Instead of making the comedy revolve around a creative futuristic world, it's more about kooky characters and odd situations. Wilbur's family is a weird one. He has an uncle who's married to a ventriloquist dummy. Another uncle looks like a superhero but delivers pizza and sounds like Adam West. His grandfather wears his clothes backwards and has a face drawn on the back of his bald head. His mother teaches frogs to sing, and in an amusing montage piecing the family together, we learn that his hereto unseen father looks like Tom Selleck and, when he shows up, really sounds like him. Those frogs, by the way, are led by a Sinatra-esque crooner and apparently have formed some kind of frog mafia. It's an inspired kind of random lunacy on display here, something we start to get a taste for at Lewis' science fair when a rogue fan, a delayed model of Mt. Vesuvius, a sprinkler system, and a farm of fire ants create havoc.

It might seem simple (admittedly, it is), but the script's unrelenting barrage of off-the-wall humor is a pleasure. Nothing stacks up against our villain, though—an incredibly dumb bumbler who carries around a unicorn-themed notebook with simple plans that go terribly awry. Enlisting the help of minions like the frog and a tyrannosaur, he's always thwarted, leaving those minions to criticize that the plan wasn't thought out that well. The brain of the operation is his bowler hat, Doris, who has wicked plans of her own, summed up in a flashback that relates one back story only to unexpectedly give us another (the revelation of the location of his evil lair is priceless). The plot eventually settles down into a chase as the space time continuum shifts around our hero (an homage to Star Wars—strangely, one of the prequels) and a moment of decision for him. Astonishingly, that moment, where Lewis must choose between the life he's longed for in the past and what he could have in the future, is moving after all the absurdity that's preceded it. Even stranger, the villain's character arc ends with a tinge of genuine sympathy for him.

This is by no means breakthrough stuff, even for Disney (the tone of the film makes it a fine companion piece to the equally absurd The Emperor's New Groove), but it is infectious. It's appropriate that Rufus Wainwright does a couple of tracks for the soundtrack, as the film is similar to his music—whimsical with some sadness underneath but never taking itself all too seriously. Meet the Robinsons, disposable as it is, is a lot of bizarre fun.