Those far-out Robinsons are a trip

BY JOHN ANDERSON | Special to Newsday

March 30, 2007

Among those enchanted, fairy-dusted people who make entertainment for children, there must be many moments of existential doubt and crises of conscience: Why not just recycle? How jaded can 7-year-olds be? Isn't it all new to them?

One considers this conundrum while watching "Meet the Robinsons," Disney's new 3-D adventure comedy, and imagining little angels, and little devils, sitting on the shoulders of the filmmakers. One is whispering, "Be creative!" The other is whispering, "Be a hack!" Somehow, both messages got through. "Robinsons" is hardly a movie aimed at little kids alone - nothing this big would be. But the movie doesn't really start becoming a masterpiece until about a third of the way through. Previous to that, it's a collection of cliches.

The conventions begin with having an orphan as the hero, in this case a pint-sized Tom Edison named Lewis (voice of Daniel Hansen), who looks just like that kid in "Jerry Maguire" and is too smart for most potential parents. Lewis has never met his mother, but believes that he must harbor memories of her somewhere - so he invents the Memory Scanner, which extracts memories, at least, theoretically. He has a friend named Michael "Goob" Yagoobian (voice of Matthew Josten), who resembles one of those big-eyed kids in the velvet paintings The arch-villain - the Bowler Hat Guy - is the spitting image of Jay Ward's Snidely Whiplash. The early laughs, when they do arrive, are courtesy of routines that were old when Cindy Adams was babysitting Charlie Chaplin.

However: once Wilbur Robinson arrives from the future and spirits Lewis away to meet the Robinsons, the movie turns into something Mel Brooks and Philip K. Dick might have dreamed up while smoking old Marx Brothers movies in Lewis Carroll's bong. The introduction to the futuristic Robinsons - the twin uncles who live in the potted plants, or the aunt who's a hand puppet, or the uncle who's a combo superhero/pizza delivery guy - is worth a ticket all by itself. By the way, while he's meeting all these Robinsons, Lewis wears a fruit basket on his head. The main question is how, and where, we jumped the tracks from tepid, Oliver-Twisted sentimentality to utter comic anarchy.

3-D is an acquired taste I've never acquired, but the success of "Robinsons" isn't contingent on effects, but on wit and emotion. Once things are ratcheted up, that's where they stay, surviving even the feel-good, inspirational stuff that inevitably follows the real laughs, like penance, in a movie like this. Not that there are many movies like this. "Meet the Robinsons" may not be a "Toy Story," but its aspirations are in the right place.