Based on the William Joyce illustrated book, Meet The Robinsons features a retro style influenced by everything from Technicolor movies to ‘40s architectural design. All images © Disney Enterprises Inc. All rights reserved.

Meet The Robinsons: Keep Moving Forward at Disney
Bill Desowitz speaks with some of the creative forces behind Disney’s latest animated feature, Meet The Robinsons.

March 30, 2007
By Bill Desowitz

The theme of Meet The Robinsons (opening March 30) aptly ties directly to Walt Disney’s own philosophy: “… We keep moving forward… ” In fact, the movie ends with the full quote from Disney, yet begins with a new Walt Disney Feature Animation logo built around Steamboat Willie. Obviously it’s that delicate balance between the past and the future that lies at the heart of Steve Anderson’s directorial debut, and the implicit message by John Lasseter in re-imagining Walt’s vision as Disney’s new chief creative officer.

Based on William Joyce’s illustrated book, A Day With Wilbur Robinson, this 3D-animated follow-up to Chicken Little is a witty, breathless, zip-a-dee-doo-dah adventure. It’s about an orphan named Lewis who’s a genius inventor on a quest to find his birth mother, who’s whisked away in a time machine by a mysterious kid named Wilbur Robinson who needs him to save the future from a strange Bowler Hat Guy. It’s a madcap cross between Back to the Future and Bringing Up Baby, and instantly appealed to Anderson, a Disney vet who was story supervisor on Brother Bear and The Emperor’s New Groove, and storyboard artist on Tarzan.

Director Steve Anderson had to find the balance between a realistic and a cartoony kind of human. He realized that the trick was to make choices that would never pull the audience out of the movie and distance them from the characters.

We worked with Bill [Joyce, who served as an exec producer] with designing all the elements from the very beginning,” Anderson confirms. “We loved the charm and warmth of his illustrations, and a lot of the ideas that he has in his book, like the hairstyles. Lewis has a broom bristle style and the Bob’s Big Boy do of Wilbur, and Uncle Art, the guy who drives the spaceship, looks very much like he came out of a `50s sci-fi movie. We knew we had such a range of emotion after boarding our movie and the dynamics we’d have to achieve with our acting, so we kept pushing to find the balance between a realistic and cartoony kind of human. The trick for me was that the choices we made could never pull the audience out of the movie and distance them from the characters. That was the journey that we had from the very beginning. I’m really pleased with what we came up with because there’s a very simple graphic language with a real appeal to their faces. But you feel the flesh, you feel the muscles, you feel the chins and knees.”

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