Note:This entry runs about 2000 words. If you just want to read the Aqua Teen stuff, it's up first. Meet the Robinsons is the second movie. Have at it!
Two Walt Disney Executives are sitting in an office.
Disney Exec 1: We should really make a movie about time travel. It hasn't been tapped enough since 1985.
Disney Exec 2: And why hasn't anyone done more with The Matrix? I mean, people really liked that creepy, post-armageddon stuff.
Disney Exec 1: That's true. You know, my kids were watching that the other day. My son was reading Oliver Twist and I thought those concepts would give us a money making picture to work with.
Disney Exec 2: Yeah! With a few Star Wars-esque action sequences thrown in! This is sooo gonna be a movie. Call Danny and get him working on a score. And pass me my bong.
Disney Exec 1: Here ya go. It kind of sounds like a train wreck, but let's throw $50 million at it. John Lasseter's coming on next year, so we can always get him to fix it if we have to.
Disney Exec 2: You're a genius.
Disney Exec 1: You are.
They light their bongs with $1000 bills.
It's a good thing Steve Jobs needed free reign in Disney's film fault to further dominate the world of internet multimedia downloads. If this hadn't happened, I would have seen two trainwreck cartoons this weekend.
We'll get to Meet the Robinsons in a moment. But first...
For those in the know (and my readers are certainly that) Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters was released this weekend. Clearly they were trying to rival Borat in all things absurd including Most Outrageous Movie Title. This is not the only realm where they succeeded.
I left home, walked into the theater, and sat down not knowing what to expect. I've been a fan of ATHF the show since it first aired in 2000. Master Shake (Dana Snyder), Frylock(Carey Means), and Meatwad(Dave Willis also doing Carl and Ignignokt) have always been willing to give me a break from homework when I least needed it well after the witching hour. Through all the countless times I've watched the show and been in a movie theater the past seven years, it never once occured to me that the two should be brought together in a most unholy matrimony.
Apparently, that light bulb clicked for some other matchmaker at Time Warner, and we, the viewers, were rewarded with an abominable marriage.
Despite being a big fan of the show since its beginnings, I was a bit skeptical of the movie. I mean, if you had to stretch a show that normally ran 11 minutes to the 90 minute range (they got it in at 87 mins), you might be a little intimidated as well. Here again, we can draw comparisons to Borat. Sasha Baron Cohen's character was one of many on his HBO series. Borat would get maybe 7 or 8 minutes an episode. Stretching that into (what seemed like) a 3 hour movie proved problematic as well.
I can stand on my digital soapbox and tell you that ATHFCMFFT made a much better transition to the screen than Borat did, but that's not saying much. Rather than adjust the material to cater to the big screen, the Aqua Teen creators decided to extend the implausibly outlandish spiral into the abyss of insanity that every episode of the show fell down to a feature length. Absurdity is built upon foundation of senselessness and, at about the 60 minute mark, you're not even sure what you're supposed to be watching anymore. It becomes impossible to tell the difference between punch lines and build ups and plot advancing dialogue. This movie is a train wreck of epic proportions.
Which, really, is pretty awesome.
Let me explain.
For anyone that's ever spent 30 minutes splicing fuses together at the 4th of July; if you've ever built a giant city of 10,000 Legos to act out a true-to-scale Godzilla; if you and your buddies have ever built an army of 400 Zerglings just to send 9 Ghosts to nuke them all to hell, you can truly appreciate this movie.
Directors Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis took us, as an audience, to a place we've never been before. To suck the audience into a true suckfest is all but impossible. I mean, how can you achieve this kind of futile fixation with a conucopia of crap? These men are geniuses of the higest order.
I'd like to try to summarzie the plot (it involves a half dozen locations, a mythical piece of exercise equipment, every character in the show's arsenal, and the origin of the Aqua Teens) but that would mean I'd have to admit there was a plot. I'm not sure my journalistic integrity would allow that. And I have no journalistic integrity.
The entire experience can be crystallized with a chance happening at the theater. With about 20 minutes left on the scheduled movie time, the projector cut out. The lights were raised, and the theater radio system kick on. Everyone in the theater sat there, bewildered for a moment, and then asked, almost in unison: "Is it over?". But it didn't end there. Some patrons stayed in their seats, continuing to ask if the movie had ended. Others left, convinced that the movie was over and that there was nothing more to see. About half a dozen audience members (including me, Chuckles, and BlackToast) ventured out to the manager to shly ask, "Is the Aqua Teen movie over? Does it have credits or does it just end like that?".
Nobody in the theater knew then, but as we walked back into the theater to watch the last 20 minutes, we were witnesses to The Most Fantastic Train Wreck in Movie History.
As a fan of the show, I couldn't have been more satisfied.
I just love that.
The hype surrounding Meet the Robinsons has been almost non-existent. Mostly because my little dialogue above was pretty close to the real situation. Robinsons was a movie born of the old Disney Animation vanguard. A little over a year ago, Steve Jobs changed all that by selling his stake in Pixar to Disney for stock in the new company. As a result, John Lasseter, new head of Disney Animation after the merger, started clearing house. Toy Story 3 was immediately halted and Meet the Robinsons was going to need a complete overhaul if it was going to be released to the public.
And it certainly got that.
Moments after the Disney Logo finishes transporting us in all it's glory to the Magic Kindgom, we are greeted with a rainy, crystal clear street in decisive sepia tone. A woman scurries up a stoop to the 6th Street Orphanage and leaves a baby Lewis (voiced by Jordan Fry) to a lonely orphan life.
And this inquisitive young man is, of course, our hero. His own orphanhood drives him to create a better world. He unveils this vision like a plan for the future to every set of prospective parents that would potentially adopt him. As parents continue to pass up the opportunity of raising the young Lewis, he grows impatient and sulks in the fact that his own mother didn't want him, so why should anyone else. A predictable plotline, to be sure, but perhaps fresh in the face of the more recent Hollywood fair.
This seems to be where the new Disney is going. Common situations are being reinvented and redone in a gorgeous CGI backdrop. The Disney heart remains in every picture, but not all of the magic is there. Recent pictures like Robinsons, Cars, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and (presumably) the upcomming Ratatouille all have that heart. And, in the case of The Incredibles, a lot of the magic as well. But the magic that made Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella great in Walt's time - the magic that somehow spilled over into the Golden Age to give us The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast seems to have been traded in for something else. That something may be jokes that appeal to kids and adults, that something may be celebrity voices, and that something may be digitally enhanced visuals, but it's not the same. That's not to say, however, they're not on a very good path to finding it.
The afformentioned heart that Disney has produced in spades as of late is certainly present in Robinsons. The first scene immediately asks sympathy of the audience for baby Lewis. This sympathy is translated into admiration at witnessing Lewis's perseverance. That admiration morphs to wonder as a plot unfolds that pins Lewis in the middle of a struggle between a snide stranger in a conscious bowler hat (that often resembles sentinels of Matrix fame) and a 13 year old science fair colleague who goes by Wilbur Robinson.
From here, plot spins and character relationships are all but impossible to follow (though they are deftly summed up by our boy-genius hero). Time travel is the order of the day, and Lewis goes forward in time with Wilbur Robinson to do exactly what the title would lead us to believe. The audience is excited to find out there is still a fair amount of plant life in the future, and the Robinsons' garden coupled with the whimsical score provided by the always entertaining Danny Elfman reminds us of a time when Johnny Depp wore a bondage suit. Inside the home of the Robinsons, the mother Franny (voiced by Nicole Sullivan) is training a band of du-wop frogs that seem to have as much talent as Marvin Berry and his band from another time-travel film(This band locks a villain in a trunk, rather than springing the hero from it). And a car(sorry, I mean time machine) chase late in the movie provides us with ever mounting sci-fi themes that are simultaneously reminiscent of The Matrix and Star Wars (assuming this is allowed).
Director Stephen J. Anderson is the man charged with organizing this plot with its many twists and turns. And he does it rather well. While the natural gripes with the logic faults in time travel theory still appear in Robinsons, Anderson and his crack crew of Disney animators provide us with transitions in existence and bends in time space that are far more pleasing to see than to attempt to understand.
And naturally, the movie ends with a heaping dose of heart that only Disney can bring us. Unlike rival stuidos like Dreamworks (Shrek) and Warner Bros. (Happy Feet) Disney continually delivers these fluttering emotions to us through their pictures. This is why they call it the Magic Kingdom and why these movies will always outpace their competition.
I only hope they can once again reach for that brass ring, and make us forget about their inferior contemporaries entirely.
Seriously, though. Everything else that's put out by other studios is terrible in comparison. Shrek, while funny, has nothing on what Disney's done over any time span in their history. Happy Feet was garbage from it's complete lack of any real characterization to it's way too overt social message. I actually got a pamphlet in the DVD about certain fish to avoid because their numbers are scarce or they are improperly farmed.
Disney towers above these other fools. We're just lucky they can reach greatness without any real competition around them.
Ok, I'm done ranting now. I need to calm down....but how...?
I've got it!
Ah yes, that did it.
If you liked that, I recommend you go above and click the links for all the Disney movies I listed. You should be clicking links anyway, but I'll give you a mulligan on this one.
Tschüs!