As in Lewis Carroll, there’s much to keep track of, but unlike Wonderland, the future seems to have more dim twits than bright wits.
By: Bob Brown
Seeing this movie is like entering Disney World. You’re so overwhelmed by the possibilities, you don’t know which ride to take so you take them all at once. At least you would if you could. This movie makes you feel as if you had. But unlike Disney World, which whets your appetite for a return trip, the sensory overload in a film has the opposite effect.
This isn’t your dad’s Disney. Walt Disney’s studio created the feature-length animated film as an art form with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and honed it to perfection. The secret was hanging the movies on a clear story line and a few indelible characters. But times have changed. Disney knew a thing or two about change. He was a restless guy, always looking for the next big thing. He was more an entrepreneur than a cartoonist.
As quoted in the epilogue to the movie, Disney acknowledged his restless optimism. "Around here, however, we don’t look backward for very long," he said, "We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things."
And toward the end of his life the new thing was a theme park in central Florida that would be much bigger than Disneyland. It would embody his utopian ideal of a self-contained town, a perfect, happy environment. As the architect Peter Blake wrote in Architectural Forum in 1972, "Walt Disney did not know that such things as vast urban infrastructures, multilevel mass-transit systems, People Movers, nonpolluting vehicles, pedestrian malls and so forth were unattainable, so he just went ahead and built them."
In a way, the overall structure of Disney World was an expanded version of "Tomorrowland," one of the theme sections in the original Disneyland. It was a Pollyanna tomorrow, with better living through engineering. It was as if Walt Disney was not satisfied with creating this vision on film: he wanted it in the flesh.
Disney’s shadow looms large over his studio. The Robinsons, as created by author William Joyce, live in a digitized utopia of the future that has a theme park called "Todayland," as if Tomorrowland had caught up with itself and were better than the original.
The broom-haired kid Lewis (voiced by Daniel Hansen) is an orphaned genius living some time in the early 21st century. Like many boy geniuses, he’s long on enthusiasm and short on materials. His machines blow up in mid-demonstration, spewing peanut butter and jelly, or worse, everywhere.
His latest invention is the Memory Scanner, by which he hopes to capture the moment when he last saw his natural mother and thereby to rejoin her. But the scanner is stolen by a mysterious Bowler Hat Guy (voiced by Director Stephen Anderson), a mustachioed villain from the future whose evil assistant is a bowler hat named Doris. Meanwhile, Lewis is abducted by young Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who jets him back to the future (the resemblance to the film of that name is almost too close). The point is to recapture the Memory Scanner from the Bowler Hat Guy and get things back on track in the present.
The point of the mad chase is lost until the last few minutes of the film, which is full of "Aha" revelations that make everything clear. But by then one has been subjected to dozens of eccentric characters, including the extended Family Robinson (minus Dad) and bizarre situations. There’s Mom Franny Robinson, Grandpa Bud, Grandma Lucille; Uncles Art, Gaston, Fritz, Joe, Spike, and Dimitri; Aunts Billie and Petunia; cousins Lazlo and Tallulah; and a purple octopus named Lefty. Everything comes at you in a breathless whirl. As in Lewis Carroll, there is much to keep track of, but unlike Wonderland, the future seems to have more dim twits than bright wits.
But why bother figuring out who’s who and what’s what when everything looks so smashing? Indeed, the studio plumbed the work of futuristic architects of the ’30s and ’40s, then took a lesson from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the nightmare vision of inventions gone awry. And they had cool digital toys to realize whatever they could imagine.
The Disney team who dreamed up the three worlds squarish present, roundish retro-future and nightmare dystopia invited dozens of creative types to chip in with ideas, all of them welcomed with open arms. "Every step of the way the creativity just kept flowing and we just kept pushing forward," Director Anderson said in production notes on the film’s Web site. Was Walt whispering in his ear?
Thereby lies the trouble. In the "no bad ideas" environment, there was no Bowler Hat Gate Keeper who could have said, "Stay out" to at least a few of them. The result is a multi-ring circus of busy-ness that is so busy astonishing the viewer and showing off (like Lewis) that it loses sight of the center, drowning it out. The story line resurfaces only later in the film, where it comes bobbing up, gasping for air in a rush to get to the long-delayed heart-warming point. The film’s upbeat attitude, its relentless energy, its lack of focus until the very end, weigh it down for all but those whose attention span is already measured in milliseconds. At least the price of admission is less than at Disney World.
Rated G.

