Meet the Robinsons

IF THE rumour mill is accurate - and it usually isn't - then Disney Studios may be on the point of returning to the traditional animation that made it great. You can see why. After the ropy Chicken Little and the awful The Wild, the digital boffins from that organisation must have grown a ittle sick of having their heads held down the lavatory by the bigger boys from Pixar.

Meet the Robinsons, a zany sci-fi digimation, does, however, show some slight signs of improvement. There are more than a few excellent jokes, and the picture holds off its inevitable descent into sentimentality until the last five minutes. Still, no viewer who hadn't recently had a tent peg hammered into his or her cerebral cortex would mistake it for Bambi.

The film introduces us to an unwanted orphan (he grimly counts off the unsuccessful interviews with potential parents on the side of a box) as he sets out to manufacture a machine that will allow him to view images from the past. Before the boy, Lewis, achieves his ultimate aim of glimpsing his birth mother, a young visitor arrives in an advanced time machine and whisks him forward to a busy future the Jetsons might have recognised.

The voyager, enemy of an evil man in a bowler hat, is the least eccentric member of the Robinson family. Among the extended clan and its retainers are a giant pink alien, singing frogs and an elderly man with a face painted on the rear of his head.

As you will have gathered, the animators are aiming for a freewheeling, irreverent style of surreal humour. When the film is at its least disciplined, this comes off quite nicely. The villain has an old-fashioned, spidery menace and the Robinson household radiates enough lunacy to distract the viewer from the crude, rubbery visuals.

Otherwise, there is little in Meet the Robinsons to suggest that the decision to (quite literally) go back to the drawing board should be reversed.