This week, we have landed on another one of my favorite Disney films,
Meet the Robinsons. I honestly believe that this movie is very underrated and not as popular as it should be, unfortunately. If you have not seen this film yet, I would
highly recommend it - this film not only brings along good laughs, but it will also guarantee to bring tears and wholesome feelings, too. With this, if you are looking to now watch this movie, I say skip reading this blog post first and come back to it after you have seen the film. It will be so worth it!
All right, this film favorite of mine starts out with the main character, Lewis, who is an aspiring 12-year-old inventor who grew up in an orphanage. The reason why he is still living as an orphan is because his energy and eccentricity has been scaring off potential parents, even when he invents a machine to make PB&J itself, but ends up putting a potential parent in the hospital due to his extreme peanut allergy. So much for first impressions, huh?
Lewis also works all night on another machine to scan his memory to locate his birth mother, who abandoned him at the orphanage when he was just a baby. While taking the scanner to his school's science fair, Lewis meets 13-year-old Wilbur Robinson, a mysterious boy claiming to be a time cop from the future. Wilbur needs to recover a time machine that a man wearing a bowler hat has stolen. Lewis tries to demonstrate the scanner, but it ends up being sabotaged by the Bowler Hat Guy and falls apart, throwing the science fair into utter (yet hilarious) chaos. Lewis leaves disheartened while the Bowler Hat Guy, with the help of a robotic bowler hat named Doris, repairs and steals the scanner.
Wilbur meets Lewis again but at the orphanage this time, and asks him to repair the scanner. Lewis agrees to do so only if Wilbur can prove he is telling the truth, which Wilbur does by taking them in a second time machine to the year 2037, which is extremely advanced technologically. I sincerely doubt we will have such advanced technology as the movie shows, but who knows what will change in the next 15 years.
When they arrive, Lewis realizes he can simply use the time machine to meet his birth mother, but in claiming so results in an argument with Wilbur, making them crash the time machine. Wilbur asks Lewis to fix the time machine, and Lewis agrees on the condition that Wilbur has to take him to visit his birth mother afterwards. Reluctantly, Wilbur agrees and hides Lewis in the garage. Lewis accidentally leaves, however, and ends up meeting the rest of the Robinson family, except for Cornelius, Wilbur's father and the main creator of most of the society's inventions, who is away on a business trip. Having followed Lewis back into the future, the Bowler Hat Guy and Doris try to kidnap him, even while hiring a talking frog and a dinosaur, but the Robinsons beat them back. The Robinsons even offer to adopt Lewis after bonding with him, but change their mind when they learn that he is from the past. Wilbur admits to lying to Lewis about taking him back to see his mom, saying he was never going to do it in the first place, causing Lewis to run off in disgust.
The Bowler Hat Guy and Doris approach the distressed Lewis and offer to take him to his birth mother instead, but only if he fixes the memory scanner. Upon doing so, however, they take Lewis hostage. The Bowler Hat Guy reveals that Cornelius Robinson is, in fact, Lewis's future self, and that he himself is a grown-up version of Lewis's roommate, Michael "Goob" Yagoobian. Here's a quick flashback into why the Bowler Hat Guy, or Goob, sought out revenge against Lewis all along: because he was kept awake all night by Lewis's work on the scanner, Goob fell asleep during an important Little League game and failed to make an important catch that cost the game. Goob became so bitter as a result that he was never adopted and remained in the orphanage way long after it closed and even into his adulthood. In fact, Doris is "DOR-15," one of future-Lewis's failed and abandoned inventions. They both blamed Lewis for their misfortunes and decided to ruin his life by stealing the memory scanner and having Goob claim credit for it, who will then have Doris be mass-produced.
Leaving Lewis behind, they take off with the fixed scanner all while the past and the future are steadily changing. However, it is revealed that Doris tricked everyone, even Goob, and that by changing the past, Goob has allowed the mass-produced Doris hats to enslave humanity and render the future post-apocalyptic. Talk about dark for a Disney movie! To fix his mistakes, Lewis repairs the second time machine, confronts Doris in the past, and destroys her by promising to never invent her, restoring the future to its utopian self. After persuasion from Lewis, Wilbur tries to ask the adult Goob to join the family, but finds that Goob has run away, apparently ashamed by what he has done.
Back in Wilbur's time, Lewis finally meets Cornelius face to face (his future self). Cornelius explains how the memory scanner started their successful career, and persuades Lewis to return to the science fair, which is where it all began. Wilbur takes Lewis back to the present, but makes one stop first: as he promised, he takes Lewis back to the moment when his birth mother abandoned him at the orphanage. Though Lewis approaches his mother, he ultimately decides not to interact with her, realizing the family he will come to have with Wilbur and others is good enough.
Wilbur drops Lewis off in his own time and leaves. Lewis heads to the fair, but en route wakes up Goob just in time for him to make the winning catch, saving the game and thereby preventing his villainous ways in the future. Goob is eventually adopted, too, with a baseball championship trophy in hand. Back at the fair, Lewis asks for one more chance to demonstrate his scanner, which this time succeeds. He is then adopted by Lucille, one of the science fair judges, and her husband Bud, who nicknames him "Cornelius" and takes him home.
The film ends with a quote which is said repeatedly throughout the movie, and even reiterates the message of not dwelling on failures: "keep moving forward," attributed to Walt Disney. As one of my favorite ending scenes in film, I always get the chills at this quote. This film is funny, heartwarming, and gut-wrenchingly good, I cannot help but always recommend everyone to watch it whenever I get the chance. So, please, go out and watch it now! You will not regret it.
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