comes across the Robinson clan. Also on this journey Lewis finds that animals act much differently than he ever imagined and that dinosaurs are in a whole other league. Also, amidst all this Lewis realizes that there are forces out of his control conspiring to hurt the future.

Or are things really out of Lewis' power?

With the help of the Robinson family Lewis starts to learn that things aren't always as they seem, you can't judge a book by its cover and most of all... one should never stop believing in themselves. Meet the Robinsons is a fun tale that manages to pack a unique amount of messages into this wonderful film.

Features

Family Function 5000

In this set-top game Lewis has created an invention that puts together his family tree. It is meant to "keep track of his family to be." Sadly, this invention has some bugs so players of this game have been given the task of ironing them out. If this doesn't happen, all of Lewis's hard work in putting together his family lineage will be erased forever. Now, I could go into details about the ways one might use their controller to play this game, but I think you might be better off just doing it for yourself.

Audio Commentary

Inventing the Robinsons

Personally, I am a really big fan of these kinds of featurettes as they take us into the process of actually creating this cartoon. We see the beginning stages of William Joyce's original drawings and how that led to the eventual Meet the Robinsons animated film. While this didn't go as deep into the drawing process as I was hoping that it would, I am big fan of seeing where the ideas come from. In that regard this featurette more than delivers.

Keep Moving Forward: Inventions that Shaped the World

Deleted Scenes

The creators of this DVD have given us three deleted scenes on this release. They are:

- Arriving In the Future

- Meeting Carl

- Bowler Hat Guy's Redemption

These scenes should have been in the movie! It isn't like they are so long that they would have weighed the story down, but more to the point I think that they helped add a slight touch of nuance that this movie may have lacked a bit. All in all, I think that things have been done quite well on this DVD but leaving these scenes off was a mistake.

Music Videos

Video

Aspect Ratio - 1.78:1. For a Standard DVD it would be hard to imagine that this release could look that much better in high definition. The compression on the release was perfect and I never found that the colors bled into one another or that the compression was so sharp as to have things get pixilated. They have also not made the characters stand out too much, color-wise, and due to this this movie all sort of has fresh look about it across the film's 95 minute run time.

Audio

Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. French and Spanish Language tracks. The audio for this movie played pretty solidly on my one speaker television. While in an animation sense it sounded pretty typical, it did bolster the images without getting in their way and beating us over the head.

Package

This mostly red cover heavily recalls The Incredibles. It features all of the main cast member with the lovable Lewis standing proudly in front. The back of this cover has some more images from the film, a description of what this movie is about, a Special Features listing and some minor technical specs.

Final Word

This mostly red cover heavily recalls The Incredibles. It features all of the main cast member with the lovable Lewis standing proudly in front. The back of this cover has some more images from the film, a description of what this movie is about, a Special Features listing and some minor technical specs.

final

When I first saw any of the artwork for Meet the Robinsons, my initial thought was that this movie was a quick knockoff of The Incredibles, just minus Pixar. Well I must admit that I was 100% wrong. I really think that Meet the Robinsons is a special film. It is very easy to get into the character of Lewis as well as the journey he is. Who doesn't want to belong somewhere and with some group of people? Who doesn't want to feel like they have people around that care about them? Who, sadly, thinks that they might never get a chance to have that?

In telling the story of Meet the Robinsons the folks at Disney have done what they do best. They've managed to take the classical story of family and refreshed it for the 21st Century.

Meet the Robinsons was released March 23, 2007.