I am taken aback but delighted by the humor of Meet the Robinsons. The film is less a kiddie adventure in a futuristic world than it is an absurdist comedy that looks like a kiddie adventure. Clearly made for kids but written for adults, the intent of the jokes for the most part is going to go right over kids' heads. That's not to say children won't enjoy it. It's bright, colorful, and full of goofy characters, but that's about the end of it. Instead, the focus is trying to fit lots of random goofiness into a plot about a genius orphan, time travel, and one of the more bumbling villains in recent memory. Based on the children's book A Day with Wilbur Robinson by William Joyce, this isn't Disney animation at its finest, and the computer animated film still fits pretty basically in the trappings of typical Disney plotting (child on his own, strange new land, villain) and motif (family, finding yourself). Those aren't the focal points for most of the movie, though, and the wacky humor doesn't necessarily give the formula an edge as much as it slightly dulls its familiarity. More surprisingly, when those familiar themes come to the foreground near the end, they are still affecting.

It's a rainy, desaturated night. A woman is carrying her baby down the sidewalk to an orphanage, where she leaves him on the doorstep. Mildred (voice of Angela Bassett), who runs the orphanage, takes the baby in. He is Lewis (voice of Daniel Hansen), a brilliant young inventor, whose only wish is to be adopted but whose inventions scare away his potential parents and keep his roommate "Goob" (voice of Matthew Josten, with a very funny stream-of-consciousness droll) up at all hours of the night. After yet another rejection and realizing he is facing his thirteenth birthday, Lewis decides to build a memory scanner so he can unlock the memory of his mother, find her, and live happily ever after. Things are complicated, though, when Wilbur (voice of Wesley Singerman) arrives at the school science fair, warning Lewis of the mysterious Bowler Hat Guy (voice of Stephen J. Anderson, also the film's director). The invention is ready to work, but Bowler Hat arrives, sabotages the machine, and steals it to sell as his own. Wilbur returns, telling Lewis he's from the future and that it's vital Lewis rebuild the machine, but the only way to convince the skeptical Lewis is to take him for a ride to the future.

I must reiterate that the future of the film is a bright and colorful place, because that's essentially what the conceptualization boils down to. In terms of new ideas about what the future could look like, the film has none, but that's not a drawback.