Logo Case Study: Pixar's Luxo Lamp

2026 marks the fortieth anniversary of Pixar's founding (when the Graphics Group, a special effects team that made up part of Lucasfilm's Computer Division, was acquired by Steve Jobs and established as an independent company), so what better time to pay tribute to the plucky little desk lamp who's been attached to their output for as long as they've been making feature films?

I can remember a time when the existence of Luxo Jr. was a secret, an intriguing little Easter egg you'd be rewarded with should you make it all the way through the closing credits on the VHS release of Toy Story. Nowadays, we're fully accustomed to the lamp popping in at the start of each Pixar release as well as after, but that wasn't the case with their premier feature. Although Toy Story was heavily touted in its marketing as the first completely computer-animated feature film, Pixar themselves had essentially no brand recognition among the general public in the mid-1990s, and there does seem to have been a mindset that it should be packaged foremost as a Disney film - as something bold, new and exciting, but under the warmth and familiarity of the Disney banner. On the original print of Toy Story, the Disney logo had the opening all to itself, while the Pixar logo was tucked away discreetly at the tail-end of the picture. And quite frankly, that's where little Luxo thrived. For me, the hopping lamp was poetic, a perfectly quirky manifestation of the fact that we were venturing a little far beyond our comfort zone and were getting dangerously close to the spooky oblivion that awaited at the end of every VHS tape. He came bounding into view, eager to play with the I in the text that spelled out the company's name, only for these larks to be cut short by the I's inability to withstand his rambunctious thumping atop it, before some unseen power turned the lights out on him. Luxo Jr., now substituting for the ravaged I, would direct his bulb toward the camera (his eye, for all intents and purposes, so a possible visual pun), emitting a final warm glow into the abyss, before that too was extinguished with a genial click. At the time, Disney were in the business of inserting extra previews at the end of their tapes, so we still had a couple of items to get through before we would also be plunged into total blackness (in this case, a promo for the few blessed Disney releases that got to live permanently outside of the vault, and an ad for an interactive Toy Story CD Rom that supposed that Woody and Buzz might emerge from your PC screen as soon as you left the room), but the refuge and excitement of the main feature was now behind us. I can think of few closing logos that quite so slickly captured that feeling of "Show's over, eject" as the frisky desk lamp that saw out Toy Story.

Of course, as Pixar's stature in the entertainment industry grew there was no reason to keep Luxo confined to the pictures' sign-offs, and he became a familiar, reassuring sight in their introductions as well (including updated prints of the first Toy Story). For the most part, the sequence works as aptly as an opener, with the enthusiasm the lamp exhibits at the prospect of getting to tamper with the Pixar lettering mirroring the audience's anticipation for whatever experience the studio is about to serve up next. All the same, an important distinction was maintained between the opening and closing versions of the logo, indicating that the powers that be were entirely aware of the special power the lamp's antics had exuded at the end of their original feature. In the standard opening version of the logo, the sequence simply fades to black as Luxo's gaze turns directly toward the cinema. The intense glow in the darkness and the concluding click happen only in the end version, preserving their association with that sense of finality. I will admit to being a total purist when it comes to the latter version of the logo, meaning that I strongly disapprove of any variant in which music from the end-credits continues to play as little Luxo makes his entrance. I don't mind one iota when the reverse occurs, and the opening version of the logo is overlaid with the score from the film's beginnings, but as I see it, the sound design is too quintessential a part of the closing experience to jettison. It wasn't just the click and the total immersion in darkness that signalled that we'd reached the end of this particular journey. Every last thud and squishing sound that accompanied Luxo's movements, in addition to making the logo feel all the more alive, also emphasised the vast emptiness of the space around him, like he was hopping around a deserted venue after everyone else at Pixar had packed up and gone home for the night. The narrative I always projected onto the sequence was that Luxo was looking to eke a scrap of added enjoyment from the experience, not wanting the thrill of the feature we'd just watched be over, but his efforts were brought to an abrupt halt once he'd obliterated the I, at which point he was left shut inside the Pixar studio as the last of the employees switched off the lights. Which perhaps sounds a little bleak, but I was fairly confident that the last click was voluntary, and that Luxo was embracing in the darkness, signifying the completion of this particular Pixar project, and the promise of the next one to come. The lamp wasn't deserted, merely dormant.

I know that there are a number of folks out there who report finding Luxo Jr. unnerving in their school-aged years, on account of that fourth wall-breaking moment where he surveys you with his glowing, inhuman "eye", but in the main I think his impact on viewers was overwhelmingly disarming. I was utterly fascinated by the character - never mind toys, there was something innately beautiful in the suggestion that desk lamps could be brought to life and exhibit playful personalities. It all made sense, for you could look at a desk lamp and pick out the outline of a creature, with a head, elongated neck and foot, and Pixar were really able to make the most of that, imbuing their subject with a convincing heart and motion without the need to implement additional anthropomorphic features. It's all in the movements and the gestures - the eager spontaneity as he races into the picture and the lettering appears to catch his attention, the frantic confusion as he attempts to pinpoint the flattened I, and the stunned abashment with which his displacement of the unfortunate letter sinks in. Meanwhile, the various little creaks and clangs emitted by Luxo's metallic form are assertions of his fundamental otherness; in working within the limitations of something as inanimate and inhuman as a lamp, Pixar managed to give him a vitality and expressiveness that is uniquely his own. The patch of light that accompanies Luxo and is carefully matched to his every movement (a demonstration of Pixar's capacity to have light and shadow interact with their computer-generated landscapes) is another invaluable touch. 

At the time, I was vaguely aware that the character had originated from a short film, Luxo Jr. (John Lassester, 1986), thanks to a documentary I'd seen close to the UK release of Toy Story in the spring of 1996. I'm pretty sure Luxo Jr. came up somewhere in that, although my main interest in said documentary had been in getting glimpses of the upcoming feature and a lot of the background information went over my head (still, I've distinct memories of gasping when they played the test footage Lasseter had prepared for a proposed adaptation of Where The Wild Things Are, and being properly gutted when they subsequently indicated that the project had been canned). Like many people, I didn't see the short in its entirety until it did the theatrical rounds, attached to Pixar's 1999 release Toy Story 2 (though it had previously been available on the 1996 VHS release Tiny Toy Stories), with added text explaining that "This is why we have a hopping lamp in our logo", as if it had been a matter of serious confusion beforehand. Originally created as a technical demonstration of what the Pixar Image Computer could do, it creates an irresistible narrative, cramming a lot into its efficient two minute running time - the bond between Luxo Jr. and his "parent" lamp Luxo Sr., Luxo Jr.'s education on death, or at least consequence (thankfully, the ball he flattens doesn't actually appear to be alive), and the endearing visual punchline where Jr. rebounds from his setback and with the renewed confidence to take on an even bigger escapade in the form of that beach ball. Some of the narrative detail from the short was transplanted directly into the logo - notably Junior flattening the I in the same manner in which he does the smaller ball, although in the original short it was Luxo Sr. who made the fourth wall-breaking gesture of looking directly to the camera. The electrical cord that trailed Luxo Jr. in the original short (another crucial feature in establishing the characters' "lampness") was not incorporated into the logo, presumably in the interests of greater fluidity.

The logo worked its magic, implanting the Pixar brand name firmly inside my skull and getting me genuinely excited for what might be next on the studio's horizon. It offered such an intriguing contrast to Disney's logo - one was elegant and grandiose, while the other was quirky and ultra-modern - making it clear early on that Pixar's output was going to have a touch and character quite distinct from that of the Mouse. It was likewise a much busier logo than the grey shape that had accompanied Pixar's preceding projects, boldly announcing that a new dynamic era had begun. Mind you, the Beveled Square with a Dent still has its charm. It seems like such a primitive piece of computer animation now, but once upon a time it was the future.

The Most Wonderful Time of The Year (aka Look What Disney Did To Bob)

Watching the Simpsons shorts created for Disney+, it is somewhat mind-boggling to contemplate that there ever was a time when the series doing a self-proclaimed cheap cartoon crossover was treated as a matter of extreme contention, at least among the higher-ups. "A Star Is Burns" of Season 6 was conceived and created with the intention of convincing you to check out The Critic, a series by former Simpsons showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss, which had been picked up by Fox for its second season (following a troubled start on ABC) and would be premiering right after. Simpsons creator Matt Groening was so infamously opposed to the move that he insisted on having his name scrubbed from the credits, arguing that The Simpsons and The Critic didn't have anything to do with on another. He was basically right. Writer Ken Keeler had a valiant go at making the set-up as fun and credible as could possibly be expected, but there isn't much dancing around the fact that the episode rests on a massive contrivance - the idea that snobby New York film critic Jay Sherman and the uncultivated small-towners of Springfield would want to hang out together. There's a weird false harmony to their interactions, as if both parties know that ingratiation is their best recourse, even with Bart getting in the occasional aside about how intrinsically crummy the arrangement is. With hindsight, though, the possibility of Jay and the Simpsons sharing a common universe was barely a stretch at all, not when compared with the company the family would be toadying up to in three decades' time. Who would have guessed that in the 2020s we'd be seeing official content that had the Simpsons rubbing shoulders with fairy tale princesses, space tyrants and talking ducks who wear naval jackets (but not pants)? Welcome to the world of Disneyfied Simpsons, a world as baffling as it is brain-rotting.

The obvious rejoinder is that the Disney+ shorts (unlike "A Star Is Burns") are clearly not part of the Simpsons canon and that the crossovers therein represent no radical new world-building for the show's internal universe, but rather pieces of fun, bite-sized content to be readily consumed on the side. More accurately, they're thinly-veiled advertisements for the Disney+ library that hide behind a repurposed, declawed version of the Simpsons' irreverence. They're over before they've even started, they might give you the occasional dumb laugh (so help me, while watching May The 12th Be With You, I actually did chuckle when Mary Poppins - or was it Shary Bobbins? - said, "No fat-shaming on Disney Playground Planet, brat!") and have you go away wanting to binge the latest Marvel series, but they add nothing of value to the Simpsons brand. In my eyes, Plusaversary (2021) would be a strong contender for the nadir of the entire franchise. The part of it that had me absolutely throwing my hands up was at the end when Bart walked in dressed up as Mickey Mouse and Sideshow Mel leaned over and said something along the lines of "I can't believe you're getting away with this!" Excuse me Mel, but what the fuck is there to even be getting away with? Plusaversary is about as subversive as an episode of House of Mouse. Bart did a far more scathing Mickey Mouse impersonation in The Simpsons Movie, and even that was relatively mild compared to how savagely Disney were sent up in the episode "Itchy & Scratchy Land" (if they were able to sneak a gag like "Nazi Supermen Are Our Superiors" into one of these shorts then yeah, that might have impressed me). Before that head-scratching finale, we had Lisa singing a ditty about the virtues of Disney+, in a manner that seemed eerily reminiscent of her role in "The Simpsons Spin-off Showcase" segment "Chief Wiggum, P.I.", only without the winking irony. There were attempts to disguise the tackiness of the occasion with sprinklings of pseudo self-deprecation, including an ever so quaint gag about parents using their televisions as inexpensive babysitters. When Roald Dahl was making that observation in 1964 I'm sure it seemed biting and scandalous, but the conversation about children and screens has moved on significantly, what with the coming of tablets and social media, and I doubt that anyone in 2021 was terribly shocked by the admission that TV is a convenient fallback for keeping the kids pacified.

Defenders of the Disney+ shorts will point out that The Simpsons were never sticklers for artistic integrity, and that they were hawking candy bars before they even had a series proper, but at least those Butterfinger commercials had the decency to restrict themselves to actual advertising blocks and had zero pretensions about what they were. The Disney shorts are cynical slices of self-promotion dressed up as fun little nuggets of bonus content; superficially, they might be capable of acknowledging their own vapidness, but they are not designed to make us question our relationship with the media we consume, as might once have been expected of a creation as iconoclastic as The Simpsons. They have the air of a surrender more than a challenge. I think Frank Oz's comments about Disney's handling of The Muppets applies here: "They're cute...I love cute things like little bunny rabbits, but I don't like pejorative cute."

So yeah, the Disney+ shorts are not my bag and I've tended to avoid talking about them because these days I prefer to direct my efforts toward things that I like or that I at least think are interesting. Besides which, they're so aggressively lightweight that I'm not sure there is a whole lot to be said about them ("Chilli and Bingo were in the same narrative space as Marge and Maggie - isn't that nutty?"). And then last year they did the one thing guaranteed to grab my interest - they dragged Sideshow Bob into this dubious arena - and I thus feel obligated to comment. The Most Wonderful Time of The Year dropped on October 11th 2024, and revolves around Bob joining forces with the Disney villains to belt out an ode to the spooky season by way of a corrupted Christmas standard ("It's The Most Wonderful Time of The Year", originally recorded by Andy Williams in 1963). That they're singing about Halloween but the short has the trappings of a festive special is the big underlying joke. The definition of a Disney villain has been expanded to include the likes of Vader, Thanos and Agatha, but there is a curious dearth of Pixar villains in The Most Wonderful Time of The Year. Curious, because come on, one of them was actually voiced by Kelsey Grammer. Surely if you're going to have Bob interacting with bad guys from other Disney-owned properties, Stinky Pete is the first who should have come to mind? The mint condition prospector's failure to show must be this short's single biggest missed opportunity.

As it is, The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is basically harmless - which, honestly, is about as good as I could have hoped it to be. It's not as feeble and inexplicably self-congratulatory as Plusaversary, but it is every bit as vacuous. I'll start by focussing on what I liked about it, which is that Bob is still a treat to listen to. There's been so much discourse in recent years about the ageing voice cast and what it might mean for the future of series, but Grammer seriously doesn't sound too bad for a man entering his 70s (admittedly, I'm not sure if he's doing Bob's maniacal laugh any more - he apparently found that challenging enough in his 30s). There's a moment in the prelude where Bart (the only Simpson to have any dialogue in this short) indignantly requests that Bob kill him and not torture him with singing, and my immediate reaction was "How dare you? Bob is a wonderful singer!" And yeah, I stand by that. The performance was essentially fun. I also quite liked Bob's description of the Halloween season: "A time when we take a break from the hustle and bustle of daily life to think about what's really important: murder, mayhem, madness and, hey, a few laughs."

Worth noting is that The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is only our second villain-themed Disney+ short. The first was Welcome To The Club from 2022, which was about Lisa meeting the Disney villains, and which actually had the germ of a good idea. Lisa has been invited to become an official Disney Princess, only to discover that she has a greater affinity with the villains. And why not? Disney princesses are, generally speaking, upholders of traditional patriarchal systems and values, whereas villains are the rebels who challenge the status quo. I could see Lisa having some issue with Cruella De Vil, Gaston and the others who were animal killers or exploiters, but the ones who were queer-coded misfits would definitely have a case. It wasn't especially well-realised (Lisa's big hesitation about joining the villains is that they always die at the end, which historically has happened more rarely than people tend to assume), but the potential was definitely there for a short that integrated the characters in a meaningful way, and wasn't just a crossover for the sake of a crossover. Bob's reason for hanging out with the Disney rogues gallery is a lot more surface-level -  the gist of it is that he's a villain, they're villains, so let's all have a big song and dance where we celebrate being evil for the sake of evil. Needless to say, this is as surface-level as Bob's characterisation gets, in line with the flattening he underwent post-1990s. He is just here for the murder, mayhem and madness, and not because he too was once a queer-coded misfit who challenged the power structures of his own environs. The greatest contrivance of the set-up occurs at the opening, when he invites us to, "Pull up a chair, relax and let me extend you on behalf of Disney+ the most wonderful wishes of the season". You know, I don't for a second believe that Bob watches Disney+. He's a PBS guy and you know it. (Actually, as per "Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming", he's not much of a chattering cyclops guy at all, but I'm sure he'd see Disney+ as particularly representative of dumbing down cultural standards.)

Unlike Welcome To The Club, there's not any real comprehensive narrative here. It's a straight-up music video, more or less. Bob is holding the Simpson family captive in their own living room in the opening sequence, but this doesn't go anywhere once the song itself gets underway (also, the house is on fire, a detail to which everybody inside seems strangely indifferent, and we later see Snowball II running from the blaze, but that's it). Bob doesn't have any overarching nefarious scheme going on, we don't see the Simpsons escaping from his clutches, and although Bart later shows up with Loki to oppose Bob, hitting him with a rake (ugh, fuck those things) is as far as it goes. Bart is also dressed up as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a callback to the costume he'd donned in the wraparound narrative of "Treehouse of Horror III". It's an interesting choice, given that Disney doesn't own that film (no, that's Warner Bros' property to bastardise in their own stupid crossovers, as we saw with Space Jam: A New Legacy), but I think it's supposed to code him as being in something of a miscreant mode himself. And wouldn't you know it, by then end of the song he and Bob are on the very same page, singing side by side like they're the best of buds, conceding to the possibly that they are not so diametrically opposed after all, but rather different shades of the same deviant spirit. For Halloween is absolutely the time be unleashing your inner deviant, if not quite as literally as this song suggests. And yes, we could absolutely question the appropriateness of Bart dressing up as that character, which I think was supposed to be an implicit joke in "Treehouse of Horror III". Here, I don't know if Disney fully thought the implications through, seeing as how one of the stills during the closing credits shows Alex-Bart tormenting a gagged and bound Bob. Where exactly is our train of thought supposed to be going?

Futuristic rapists aside, The Most Wonderful Time of The Year is an overwhelmingly safe short, and that's absolutely to its detriment. It doesn't do anything really radical or unexpected with the concept of the Simpsons and Disney worlds colliding for a Halloween bash. There was precisely moment that genuinely caught me off guard, and that was when Amos Slade, the villain from The Fox and The Hound, was singing about the joys of shooting deer while directing his gun at Bambi and his mother, only for the Great Prince of the Forest to sneak up from behind and wallop him.

I'll admit that this sequence hit me, in part because my brain had a slightly hard time processing its very existence. We have Bambi, star of my favourite Disney movie, Bob, my favourite fictional character period, and Slade...well, I'm not really a massive stan of Slade per se (there are some who champion him as one Disney's most complicated villains; he certainly is one of the pettiest) but The Fox and The Hound was one of the quintessential movies of my childhood, and it blows my mind seeing them all onscreen together like this. When I was watching all three properties as a kid in the mid-90s, I would never in a million years have imagined that I'd be seeing them intersect in this way. It's precisely this kind of insidious buzz that these shorts are looking to coast on, and it has little to offer beyond cheap novelty. But it's also the one portion of the short that kinda sorta disturbed me on any level. Not because the action itself is especially edgy; it's not like Slade succeeds in even spooking the deer, after all (without Chief or Copper, I've a feeling he'd be a pretty incompetent hunter). No, what I find unsettling about it is the way Bob pops up wearing a bib with Bambi's face on and cries out, "Yummy!" Oh Bob. The death of Bambi's mother represents the ruptured innocence of umpteen generations of children; why are you cheering this on? Although let's face it, while Bob is absolutely not a Disney+ subscriber, and I'm also not convinced that he's as big a Halloween enthusiast as this short implies...he probably does eat venison. And it tears me up inside. 

Slade is, incidentally, the most "obscure" Disney villain to appear in the short, in that he isn't one you tend to see featured on merchandise (ie: not one of the sexy villains). For the Disney buffs, I don't think The Fox and The Hound could be considered an obscure title at all, but I suspect that your casual Disney+ viewer has no clue who he is and assumes that he's meant to be the actual hunter who killed Bambi's mother. The most obscure characters to appear overall would probably be Hansel and Gretel from the 1932 Silly Symphony short Babes In The Woods, who are brought out alongside Snow White, Aurora and Rapunzel for a joke about how a number of Disney's stars would be obliterated from existence (to the approval of Thanos) if the Brothers Grimm were somehow capable of getting their stories copyrighted. Meanwhile, a character who seems to be doing a more silent disappearing act is Dr Facillier from The Princess and The Frog. He's AWOL from Bob's celebration, despite being one of Disney's most popular 21st century villains, and the short unwittingly draws attention to his absence by incorporating a scene where the Sultan from Aladdin is transformed into a frog by Jafar, a bit that feels like it would be better suited for Facillier (sure, Jafar's got personal baggage with the Sultan, but turning humans into frogs is specifically Facillier's thing). 2024 really wasn't Facillier's year, since he was also conspicuously absent from the "Tiana's Bayou Adventure" attraction that opened in Disney's US parks upon the bones of Splash Mountain. There's been speculation that Disney is becoming increasingly hesitant to use him, for concerns that his voodoo associations could be deemed problematic, and I guess his absence here will be adding further fuel to that theory.

For the most part, the choices of characters are the predictable ones, and that's really too bad. If we must be downing these nutritionally-empty remember berry smoothies, then I say go whole hog with it. Slade was a good start, but there are far bigger swings to be taken still. For instance, why wasn't my man Frollo invited for the occasion? He's a gnarly old soul. Goob and Doris are also fun if you give them a chance. Disney has allowed the Who Framed Roger Rabbit property to stagnate for decades (despite it being the gold standard for cartoon crossovers, in that it was made with palpable love and skill), but Judge Doom and Toon Patrol are terrific villains who are absolutely crying out for more recognition. Be creative. Have Magnifico from Wish show up and all of the other villains be embarrassed to be seen with him, including Edgar from The Aristocats. Heck, why not get Harry and Marv involved, since Disney has Home Alone too? Those guys would absolutely sympathise with Bob, in knowing the sting of being repeatedly bested by a wily prepubescent. Or are there additional legal complications in using Pesci and Stern's likeness?

It also has to be said that the Simpsons visual style really doesn't become a lot of the Disney characters that are featured. In particular, I don't get why Scar, who has one of the most badass designs in all of Disney villaindom, always looks so unbelievably hideous in these shorts. I did wonder if it might be a nod to the show's tendency to draw cats in the most grotesque possible fashion (Groening has stated on multiple DVD commentaries that he thinks Snowball II might be the ugliest feline in animation history, of which he's very proud), only Shere Khan looks halfway decent by comparison, so that's probably not our answer. Elsewhere, the Tangled characters clearly didn't get the memo that The Simpsons is an iris-free zone, and egad does Mother Gothel look like she's on substances.

And what of The Simpsons' own antagonistic arsenal? Do they get much of a look-in with so many Disney foes running rampant? Besides Bob, Nelson is the only one to contribute anything to the song, but a lot of them do make appearances, notably during a crowd shot that packs in a fair number of knaves from across the series. The selection of characters is certainly interesting. Most of the expected faces are there - Mr Burns, Fat Tony, Snake, Herman, Russ Cargill, Hank Scorpio and the like. It's also heartening to see Ms Botz and Lyle Lanley, two one-off villains who presumably won't be back because their voice actors are sadly no longer with us, but that doesn't mean they can't be remembered and celebrated. Other choices are more questionable. Groundskeeper Willie? Er, in that one Halloween segment, sure. I'll concede that he also tried to bludgeon Bart in "Girly Edition". But outside of that, could you really call him a villain? Helen Lovejoy? I've always thought she had a ton of untapped potential as a rival to Marge, but I'm not sure if she ever went far enough with that energy to be lumped in with the rest of these ne'er do wells. Agnes Skinner? Look, much like Helen she's not a very nice person, but if that were the criteria, most of Springfield would be up here. Meanwhile, I was surprised by the absence of Kodos and Kang, given that this is a Halloween-themed short and all, but the space squids do feature later on, having some kind of strangling tussle with Ursula (or are they merely exchanging long protein strings?). The total lack of Cecil Terwilliger feels like the short's second biggest missed opportunity, but then I could imagine a man of his refinement, even one with faded dreams of being a TV clown's sidekick, turning up his nose at the idea of participating in anything so corny. ("Something like this was inevitable, Bob. It's the final step in your descent from legitimate maniac to dancing bear!")

The short ends in a predictable manner, with Bob getting hit by another rake and calling it a "tired gag". True, and pointing it out doesn't make it less so. Although the final still in the closing credits shows Bob riding off into the night on a rake a la a broomstick, implying that the hardest of feelings have truly been put aside in the spirit of the Halloween season. And that's just beautiful. God bless Us, Every One!

Bundles of Joyce: Meet The Robinsons (aka And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird)

Disney's 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons in some respects represents the studio at its most downtrodden. It is certainly telling that it resorts to a device rarely seen in the studio's canon, which is to end with a quote from Walt Disney himself: "Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." Shorn from this quote is the additional information clarifying that Walt was specifically talking about the approach at WED Enterprises. Retained is that rather awkward "however", making it clear that this was part of some wider conversation that we are not here privy to. Instead, there is the implicit invitation to attach our own meaning to "however", and to what wider conversation the minds behind Meet The Robinsons might themselves have been responding to. It's no secret that the 2000s were not auspicious years for Disney. The Renaissance of the 1990s had given way into the Dork Age, with most of their animated features either outright flopping or earning only modest totals. Meanwhile, the box office was dominated by a new breed of animated feature; the age of 3D animation had arrived in full force, with it being largely a two horse race between Pixar and DreamWorks for dominion of the industry. Disney, who for decades had had the luxury of being effectively the only game in town when it came to big league Hollywood animation (Don Bluth's 1980s challenge notwithstanding), were suddenly finding themselves left in the dust. Having made the controversial decision to ditch hand-drawn animation altogether and to pivot to 3D, they'd done little restore their credibility when the first product of this bid for renewed relevance was the ghastly Chicken Little (2005) - a modest success that instantly cemented its reputation as one of the most loathed entries in the Disney canon. Meet The Robinsons knew that it faced an uphill battle when it came to both winning over the general public and convincing the Disney enthusiasts that the old magic hadn't gone away, and as such that closing nugget of Walt wisdom could be seen as an earnest plea for audiences to bear with the studio as it sought to regain its footing in a changing industry. Alternatively, it could have been interpreted as a massive middle finger to the devotees who favoured traditional animation and were disappointed at how quick Disney were to write off their legacy and jump on the 3D bandwagon. In light of everything that was happening at the time, I can see why that final title might have rubbed some people the wrong way, if it came across as taking Walt's words out of context to support their new computer-animated agenda. Not to mention that Disney could hardly take credit for "opening new up doors" when they were simply stumbling down a trail that Pixar, DreamWorks and Blue Sky had already blazed. They weren't exactly selling us on the notion that this was the best possible future.

Personally, I am not so cynical as to suppose that this was the intention. I don't believe that the quote in question was meant as a commentary (at least, not a conscious one) on the studio's abandonment of 2D animation. Nevertheless, its inclusion does betray a fundamental lack of confidence on the film-makers' part - an admission that, yes we know that we're asking our audiences to go along with a lot, but look, this is exactly in the spirit of the old Disney. It is meant to convey a sense of playful optimism, but there is a distinct whiff of scepticism about it, a feeling that the film couldn't be left to speak for itself and needed the pseudo-endorsement of Walt to lend it authenticity. I would rather that it wasn't there at all. Because Meet The Robinsons shouldn't have doubted itself. It's no masterpiece, but it holds up remarkably strongly for a film that emerged from such a shaky and uncertain time in the studio's history. I speak as someone who was so dismayed by the direction Disney was taking in the 2000s that I chose to sit out the theatrical run of Meet The Robinsons altogether. It certainly had a lot to bounce back from. Brother Bear (2003) and Home on The Range (2004) were the products of palpably low morale, while Chicken Little was a gruesomely misguided attempt to ape the lucrative DreamWorks model. I wasn't expecting Meet The Robinsons to break the streak; based on word of its troubled production, and on its madcap trailer, I'd envisioned it being something of a mess. And, in a manner of speaking, it was. But it was a mess in the best possible way, one fully in keeping with a philosophy expressed in the film: "From failing you learn; from success, not so much." Meet The Robinsons might not be top tier, but it feels more authentic than other Disney products of its era, being willing to experiment and to go to more offbeat places in order to find new direction. It is a greatly more idiosyncratic piece than the succeeding Bolt (2008), a film structurally more polished but also doggedly averse to anything resembling risk or originality. I will be clear that I remain, above all, a 2D animation devotee, and think that Disney's treatment of it was lamentable. Nevertheless, I now have little trouble in declaring Meet The Robinsons to be the studio's second best entry of the decade, topped only by The Emperor's New Groove (seeing how Lilo & Stitch has so lethally debased itself, as of 2025).

The quality I can most admire about Meet The Robinsons is the sizeable extent to which it actually feels like something of a personal project. There is a real beating heart to the picture in a way not seen at Disney since the debased Lilo & Stitch. Somebody cared about getting this particular story told. I'm not sure that it was necessarily William Joyce's story, as related in his 1990 publication A Day with Wilbur Robinson, that they were particularly passionate about bringing to an audience. But they cared about what they had in Meet The Robinsons.

For an idea of how challenging and drawn out this film's development was, plans for a big screen version of A Day with Wilbur Robinson had been gestating at Disney since before the book itself was even commercially available. Film producer Bill Borden, a personal friend of Joyce, was given access to a proof copy and suggested that Disney might be interested in optioning it for a feature adaptation. Joyce wrote a treatment and pitched it, with the intention that it be adapted as a live action film and that it stay true to the book's timescale of taking place within a single day. He then set about drafting several different scripts while a variety of big name directors were courted - Joyce's top picks were Steven Spielberg and George Miller, with Peter Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola and Diane Keaton also being considered, but all to no avail. According to Borden, there was a prevailing sentiment that a live action children's film involving singing frogs and flying saucers was too costly and impractical for the era. The project stalled and languished in Development Hell for several years, until Disney executive Leo Chu managed to revitalise it by re-envisioning it as an animated production. From there, Joyce and Borden's input lessened, with Dorothy McKim taking over as producer, Jon Bernstein being assigned to write a brand new script and Stephen Anderson, a story supervisor on Brother Bear, coming in to helm the project in his directorial debut. In their hands, the plot underwent some drastic changes, with the Robinsons becoming a retro futuristic family in the vein of The Jetsons, and the pivotal conflict switching to an orphan's quest to find his place in the world. The latter development especially resonated with Anderson, who was himself adopted as a child and felt an affinity with the young protagonist Lewis.

Even with the project finally off of the ground, its path to completion remained a rocky one. When Pixar's chief creative officer John Lasseter was appointed to power at Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006 he was infamously dissatisfied with how the feature was shaping up and ordered a major overhaul. It's reported that, under Lasseter's guidance, 60% of the film was scrapped and reworked (although Joyce disputes this). I previously prodded Blue Sky's Epic for having five credited writers, a sign of a torturous number of rewrites, but Meet The Robinsons has seven. As a knock-on effect of the protracted production schedule, Lewis wound up being voiced by two separate young actors, with the initial choice, Daniel Hansen, having already hit puberty by the time Lasseter's revisions were required. A sound-alike was located in Jordan Fry, a name that sounds oddly familiar to me for some reason. Great Caesar's ghost, could it be? Actually, I'd known at the time that Lewis was to be voiced by the same young actor who'd played a note-perfect Mike Teavee in the then-recent Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, and I did consider seeing the film at least out of support for Fry, but in the end my Disney fatigue was just too insurmountable. I consider it a really neat bit of career progression, because in some respects Lewis's story plays like a warmer variation on that of Mike as portrayed by Fry. There is quite a bit of thematic overlap between the two characters. Both are highly precocious children whose talents go unappreciated by the adults around them, but the role of Mike Teavee obviously requires that to be played with an angrier edge, and the story doesn't favour him. With Lewis the prospect of being young, intelligent and out of step is framed more positively, and he finds the connection and understanding that Mike was ultimately denied (Mike, though, remains the juicier character). 

Time has not been especially kind to Meet The Robinsons, in spite of its merits. Heck, 2007 was not overly kind to it. Critical reception was lukewarm, and its box office intake was substantially weaker than that of Chicken Little (a film that, while it outgrossed most of their recent 2D output, didn't meet Disney's expectations as a Pixar killer). On the plus side, it didn't amass anywhere near the level of disdain that its predecessor did, but then my mind inevitably goes to that immortal line from The Picture of Dorian Gray: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." As it stands, Meet The Robinsons is one of those Disney films with something of a non-reputation, along with most of the package features, Fantasia 2000 and my dear sweet Oliver & Company. People rarely acknowledge its existence at all - not least Disney themselves, who didn't even include the film as part of a retrospective in the closing credits of their 2023 feature Wish. It sort of fell through the cracks where zeitgeist was concerned. I'm sure I wasn't the only person experiencing Disney fatigue at the time. Maybe people were reluctant to embrace Disney's new direction, particularly after Chicken Little. Maybe the glut of CG animated product across the decade meant that the technique's novelty was waning and that audiences were getting choosier about which features they gave their money to. Or maybe the marketing was simply too cluttered (that girl from the science fair who is a blatant bootleg of Wednesday Addams isn't a major character or one of the Robinsons, so what was she doing on the poster?), too confusing or else just too unimaginative.

This particular piece of marketing was inspired though.

It's important to keep in mind that Meet The Robinsons represented something of a learning curve for Disney. They were adjusting to the process of computer animation and trying to find a new identity post-Renaissance, and were lagging behind some of their contemporaries in both regards. Tonally and aesthetically, Meet The Robinsons is a lot less sophisticated than Pixar's Ratatouille; when you compare the two, it's a little startling to contemplate that they even came out within the same year, Pixar's film is so many leaps and bounds ahead. I doubt it would be at all controversial if I called Meet The Robinsons the worst-looking of the three major Joyce adaptations. It is a rough, rough little picture. But it's also the Joyce adaptation for which I feel the greatest personal affection. It's a film about finding the value in imperfection, a point it makes so convincingly that its lack of polish becomes a part of its appeal. 

What is A Day with Wilbur Robinson about? 

A Day with Wilbur Robinson is narrated in the first-person, from the perspective of an unnamed child who goes to spend a day (and a night) at the house of his friend Wilbur Robinson. He is greeted at the door by Wilbur and the family's butler Lefty (an octopus), and taken out into the garden, where they encounter Wilbur's parents scanning the lawn with a matter detector, helped by their robot assistant Carl. Mr Robinson explains that they are searching for Grandfather's false teeth, which have gone missing...and, come to think of it, they're not too sure where Grandfather is either. The narrator and Wilbur join in the search, exploring the vast, slightly surreal halls of the Robinson abode and encountering eccentric relative after eccentric relative. Aunt Billie plays with life-sized trains, Cousin Pete keeps pet tigers, Uncle Judlow uses a brain augmentor to boost his thought processes, Cousin Laszlo floats around by means of an anti-gravity device, Uncle Art travels in a flying saucer, etc. Eventually Grandfather is located in his science lab, training his band of musically-inclined frogs with the help of his friends, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, but the whereabouts of his teeth remain a mystery. Come evening the family sits down to each a spaghetti dinner, with Uncle Gaston, the cannon enthusiast, firing meatballs out of his miniature cannon. Soon after, Grandfather's false teeth are located in the mouth of one of the frogs. The family celebrate with a pillow fight, before Uncle Art regales them with stories of his adventures in outer space, and the frogs serenade them to sleep with violins. The following morning, the narrator bids the Robinsons farewell and goes his own way. Looking back over his shoulder, he sees Wilbur shooting himself out of Uncle Gaston's cannon, holding up a sign that reads: "See Ya Later, Pal."

The story is related in a comically deadpan fashion, with the Robinsons' eccentricities often understated within the text. For example, Billie is simply described as "playing with her train set" and Pete as "walking the cats", with the illustrations filling in the more unusual details of the trains being life-sized and the cats in question being tigers. Lefty, likewise, is not identified as an octopus, and when Art arrives in his flying saucer, we are told that he has come in from abroad. Uncles Spike and Dmitri, who first greet the narrator at the door, are actually hiding out in a couple of plant pots, a detail the narrator similarly takes in his stride.

 

How much of this is in Meet The Robinsons? 

Meet The Robinsons is a more faithful adaptation of its source book than is Epic of The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs...in the sense that it's actually about the same characters that were in the book. A bunch of them, at any rate. One member of the Robinson clan who is conspicuously absent from Disney's take is Mr Robinson - he's been replaced by another character, for the sake of accommodating a brand new plot twist. Also excised are Uncle Pete and his tigers (what? why wouldn't you want to include the tigers?) and Uncle Judlow and his brain augmentor. Wilbur's older sisters, Tallulah and Blanche, have been combined into a single character, named Tallulah, who is now Wilbur's cousin (having Wilbur be an only child makes that new plot twist a whole lot simpler). Some new additions include Uncle Fritz and Aunt Petunia (the latter of whom is actually a puppet operated by the former), Uncle Joe, who never leaves his easy chair and gets no discernible dialogue, and Wilbur's grandmother Lucille. Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong do not appear.

It's probably fair to say that the film plays homage to the book more than it does outright adapt it, with certain details being implemented as quick nods to Joyce's creation before moving swiftly along. For example, the search for Grandfather Robinson's teeth still occupies a chunk of the middle act, and is resolved in the same manner, with the teeth showing up in one of the singing frogs (trained by Mrs Robinson in this version), but is here a minor distraction rather than a major plot motivator. A Day with Wilbur Robinson is not a rousing adventure story like The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs, but a slice of life yarn about a remarkable family who do not see themselves as so remarkable, and who enjoy spending time together. It has no villain and the main source of conflict (those misplaced teeth) is a totally benign one. In expanding it to feature length, the nature of Joyce's story has been changed fundamentally, transforming it into an altogether busier narrative about time travel and space age technology, with the Robinson family being recontextualised as a futuristic family from the year 2037 (a year that, eep, doesn't seem anywhere near as distant now as it did back in 2007). We thus get an implicit explanation for the family's singularities - they are simply from another time, and what's normal to them would naturally bamboozle someone from the dawn of the century.

Something Meet The Robinsons is not able to carry across is the big running gag of Joyce's book, where Wilbur will intermittently acknowledge that the narrator has happened to stop by on an unusually boring day at the Robinson household, sparking the reader's imagination as to what life for this family could possibly look like on an exciting day. Lewis's reactions are also a lot less deadpan; in the book, it was clear that the narrator was a regular guest at the Robinson abode, and as such was unfazed by what he found within, but his film counterpart is required to find it freaky and unfamiliar. Hence, he's terrified to be greeted by Lefty at the door, and he explicitly questions if Billie's trains are really toys. In an illuminating interview with Slash Film, Joyce admitted that he missed this aspect in Disney's film, noting that in his story it was a matter of, "this is how they live, this is what they do. They were much more like the family in "The Philadelphia Story," Katharine Hepburn's family. Just breezy and sophisticated and unflappable. And the Robinsons in the animated film are a little more goofy." The script still is, nevertheless, able to slip in the odd concession to the idea that the Robinsons don't perceive themselves as being terribly strange. The film's equivalent of the spaghetti dinner sequence (where Gaston still fires meatballs from his cannon, only here it plays out as a pastiche of the chopsocky cinema that Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill had recently brought into the mainstream), is followed by Lewis asking Art if dinners with the Robinsons are always like this. Art calmly responds, "No, yesterday we had meatloaf." 

 

So what is Meet The Robinsons about?

Meet The Robinsons tells the story of Lewis (Hansen/Fry), a twelve-year-old orphan who as a baby was abandoned by his mother on the steps of a children's home (a moody opening sequence that recalls the low-key sombreness of the similarly orphaned Penny in the prelude to The Rescuers). Precocious and with a flair for devising radical (albeit malfunctioning) inventions, Lewis has a hard time endearing himself to potential adoptive parents, and believes that his only hope of finding a family would be to locate and reconnect with his biological mother. He comes up with his most ambitious creation to date, a machine that scans a subject's brain and extracts information from their subconscious memories, with the intention of using it to remember what his mother looked like. While presenting the invention at his school's science fair, he is approached my a mysterious boy named Wilbur Robinson (Wesley Singerman), who claims to have waltzed in from the future to warn him of an impending ambush from a sinister figure identified as the "Bowler Hat Guy" (director Steve Anderson). When Lewis's memory scanner spectacularly malfunctions (owing to the covert interventions of the Bowler Hat Guy), Lewis loses all confidence in himself, but is enticed by Wilbur into taking a trip in a time machine to the year 2037, so he can prove that he is who he says he is and convince Lewis to return to the fair and fix his scanner. Lewis, though, is far less interested in Wilbur's agenda than he is in using the time machine to head to the past and intervene in his mother's abandonment of him; they get into an argument and break the time machine, leaving Lewis stranded in the future, where he has little choice but to acclimatise to life with Wilbur's oddball family while endeavouring to repair the machine. In the meantime, the Bowler Hat Guy has followed them into the future, intending to abduct Lewis and find out how the memory scanner works so that he might pass the invention off as his own.

It is revealing that the film's middle act, which is the part that's most like Joyce's book, ends up being its weakest. Anderson was clearly nowhere near as invested in bringing Joyce's characters to the screen as he was in telling the new story that had been crafted around Lewis, chiefly because it was Anderson's story, more or less. Growing up as an adopted child, Anderson had eagerly awaited the day he turned 18, so that he could access his birth records and discover who his biological family were. Then, when he'd reached his mid-20s, it crossed his mind that he'd never gotten round to it, and he reflected on what had changed his priorities. In part, it was because he was happy with the family he had, but also because he was now more focussed on where he was going than where he had come from, and the future we was building at Disney animation. I do not know if Anderson ever did look up the details of his birth parents or make contact with them, but it hadn't proved as integral to his sense of identity or belonging as he'd long assumed. Lewis's journey to that same realisation feels authentic and heartfelt, since there clearly was a passion and conviction behind it stemming from Anderson's experience. By contrast, the movie comes to a near-total standstill when we get to the part where we're obligated to spend time with the Robinsons. It becomes no longer a matter of hanging out with the Robinsons for the joy of hanging out's sake, but an awkward road stop in between a story that feels bigger and more urgent. It doesn't help that the majority of the household are narrative dead weight. As a collective, they might embody the lively, jostling family atmosphere that's missing in Lewis's life, but the only ones who really matter, in story terms, are Wilbur, Mrs Robinson, the grandparents and Carl the robot.

The film's most successful character is the one who was apparently the greatest source of contention when Lasseter entered the picture, which is the Bowler Hat Guy. Lasseter thought him too much of a wimp to convince as the antagonist, and suggested making him a more serious threat. Anderson was resistant to the idea, but a compromise was eventually reached whereby the hat itself (artificially intelligent and named Doris) was revealed to be the nefarious brains behind the operation, with Bowler Hat Guy becoming more of a comic foil. He remains a very non-traditional Disney villain, with a lot more of Team Rocket in him than Jafar or Lady Tremaine. The most comparable rogue in Disney's own gallery would be Edgar from The Aristocats, a character who always felt weirdly shoehorned into the part. I suppose I can't blame Lasseter for having misgivings about any villain who might seem redolent of Edgar. And yet Bowler Hat Guys works rather wonderfully, compensating for what he lacks in genuine menace with exquisite comic timing (Jim Carrey was at one point attached to the role but pulled out to star in Joel Schmaucher's The Number 23, leaving Anderson himself to fill in with a quasi-Carrey impression that still delivers) and a meaningful thematic backbone. The decision made late in the game that really holds the final character together, more so than having him be the minion of a robotic hat, was to make him the future adult version of Mike "Goob" Yagoobian, Lewis's sleep-deprived roommate (voiced in his child form by Matthew Josten), originally scripted as an entirely separate character. As a twist, it's frankly both a bit of a cheat (since Bowler Hat Guy bears not even the vaguest physical resemblance to Goob) and a smidge too transparent (it's clearly telegraphed in a scene where Bowler Hat Guy and Goob encounter one another, and the former seems inordinately invested in the latter). But it works. I totally buy into it. I can't even fathom how the story was ever supposed to get by without it.

Goob's motivation for turning to villainy is a deliberately silly one, but also poignant and a little startling. An avid young baseball player who was kept awake one night too many by Lewis's tireless inventing, his drowsiness caused him to miss a catch and cost his team an important game. For this he bore a grudge against Lewis that eventually consumed him, leaving him so bitter and angry that he drove away all prospective friends and adopters. It is a dark parallel to the story's other major revelation, that the adult Lewis (Tom Selleck) is none other than the Robinson patriarch (hence the excision of the book's Mr Robinson), now a world-renowned inventor living in a future that represents the best he can possibly be. His path to success was strewn with innumerable mistakes, but each mistake was an opportunity for learning, and each played a vital role into shaping him into the person he has become. The tension between the past and the future is embodied in the conflict between Goob and the Robinsons. Goob, who aspires to get revenge on Lewis by sabotaging his future and becoming a famous inventor in his place, has remained permanently frozen in that moment of childhood failure, emotionally stunted and fixated on lost opportunities, to the point that he has squandered his own future. Rather than learning or growing from his personal setback, he has allowed that setback to define him. He is, for all intents and purposes, a small child inhabiting a gangly adult body (to the extent that he still wears the young Goob's baseball uniform under his black garments), and he serves as a living rebuttal to Lewis's assumption that his salvation lies within the past. Lewis's desire to go back in time and prevent his mother from abandoning him is rooted in the perception that the trajectory he's been on since has been one of non-stop failure, and that his only remedy is to hit the reset button and reclaim the life he feels should have been his. Like Goob, he finds a false refuge in the past, and in the idea of correcting historic wrongs that inhibits his ability to embrace the challenges that could move him to more positive pastures. His former friend, now twisted and malformed beyond all recognition, becomes a grotesque, cautionary reflection of Lewis's skewed priorities, and of the other path he could potentially take if he does not take advantage of what is in front of him - one defined by bitterness and regret.

The nefarious hat Doris, meanwhile, becomes a clever metaphor for Lewis's self-doubt and how it threatens to destroy the many good things he still has every chance of creating if he perseveres. An embodiment of his personal failings, she is a creation of his that did not run according to plan; having taken on a life and a will of her own, she has returned to haunt him, seeking to disrupt his future by eliminating his self-confidence (unlike Goob she has greater ambitions in doing so than mere vengeance). Throughout the film, there is a running theme whereby hats are associated with the suppression of identity - during the portion where Lewis is accommodated by the Robinsons, Wilbur gets him to conceal his distinctive spiky hair by donning varying headgear, so the rest of the family doesn't cotton on to who he really is. Doris is likewise a consumer of selfhood, latching onto Goob because of his low self-worth and subsuming his identity, so that he becomes outwardly recognised as the Bowler Hat Guy. As an offensive weapon, she attacks her victims from the head down, scrambling their thought processes and causing them to lose their sense of purpose. Goob uses a smaller version of the hat (dubbed "Little Doris") to mind control animals into doing his bidding (first one of Mrs Robinson's frogs and then a T Rex), before an entire legion of hats in Doris's likeness are unleashed during the climax and enslave humanity, in a corrupted timeline where Lewis was never able to realise his dreams. Doris recreates this alternate dystopian future in her own image, with hat-shaped monuments dominating the darkened landscape as omnipresent symbols of his crushed potential. Lewis ultimately defeats Doris by asserting his ownership of her, vowing to her that he will never create her and thus willing her out of existence. He overcomes the adversity she presents with the realisation that his self-doubt is his own creation, and that he can take charge of it by not giving it the final say. The resolution is a straightforward triumph of positive thinking over negative thinking, with Goob coming to understand that his mistake was in believing that the latter would protect him. "Doris...I thought she was my friend", he murmurs sadly, echoing the misguided teachings he had earlier dispensed to his younger self, in advising him to let hate be his ally. 

The moral of Meet The Robinsons might be "keep moving forward", with the past being regarded potentially destructive to anyone too fixated on it, but it also presents something of a paradox (one that those inclined to interpret it as an allegory for the demise of traditional animation might want to keep in mind), in that it is a profoundly nostalgic film. Its approach to that all-important future can be described as very backwards-looking and yearnful. The Robinsons are a decidedly old-fashioned futuristic family, the 2037 they inhabit being informed by the kinds of mid-20th century futurist visions that gave us The Jetsons and, more pertinently, the Disney parks' Tomorrowland and Walt's blueprints for Epcot at Walt Disney World. (This is the sense in which Meet The Robinsons is most characteristically a Disney film - its vision of a utopian community is essentially Disneyland, and not light on corporate propaganda.) It may well have been factor in why the film didn't set the world alight upon release, as its relentlessly cheerful, euphoric depictions of the future* might have seemed a notch too quaint to resonate with where we were at in 2007. But then Meet The Robinsons is nothing if not a deeply personal story, and its futuristic visions best appreciated as a reflection of its protagonist's journey, and his progression from forlornness to genuinely relishing where his own potential could take him.

* (The Robinsons' future is optimistic...to a point. It seems that the Canucks have gotten rather a raw deal in 2037, with the country formerly known as Canada now being the US state of North Montana. I'm not sure that I want to know what happened there.) 

How much of the spirit of Joyce's book is retained in Meet The Robinsons?

If Meet The Robinsons is about the tension between past and future, what could have been versus what could be, then A Day with Wilbur Robinson is more concerned with the present moment. It is a book with a distinctly Carpe diem philosophy. The only point in which the future is anticipated is in the closing illustration, where Wilbur bids his friend farewell by holding up the sign: "See Ya Later, Pal." In the context of the book, this affirms that the narrator will return to the Robinson abode and that many more wonderful days with Wilbur Robinson lie ahead. It is also an implicit invitation to the reader to return to the book and to relive the adventure at a later date. The film plays homage to this illustration toward the end, when Wilbur returns Lewis to the year 2007 and bids him farewell by writing "See Ya Later Dad" in the clouds with the time machine. The nature of the relationship has obviously changed, and so has the meaning behind the message. Wilbur promises Lewis that they will meet again, but when they do it will not be as straightforward as simply popping round to a best friend's house for a fun-filled day. In order to reunite with Wilbur, Lewis will have to go through the whole process of growing up, courting the future Mrs Robinson, siring Wilbur and raising him as a child. The Robinsons might represent the end goal, but the real adventure, as Lewis is about to discover, is in the getting there.

On the film's Blu ray commentary, Anderson mentions that Rob Thomas wrote the theme song, "Little Wonders", without having seen the film, and that it was instead informed by the content of Joyce's book. He comments on how remarkable it was that the song opens with the lyrics, "Let it go", which just so perfectly happened to tie in with one of the film's major themes (obviously this commentary was recorded years before a certain other Disney picture completely commandeered the phrase "Let it go" in popular consciousness). Lewis's big moment of letting go, in the film, arrives when he is taken by Wilbur to the point in time where his mother abandoned him, so that he might have the chance to intervene, or at least to gain some understanding of the woman who has long been such a source of fascination to him. To Wilbur's surprise, Lewis approaches her but holds back and avoids interaction. Instead, he confirms his allegiance to his life he has been leading by knocking on the orphanage door and allowing it to play out on its current course (in the opening sequence we'd likely assumed that it was his mother who did the knocking, but it transpires to be the time-travelling Lewis). His closure comes in the realisation that he can leave the question of where he came from unanswered and still have a firm sense of his place in the world. As he tells Wilbur, he already has a family in the Robinsons. Of course, "let it go" is a phrase that can be taken both ways, and on the surface the film's forward-looking approach could be seen as somewhat contrary to the Carpe diem values of the book - in order to make the most of the present moment, the ability to let go of the future can be as valuable as letting go of the past. Yet this is the lesson Lewis that ultimately learns - how to cope with the unknown and to utilise what's on his immediate horizon. Crucially, although his trip to 2037 has given him reassurance of his potential, it does not give him reassurance of certainty. His future with the Robinsons is only a possible future, and nothing is guaranteed him. His adult self is clear that in order to become him, he will have to make the right choices in life. Indeed, the real thrill comes in not knowing exactly what lies ahead, and having a blank slate upon which to make all of the vital discoveries for yourself. This much is also suggested to Lewis by the adult Goob in his final appearance. Lewis requests that the Robinsons forgive Goob and allow him to join the family, but Goob chooses to go his own way before the offer can be extended to him. He leaves Lewis the unicorn filofax in which he was previously seen filling out his checklist of villainous deeds. The old checklist has been scribbled out, and beneath it he has supplied a new checkbox, beside a question mark.

The film ends with Lewis returning to the present day, where he does indeed seem to be making all of the right choices that will get him onto that more auspicious path. He heads back to the science fair, where his newly-restored brain scanner proves a smashing success, attracting the attentions of two prospective adopters who are revealed to be the middle-aged Robinson grandparents. Naturally, they hit it off with Lewis, and before long he's moving out of the orphanage and into his brand new home. He also remembers to attend the young Goob's baseball game and to wake him up at the critical moment, enabling him to make the catch and giving him the possibility of a brighter future. The final shot shows Lewis hard at work at his inventor's desk, enthusiastically sketching out new ideas (including a prototypical Carl), the crumpled bits of paper all around him indicators of the failures that are an inevitable part of the learning process.

Popular perception - if it acknowledges the film at all - has judged Meet The Robinsons as one such failure on Disney's own journey back into relevance, at a time when it was making numerous false or at least questionable new starts. Chicken Little had suggested a bleak, bleak future for Disney (seriously, I would consider Doris's dystopian future over whatever further horrors we might have gotten in a timeline where that abomination had grossed as much as Finding Nemo), while Bolt pointed to a future that was safe, sanitised and frightfully derivative. The Princess and The Frog (2009) gave us a tantalising glimpse into the best future of all, one in which an undervalued art form was given a brand new lease of life, but sadly it was not to be. It was only with Tangled (2010), followed by Wreck It Ralph (2012) that Disney settled into the groove that would work for them for a while, a re-embracing of their traditional fairy tale formula (Frozen, Moana) alternated with attempts at trendier modern stories (Big Hero 6, Zootopia). Maybe Meet The Robinsons was always too singular and unconventional to have represented a viable future for Disney. It's a picture that feels perpetually out of time. But it's really a joy to experience in the moment. 

Round Springfield (aka Make My Pain The Same As Yours)

The recent passing of Simpsons composer Alf Clausen got me wanting to cover an episode in which music plays a significant part. The most obvious candidate was already taken - and besides, I did ideally want it to be an episode in which music is celebrated as something expressive and transcendent, not one in which we simply have a good giggle about how camp and silly musical storytelling is. So "Round Springfield" (2F32) of Season 6 seemed like the best possible option, with bonus points for the fact that it is a story about bidding farewell to a musical legend who maybe didn't get the full recognition he deserved within his lifetime. Debuting on April 30th 1995, this was a historic episode, marking the first occasion on which one of the show's established characters was killed off. It was not the first episode to deal with the subject of death and bereavement - "Old Money" of Season 2 can claim that honor, although the theme of grief was far less pivotal in that episode, with the narrative focus being primarily on Abe's estrangement from Homer. Here, the issue is all the more stark and hard-hitting for being presented from the perspective of one of the show's younger and more ingenuous characters. Lisa left contemplating matters of life, death and resilience when a chance reunion with her mentor, the enigmatic blues musician Bleeding Gums Murphy (guest voice of Ron Taylor), is cut tragically short by an unspecified terminal illness she did not see coming. 

I confess that I know very little about how "Round Springfield" was marketed in the run-up to its airing. I personally did not get to see the episode until roughly a year after its Sky 1 premiere, and with the internet still being this weird and slightly alien-sounding rumble on the horizon, I had no means of accessing spoilers online. Later instances in which the show pulled this same macabre move tended to be preceded by promotional blitzs designed to drum up suspense about the identity of the condemned character (Maude Flanders and Rabbi Krustofsky spring to mind, although neither example worked out anywhere near as well as the King of The Hill "Propane Boom" cliffhanger). I would hazard a guess that this did NOT happen here, if only because the "Who Shot Mr Burns?" two-parter was right around the corner, and why would they risk stealing that publicity stunt's thunder? I do not know if viewers were made aware in advance that a character was going to die, let alone if there was any mystery regarding who it might be. Perhaps the title offered a clue to those hip to the 1986 picture Round Midnight, which follows the final days of a drug-addicted saxophonist (played by jazz legend Dexter Gordan) and his friendship with the fan he encounters after travelling to Paris. All I can say is that, having entered into the episode blind, I can attest that it really is the best way to first experience it, with your perspective actually aligned with Lisa's. There are clues, certainly, that something more troublesome might be unfolding (not least in that Lisa finds Bleeding laid out in a hospital bed) but we are at first inclined to share in her naivety, being too caught up in the joyfulness of the reunion, and the robustness of the characters' rapport. Alarm bells might start to ring should we pick up on the fact that the one thing the characters are emphatically not discussing is the nature of Bleeding's condition, as if it's something that neither party can bring themselves to acknowledge. But Bleeding certainly never presents as a man who is at death's door (to the point that it requires some suspension of disbelief that he'd still be able to belt out such a vigorous jamming session on his saxophone in what transpires to be his last meeting with Lisa). He seems much too alive, still so full of passion for his craft and with warmth and wisdom for Lisa. So when tragedy strikes, it comes with a devastating abruptness that feels all-too real. The line between this world and the next is such a fragile one, something this episode captures so bitterly. One moment he's giving Lisa some pointers and encouragement before she plays in her school recital, the next she's rushing back to tell him how well her performance went, only to discover that he's no longer there.

What fascinates me about "Round Springfield" is that it's an episode that allows itself time to be sad, in a way that was honestly quite unusual for this point in the series. There's comic levity in the subplot, which involves Bart suffering at the hands of yet another shoddy Krusty product (a jagged metal hoop that's inexplicably included as a freebie in his brand of cereal), and in whatever Homer is up to on the sidelines (of note, there's a running gag where a hot dog vendor seems to seek him out in the most inappropriate of places), but the loss of Bleeding and its impact on Lisa are treated with genuine reverence. There are points where it honestly seems reminiscent of the more melancholic tone endemic to the first three seasons of the show; it has a certain moodiness of atmosphere, and an eye for emphasising the loneliness and finer disappointments of the characters' lives in a way that was so central to early installments like "Life on The Fast Lane", "Colonel Homer" and Bleeding Gums' debut episode "Moaning Lisa". I tend to think of this model of Simpsons storytelling as having bowed out with "A Streetcar Named Marge" at the start of Season 4, but with the reappearance of Mr Murphy it momentarily lives again. And this would be the big twist - I'm forever blaming this shift in tone on then-showrunners Al Jean and Mike Reiss and their preference for sillier, rapid-fire humor over character-driven storytelling, yet they were the minds behind this episode. The script itself was written by Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia, but the plot was Jean and Reiss's brainchild, and they receive a story credit. Credits for story alone were unusual on The Simpsons, and it's explained on the DVD commentary that Jean and Reiss requested it on this are occasion because they'd envisioned the episode being a big winner on the awards front and wanted their names attached. (It was all in vain; the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program that year was scooped up by another Lisa-orientated episode, "Lisa's Wedding", which offered something even more novel than the death of a jazz musician - a hair-raising peek into the distant dystopian future of 2010). By Jean and Reiss's standards, "Round Springfield" is a remarkably grounded narrative. Even the lighter touches, such as the hot dog vendor, seem deliberately smaller and more restrained than much of what we'd seen them do throughout Season 4. That is, until we get the ending. With the closing sequence, the episode is suddenly immersed in the signature off-the-wall humor that was all over Jean and Reiss's own series The Critic (a perception bolstered in how it is essentially an extended parody of a popular moment from a contemporary movie). That ending is the key factor that disqualifies it from playing like a total throwback to those earlier seasons. And it is such a deeply bizarre way to conclude this story. I don't even mean that as a criticism. It's weird in ways that are grand, fun and very moving. But if you stop to think about it, what is even going on in that ending? Because surely Bleeding didn't really...well, we'll get to it.

"Round Springfield" is, admittedly, another example of an episode where the optics maybe aren't so great when viewed from a particular angle. I mean, think about this for a moment. They made the bold decision to kill off a (semi) recurring cast member, and they chose one of their few African American characters. In other words, the black guy died first. That had never been done before, right? Adding fuel to the fire is that, when Bleeding Gums Murphy was introduced in "Moaning Lisa", he was a textbook example of the Magical Negro, being a somewhat mysterious black character whose sole function within the story was to make Lisa feel more confident about her place in the world. Now, to an extent, all supporting characters are bound by the law of Simpsons-centrism - the Simpsons ARE the centre of this confounding little universe, and everything the rest of Springfield gets up to must in some way relate back to them and be in service of them. But it's felt particularly strongly with the Elliotts, a group of characters who effectively serve as the family's guardian angels. I went over my reasoning in more detail in my review of "Moaning Lisa", but to recap, "Elliotts" was a term I came up for a foursome of characters from the show's early years (named for the cartoon dragon from Disney's Pete's Dragon), whom I'd clumped into a collective as a sort of counterpoint to the Home-Wreckers - in addition to Bleeding Gums, the others are Karl (from "Simpson and Delilah"), Bergstrom (from "Lisa's Substitute") and Kompowsky (from "Stark Raving Dad"). What they have in common is an uncannily benevolent, otherworldly aura and that they are all, significantly, outsiders to the Simpsons' White Anglo-Saxon Protestant heteronormative domesticity. Bleeding's a Magical Negro, Karl's a Magical Queer, Bergstrom's a Magical Jew, Kompowsky's a...hmm, is the Magical Psychiatric Patient a thing? It could be. The point is that each of the Elliotts represents a marginalised figure within the Springfield community. Their outsider status might have given them a strength and a perspective on life that would otherwise be unknown to the Simpsons, but all that matters is that they're able to share those pearls of wisdom with one or more of the family and go merrily on their way, satisfied that their work is done. They can help to prop up the central dynamic, but they have no business in sticking around to be a part of it. Of the four, Bergstrom is the only one who could be feasibly described as having anything even resembling an agenda of his own (in that he doesn't lose sight of the fact that his time with Lisa is only a short-term job assignment and he'll soon have bigger fish to fry in the projects of Capital City). For clarity, I like the Elliotts and think they're all great and beautifully realised characters, but there's little downplaying that this dubious convention informs a huge part who they are and how the narrative regards them.

Bleeding Gums retains the honor of being the only Elliott to ever be brought back to any significant capacity, even three decades on from the episode's debut, although this wasn't for a lack of interest on the writers' part. (Returns for Karl and Kompowsky were on the cards but fell through. I am not, though, aware of there being any serious motions for a Bergstrom sequel; I suspect that Dustin Hoffman - sorry, Sam Etic - regarded it as a one-and-done gig.) His reappearance in "Round Springfield" might have been an opportunity to expand on his character and have him grow a little outside of his role as a mentor figure to Lisa - but nope, if anything they only doubled down on his Magical Negro credentials, sacrificing him so that Lisa could undergo character growth of her own, before finally depicting him as a literal spirit in the sky, jamming with his newly-enlightened protege to a Carole King tune (like I say, we'll get to that goofy ending in due course). 

None of this was done maliciously, of course. But what is just as telling is how Bleeding Gums was singled out as the kind of perfectly expendable character who could be jettisoned for the feels (and the awards bait). The Season 7 clip show "The Simpsons' 138th Episode Spectacular", would infamously mock him (alongside Dr Marvin Monroe) for never having been a popular character, and therefore not one that viewers were presumably expected to care about, although the truth with Bleeding really lands somewhere closer to the middle. On the DVD commentary, Jean does indeed state that they obviously weren't going to kill off a character like Mr Burns whom they'd be wanting to use again, but he also recounts that Bleeding was chosen because he was a character whom people felt warmly toward, in no small way thanks to Taylor's performance. He offered the best of both worlds, in not being integral enough to the core universe that it would be an especially startling development to retire him to the jazz club in the sky, but being sympathetic enough that it would still hurt viewers to see him go. If Reiss had had his way, then the show would have taken a very different path and killed off Marge's mother (a move that Julie Kavner might actually have been fully on board with, as I understand she hated doing Jackie Bouvier's voice), but he concedes that Bleeding turned out to be a better choice. Perhaps bumping off someone within the family, however seldom seen, was deemed too radical. Or maybe it came down to the fact that Bleeding is a fundamentally gentle soul, which Jackie is not. He expresses no outward bitterness or regret for the life that he's led (other than his $1,500 a day Faberge egg habit, which is the closest we get to a heroin allusion), and his legacy is complicated only in the sense that his inherent goodness went under most people's radars. He's a wholly angelic being we're intended to shed a tear for but also conversely write off as a character of no genuine consequence. Outside of what he meant to Lisa, that is.

The Lisa factor is another big reason, I'm sure, why Bleeding was ultimately the one placed on the chopping block. She is such a compelling character around which to craft emotional stories, possessing a wisdom well beyond her years but still having all the vulnerabilities of a child. The loss of a friend like Bleeding would hit her tremendously, even with life already having dealt her so many blows with its cruel impermanences. As Kompowsky's episode made clear, she was very deeply affected by the death of the original Snowball (and her hamster named Snuffy, though he comes up less often). There are also those losses she'd suffered that didn't entail mortality, with her being all but forced to surrender her beloved pony Princess and the man she'd looked up to as a substitute father figure abandoning her for a job in Capital City. In both instances, Lisa's distinctly child-like naivety regarding the impending heartbreak was such a powerful factor. She was so thrilled to have Princess that it seemingly never occurred to her just how difficult and impractical it was for her family to afford such a high maintenance animal. She was so besotted with Bergstrom that she lost sight of the fact that he was never going to be there on a long-term basis. Here, she's so overjoyed to have Bleeding back in her life that she doesn't question what he might be doing in the Springfield Hospital, and it seems that Bleeding doesn't have the heart to outright tell her. Was he himself aware that he wasn't going to make it? Yes, and I think there is a specific moment in the episode where we can pinpoint him making what seems like a conscious farewell to Lisa. It's a scene that hits so hard on repeat viewings, when we know what's coming. As Lisa prepares to go off to her recital, Bleeding hands her his saxophone and tells her to take it with her for luck. While Lisa is honored, she does not grasp the full significance of this gesture, presumably thinking that he's just lending it to her for the recital. With hindsight, it seems obvious that Bleeding gave it to her because he knew he wouldn't be needing it. In addition, by giving her his saxophone he is in effect passing the torch to her to go out and perform great music in his stead. There's a more macabre foreshadowing in his telling Lisa that she's going to "knock 'em dead" (by which he likely to alludes to Lisa's potential to go far in life, not just at this particular recital), followed by an ominous cough, the only symptom of ill-health he's seen to exhibit. Finally, as she leaves his side, there's a lingering emphasis on him waving to her, as if he knows this will be their last goodbye.

What always made the relationship between Lisa and Bleeding so affecting is in how they were ostensibly so mismatched, yet connected so readily as social misfits with a mutual appreciation for jazz and the importance of creative expression. When Lisa first encountered Bleeding back in Season 1, he gave her the much-needed assurance that she was not alone in the world, at a time when she felt that no one understood her. (Perhaps fearing that newer viewers wouldn't know who Bleeding was, the episode incorporates a small clip from "Moaning Lisa", leading to a jarring clash of art styles; I suppose it's not so strange when we consider that for several years the series still felt the need to keep reminding us who Sideshow Bob was every time he showed up.) In "Round Springfield" we see how Lisa is eventually able to return the favour, in demonstrating to Bleeding that his life and music had value, at a time when he seemed destined to die alone and all forgotten. ("You've had some career...although the moral seems to be that a lifetime of jazz leads you sad and lonely." "Well, before you came to visit I would have agreed with you.") Before Lisa, nobody had come to visit Bleeding at the hospital; when she asks about his family, he tells her he doesn't really have one. (In what can only be a deliberate callback to a joke in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?", it's heavily hinted that Bleeding and Dr Hibbert are brothers who lost contact a long time ago, although neither party seems to connect the dots. This also means that Bleeding had a second brother he possibly didn't even know about.) The grim reality doesn't fully set in until after his death, when Lisa attends his funeral and discovers that she's the only mourner there; nobody else in town knew who Bleeding was or cares that he's gone. It's a realisation that transforms Lisa's grief into red-hot grit and takes her on her first step toward healing, with the knowledge that responsibility for keeping her friend's memory alive rests solely on her.

Before then, we get a series of short scenes that feel reminiscent of "Moaning Lisa", with the family all showing awareness of Lisa's suffering and doing their bit to try and help, even if they don't necessarily have the kinds of answers she's seeking. Homer looks as though he might have a sensible response, in reminding Lisa of how she coped when Snowball died, but ends up reaching the most inappropriate possible conclusion from that train of thought: "All we have to do is go down to the pound and get a new jazzman." Maggie attempts to soothe Lisa's aching soul the only way she knows how, by offering Lisa her pacifier (it doesn't help Lisa, but the tactic later proves effective on Homer, who is rattled by his own failure to say the right thing). Bart shares with her his belief in reincarnation - specifically, that when you die you can come back in a form of your own choosing. He's intent on being a butterfly in his next life, because as he sees it he'll be able to commit acts of arson and be totally above suspicion. (Something I find particularly disturbing about Bart's butterfly fantasy is the fact that everyone else in it - Skinner, Wiggum, Lou and Eddie - are all the same age they are in the present, so is Bart banking on dying imminently?). Deciding that she needs to consult someone with a little more experience and wisdom, Lisa turns to Abe, who seems to think he's in a Final Destination scenario, with Death conspiring against him at every turning. (Really, the guises in which he sees Death manifesting aren't that far off. Maggie? Well, she'd make an attempt on Burns' life soon enough. Snowball II? As Homer alluded to above, she's a walking reminder of the grisly fate that befell the original Snowball. The bird bath? Odd are that something drowned in there at some time or other.) Marge, who nearly sent Lisa down a terribly destructive path in "Moaning Lisa", here gets to be the voice of reason, assuring her daughter that the sadness she feels is normal and making the practical suggestion that she might honor Bleeding's memory by asking the local jazz station to do a tribute to him. Lisa immediately runs into a roadblock - K-Jazz is happy to fulfil her request, but they don't have Bleeding's sole album, Sax on The Beach, in their library, and copies are hard to come by. As luck would have it, Comic Book Guy has one for sale in his store, but it comes with a hefty $250 price tag, which is increased to $500 when Comic Book Guy learns that the artist in question is dead. Knowing she could never afford it, Lisa sinks back into despair, only for help to arrive from the aspiring lepidopteran arsonist, whose recent traumatic experience with that piece of jagged metal has brought him a cash settlement of precisely $500.

 

Bart's subplot, which involves him falling ill after unwittingly ingesting the cereal prize from Hell and requiring emergency surgery, is (in spite of its gruesome premise) predominantly there to bring comic balance to a more sombre than usual A-story. It is, though, no arbitrary joke-fest, with the resolutions to these respective stories dovetailing in a way that is meaningful and rewarding. As fate would have it, Bart's swallowing of the metal hoop occurs on a morning before a history test that he's ill-prepared for; when he starts to complain of intense pains in his stomach, Marge and Homer, wary that he's pulled this exact shit to get out of a test before, pack him off to school, although Lisa voices the opinion that his illness might be genuine this time. This in itself feels like a nice callback to the events of "Bart Gets an F", where Lisa was the only character who knew that Bart was faking his amoria phlebitis; it speaks volumes to their sibling connection that she's consistently able to tell the difference. When Bart finally receives a settlement from Krusty (lawyer Lionel Hutz has actually scammed him out of a much more substantial sum, but $500 seems like a huge amount to the trusting eyes of impressible youth), he's all prepared to blow it on the most frivolous purchase imaginable - a limited edition pog (remember those?) with Steve Allen's face on - but his conscience prevails and he instead buys Lisa the elusive album (the sequence detailing Bart's dilemma, which repeatedly shifts between three different leitmotifs, is in itself such a wonderful testament to Clausen's composing talents). He explains to Lisa that he felt he owed it to her for being the only person to take his side when he got sick. It's a lovely gesture that upholds my personal view of Bart and Lisa having the strongest bond out of all of the Simpsons, but it has deeper significance still, as a final affirmation to Lisa that, even with her soulmate sadly departed, she does not have to worry about being alone in the world. No matter what, she can always count on her family to come through for her.

At last the time has come to dig into that bizarro finale. Even with that copy of Sax on The Beach safely within her mits, Lisa's tribute seems doomed to fall at the second hurdle, that being K-jazz's ridiculously weak broadcast range; even when standing immediately outside the station with a portable radio, she is unable to pick up their transmission of Bleeding's music. That is until a thunder cloud appears in the sky, and a bolt of lightning strikes the K-Jazz antenna, making it so powerful that the broadcast is heard and enjoyed all over Springfield. The Deus ex Thunder Cloud subsequently assumes the form of none other than Bleeding himself, assuring Lisa that her actions made him happy. This much is a parody of the sequence from Disney's The Lion King in which the deceased Mufasa appears amid the night sky and urges the emotionally lost Simba to remember who he really is - a point made salient in having the ghost of Mufasa appear right next to Bleeding, with a message for Simba...or does he mean Kimba? (On the DVD commentary, Jean and Reiss fret that this is a jab that nobody would have gotten after the 90s, but they'd no need to fear - as long as there are animation buffs in this world, that line will always be hilarious and relevant.) They are then joined by the ghost of Darth Vader, making his shocking declaration of kinship with Luke, and then finally...James Earl Jones, giving an announcement on behalf of CNN? This elaborate and totally nonsensical gag is nothing less than a loving tribute to the vocal talents of Jones, who voiced Mufasa and Darth Vader and recorded announcements for CNN. (Jones was imitated here by Harry Shearer, although he had previously guest starred in the Halloween episodes "Treehouse of Horror" and more recently "Treehouse of Horror V". Somewhere out there there's also a parallel universe in which he got to voice Sideshow Bob.) It's a sequence that would seem perfectly suited to the looser, cinema-fixated reality of The Critic, but if feels just a whisker out of place in The Simpsons, no? Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of Bleeding, Mufasa, Darth Vader and James Earl Jones all being besties in the afterlife (Jones himself was very much alive when "Round Springfield" initially aired, but now in 2025 his placement alongside these deceased characters seems less absurd). But what exactly are we to make of this sequence within the context of this otherwise relatively grounded story about grappling with bereavement? Surely Mufasa, Darth and then-still-with-us Jones didn't literally manifest in the clouds above Lisa? Surely not even Bleeding was really there, jamming with Lisa to a "Jazzman" reprise? I recall that Groening made a big thing about that catfish who winked at the camera in "The War of The Simpsons", but that all seems very sensible and subdued compared to the borderline fever dream unfolding here.

"Round Springfield" leaves us with a head-scratcher - have the skies above Springfield really become host to this odd assortment of spectres (most of them culled from popular culture), or is the entire sequence nothing more than a weird and protracted bit of symbolism? Arguably, there was precedent for it in "Old Money", which included a scene in which the ghost of Bea Simmons appears to Abe on a roller-coaster, though its strangeness was of a somewhat lower-key variety and was easy enough to rationalise as representing some kind of internal monologue on the part of Abe. It should also be noted that the Disney moment it's parodying is up for a similar kind of interpretation - Rafiki makes a remark about the weather, leaving some ambiguity as to whether Mufusa's manifestation really occurred, but I suspect that most adult viewers would be inclined to read it as symbolising the soul-searching Simba undertakes in trying to understand what Rafiki means by "He lives in you." It's possible that this too is taking place inside of Lisa's head, but it goes so far with some of its concepts and gags that I fear this would make Lisa look just a little unhinged.

It is, though, a magnificent ending - triumphant, redemptive, uplifting and poignant. Perhaps it doesn't matter how well it meshes with the series' reality or what sense we make of it, so long as we gather that Lisa has reached the light at the end of the grieving tunnel and realised that she retains her connection to Bleeding Gums and everything that he taught her. I would argue that the intention here is nothing more complicated than to leave us on a spectacular emotional high following such a downbeat experience - it's the episode's markedly eccentric way of letting us know that everything is going to be okay. It helps that Lisa and Bleeding's recurring performance of "Jazzman" is allowed to be a thing of beauty in itself, tussling only with the "Oh Streetcar!" material from "A Streetcar Named Marge" for my favourite musical sequence of all the series (bless the person who compiled the Songs in The Key of Springfield album for putting those tracks right next to each other, so I could listen to them over and over in easy succession). Perhaps it ought to lose the edge for not being an original song, but that seriously doesn't matter. They imbued it with a heart and an aching all of its own. I love Carole King's original 1974 rendition too, but thanks to The Simpsons I will forever interpret it as being about Lisa's yearning to become one with her idol, both before and after his passing.

Cheers to Yeardley Smith, to Ron Taylor and not least to Alf Clausen for making this episode such a transcendent voyage. Jeers to Disney, for a whole multitude of reasons, but on this day for the downright galling manner in which, while watching this episode on Disney+, they always seemed to want to take out midway through the credits and directly into "The Springfield Connection", rather than encouraging me to enjoy the whole dazzling performance of "Jazzman" as the Simpsons gods intended. If Disney had their way, nobody would stick around for the punchline that rounds off the story: "Oh come on, Lisa, I've got a date with Billie Holiday!" Bleeding's parting words, and they couldn't give a mouse's hickey if you hear them. The sacrilege astounds.