Meet the Robinsons

U, 101 mins

Half the fun of cinematic time travel is in mucking about with the past, seeing what the future holds (usually the present with more people, gadgets, rain and taller buildings) and producing paradoxes and plot knots that have us leaving the cinema, scratching our heads, and muttering: “But does that make him his own father?” Sadly the new Disney CGI cartoon Meet the Robinsons is too busy filling the screen with hectic plotting and extraneous business, not to mention some glutinous musical interludes, to make much of its time-hopping plotline.

Our young hero is Lewis, a geeky orphan boy-genius inventor, despairing of ever being adopted, who is whisked away by a time-travelling teenager, Wilbur Robinson, to a Utopian retro-future that’s threatened by Lewis’s decision to give up inventing.

Lewis is embraced by Wilbur’s family, a bunch of equally inventive misfits. But having been introduced to this clan, the characterisations then remain sheen-deep in a candy-coloured film that sacrifices any charm for an overstuffed narrative.

The film, made while Disney’s animation department was being subsumed by its one-time subsidiary Pixar, succumbs to the now standard overcaffeinated approach to storytelling that relies too much on rollercoaster thrills to stop the kids from fidgeting. And the script isn’t smart enough to make much of details such as Wilbur being Lewis’s son. It offers a bowler-hatted villain used more for slapstick than menace, while the story tosses in a T-rex and frogs that come across like an amphibian Rat Pack. Still, at least this doesn’t feature uninspired celebrity turns voicing gabby creatures in fish-out-of-water situations involving flatulence and cinematic in-jokes – but it’s still best to catch it in its 3-D version at certain cinemas.

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