Halfway Across The Galaxy And Turn Left (aka Third From The Sun)

A children's series from the 1990s that I wish people talked about more is Halfway Across The Galaxy and Turn Left. A gem of a series based on a 1985 novel by Australian author Robin Klein, regarding a family of fugitive extra terrestrials who flee their home planet of Zyrgon and travel to Earth by following the directions laid out in the title, where they attempt to start anew in a suburb down under. I remember this one being a pretty big deal back in 1994. People on my playground spoke about it, and were genuinely interested in where the story was headed. I'm not sure how we let this one fall into the cracks of obscurity, but I suggest that we all rectify that post haste. 

The big intriguing hook of Klein's original premise was that, in Zyrgon society, the family dynamics are reversed, so that children have authority over their parents, or at least have an official route to gaining that authority. The book centres on the middle child, X, who is the equivalent of 12 years old on Earth, and has studied tirelessly for the position of Family Organiser, earning a scholarship at the Zyrgon Community Centre and becoming formally recognised as the head of her household. In spite of her status, X feels a degree of inferiority compared to her two siblings, for her teenage sister Dovis is a skilled pilot on track to becoming a Cosmic Flier, while youngest child Qwrk is a mathematical genius awaiting a professorship with the Knowledge Bank. By contrast, X's role is considered dull and not very glamorous, a path she pursued because she couldn't excel at anything more exciting. Nevertheless, her hard-nosed leadership proves indispensable when the children's Father, a compulsive gambler, is exposed as a serial lottery cheater and wanted by the Zyrgon Law Enforcement, forcing the family to vacate the planet. They anticipate that this will be only a temporary measure, with the current regime expected to topple at any moment, and regularly check in with Lox, a dashing young Space Shuttle captain with whom X is infatuated, for updates on the situation. In the meantime, they attempt to hide on Earth by posing as a human family who've recently relocated from abroad, adopting Earth names (X becomes Charlotte, Dovis becomes Astrella, Qwrk becomes George, Father becomes Mortimer, Mother becomes Renee and the family, whose surname was never given, become the Jacksons) and attempting to assimilate themselves into the local culture. Not wanting to attract attention, X orders them to be as nondescript as possible, but this poses a problem when the children attend school and Qwrk is required to present as a child of average intelligence, something he can't even fake. X has him take up the violin, hoping that his lack of musical aptitude will convince the school that there is nothing remarkable about him. But, as Boards of Canada told us, music is math, and Qwrk has little trouble applying his mathematical prowess to mastering the instrument, causing him to be hailed a prodigy and for the school to restructure his lessons around his musical education. Meanwhile, the charismatic Dovis takes to life on Earth like a duck to water, becoming one of the most popular girls in her peer group, and Mother and Father find jobs pertaining to their respective talents for fashion and cooking. X is the only one who still struggles to adjust, bogged down by the weight of her responsibilities.

Eventually, X decides that it would be easier for the family to return to Zyrgon, if they used the money saved from her scholarship to bribe the officials to drop the charges against Father, by which point everyone else has grown accustomed to their Earth routines and meets her proposal with resistance. X then discovers, through communication with Lox, that they actually can't go back, since it's come to light that the test papers that earned her that scholarship were falsified, and she's now the one the Zyrgon authorities are interested in apprehending. Father admits to tinkering with the results on X's behalf, knowing how much she'd wanted to succeed as an Organiser. Realising that she's been living a sham and was never suited to the position, X feels relief rather than disappointment. The book ends with her dispelling the raft the family had travelled in, so that the Zyrgon law enforcers will be unable to trace it to their current location. With no choice but to remain on Earth, she opens up to embracing her new life as a child, announcing that the family will have to learn to start organising themselves. In the meantime, she's going ice-skating with her schoolfriend Jenny Roland.

At just 144 pages, the book is a slim read. The television adaptation, conversely, consisted of 28 half-hour episodes, so you know that they added in a ton of extra material. The show's Wikipedia entry states that the series was split into two arcs, with the first staying close to the events of the book. Eh, sort of. For the first 10 episodes or so, it's a reasonably faithful adaptation. We again follow the adventures of X (Lauren Hewitt), Qwrk (Jeffrey Walker), Dovis (played by German actress Silvia Seidel with dialogue dubbed by Amanda Douge), Father (Bruce Myles) and Mother (Jan Friedl), who in this version come to the fictional Melburnian suburb of Bellwood (filmed in the actual Melburnian suburbs of Williamstown and Surrey Hills), claiming to be returning to Australia after a period of living in Peru. They face many of the same challenges as in the book (Qwrk's violin story, for example, is transplanted pretty much wholesale), although the tone of the narrative is noticeably altered, not least because we get considerably more direct insight into the happenings on Zyrgon, something that in the novel was related largely second-hand from X's perspective. Zyrgon culture has also gotten even more draconian - in the novel, the penalty awaiting X and Father, should they be apprehended, was a term in the Detention Centre, which was not suggested to be any worse than an Earth prison, whereas in the series they are threatened with execution by being cast into a pit of lava. After 10 episodes, the series starts following its own storyline, based on the new world-building introduced. It should be acknowledged that Klein penned her own sequel to her novel, Turn Right For Zyrgon, which I understand was written after the TV series and incorporated a few of the plot points from its latter half. I will confess that I've never read the sequel, copies of which seem to be quite hard to come by (I'm not even sure if it was ever published in the UK, in spite of the popularity the series enjoyed here at the time, and the original novel being readily available during its run), so I am unable to comment on how it compares to the events of the series. 

Produced by Crawfords Australia, the series aired in 1994 on the Seven Network in Australia, and in the UK as part of the now-defunct CITV programming block. At the time, I got really invested in the story and characters, although for such a long-running series it was basically inevitable that I was going to miss an episode here and there, and for some reason my viewing during the second half got particularly spotty. I am happy to say that I caught the finale, "We Live On The Best One", so I at least got to see how everything concluded. I had missed the penultimate episode, "Trial By Lava", and remember how shocked I was when I learned from the recap what the final cliffhanger had been. But I was thrilled to bits with how the story ultimately resolved, and the closing line, spoken by X, is one that's really stuck with me through the years. I recently revisited the series in full, which it had long been on my mind to do, and was chuffed at how much I got from it the second time around. This is a show that has it all - a memorable cast of characters, a gripping sense of adventure, a stirring theme tune (courtesy of Peter Sullivan), visual designs that are really quite lovely (inevitably, some of the effects look kind of dated now, but for a television production of its day it seriously doesn't look too shabby, with those shots of the Zyrgon civilisation in particular still feeling so chilly, haunting and alien), and while it makes for darker, more dramatic viewing than some of the other Australian children's shows I remember from that era (most notably Round The Twist and Genie From Down Under), there's still a healthy undercurrent of that same antipodean quirkiness. My only quibble is that the sprawling structure^[1] isn't immune to intermittent flabbiness. There comes a point (around episode 13) where it shifts from being a serialised science-fiction adventure into more of an episodic fish out of water dramedy, and from there you get your share of episodes that could be described as "filler", in that they don't do a massive amount to further the overarching plot. Such fillers aren't necessarily a bad thing, with some simply slowing down to focus more on the characters (episode 14, "Qwrk Lands On His Feet", an unusually X-lite installment that has Qwrk befriending an aspiring skateboarder, offers an agreeable little study of the youngest Jackson). But there is a particularly laggy stretch later on (namely, episodes 20 to 22) that leaves you wondering when the adventure is going to pick up again - which it thankfully does in style for the remaining six entries. It's an excellent series, though one that might have benefited from being a smidge shorter.

(Top: The villainous Chief, as portrayed by Bruce Spence. Bottom: Chief in his more harmless rubot form.)

One of the most significant changes in the television adaptation was the addition of The Chief, a sinister and relentless law enforcer who'd tracked the family all the way from Zyrgon and was intent on bringing X and Father to his twisted vision of justice. In his anisocoric eyes (yes, Chief has the same eye condition as David Bowie), X had abused her position as Family Organiser by refusing to turn in her father, which already made her a high-level traitor to Zyrgon society, never mind any matter of falsified test papers. In the finale, it's revealed that he'd also harboured some personal jealousy of X, recognising how favoured she was by Zyrgon ruler Prinicipa (Diane Cliento) and her potential to rise up the ranks faster than him. (Chief had no real interest in Mother, Dovis or Qwrk, and in episode 11, "Home Is Where The Heart Is", when he temporarily apprehended X and Father, was happy to leave them behind on Earth.) In the book, the Zyrgon law enforcement were never more than a distant, vaguely-defined threat, with much of the conflict arising from the family's efforts to adjust to life on Earth, while in the television series the jeopardy naturally became a lot more immediate and intense, with an enforcer so actively and aggressively on their trail. Chief also got confused by the ways of Earth, and had contempt for what he saw as the planet's chaos and disorder (there's a hilarious moment in the penultimate episode where he tries to explain to Principa the concept of shopping malls). As a child, he was by and far my favourite character, and I recall that very specific disappointment, on reading the book, when it became apparent that he wasn't going to be in this version of the story; without him, it became a very different, somewhat slighter experience (although there was a reference to a "Law-Enforcer-In-Chief" who according to Lox loves the sound of his own voice, which I suspect was the basis for his character).

One of the joys of rediscovering the television series as an adult has been in seeing how fantastically well Chief holds up as an antagonist. A big part of that has to do with his being played by the legendary Bruce Spence - not only does Spence's lofty, gangling frame give him an imposing and convincingly alien presence, he could imbue Chief with a sublime creepiness and sublime campiness all in one package, simply through what he does with his mouth (a talent put to subsequent use in his cameo as the Mouth of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings: Return of The King, which was egregiously excised from the theatrical cut). The guy is skin-crawling, but so, so fun. He also has an unexpected and frankly weird character arc, which involves him spending the middle portion of the series in the form of a harmless "rubot" (robotic beings used on Zyrgon in the roles of dogs and cocktail waiters), having accidentally transformed himself in a botched attempt to capture X, and being adopted by Father as a sort of pet he keeps around without X's knowledge. For a few episodes, he and Father appear to forge quite a loving bond, with Father regularly going out of his way to protect Chief, after taking pity on him in his disarmed state. From Chief's perspective the truce was almost certainly one of convenience - having finally returned to his true form (in episode 19, "Welcome To The Human Race"), he goes right back to hunting Father and X. Mercy and emotion are just not things that he comprehends, and while X is able to teach him something of their value in the series finale, his time under Father's care is oddly never cited as a factor in his eventual redemption.

The other major change made by the television series was to expand extensively on the role of Jenny Roland (Kellie Smythe), the lonely Earth girl befriended by X who ultimately gives her a reason to feel that she belongs on the Blue Planet. In fact, the very first scene of the opening episode centres on Jenny's perspective, indicating that the series will be her story as much as X's. It is established that Jenny is struggling with the absence of her father, who distanced himself from the family following the breakdown of her parents' marriage. Jenny spots a falling star in the night sky and wishes for her father's return. She then makes an additional wish that is not said out loud, but later shared with X - she wants things to be different for her at school this year, and to find a friend. (Were you watching, Chris Sanders?) The narrative thread regarding Jenny's father is not explicitly resolved, but he implication is that X has arrived to fill a dual role, both as Jenny's friend and as a surrogate parent, in helping her to come to terms with her father's abandonment. When X attempts to have the family return to Zyrgon (claiming that they are going back to their old home in Peru), Jenny is forced to relive that abandonment and expresses her anger for her father by taking it out on the fishing boat he left behind, a symbol of their vacated connection. Unlike in the book, where Jenny remains oblivious to X's origins, in the television series X chooses to confide the truth in Jenny and her brother Colin (Che Broadbent), who become actively involved in the family's efforts to remain undetected on Earth and to evade the clutches of The Chief. In turn, their alliance provides Jenny with a means of healing from her own upheaval. The fishing boat, which has stood unused since her father's desertion, is granted a newfound mobility thanks to the Jacksons' telekinetic abilities (abilities that might potentially be unlockable in Earthlings too, if they concentrate). It plays an essential part in rescuing X and Father when they are apprehended by Chief in episode 11, and at the end of of episode 12 ("X: The Unknown Factor") when the girls have come through the first phase of their ordeal, they go out for a celebratory joyride in their flying boat, mutual survivors of adult insensitivity. Just as X learns to enjoy life by becoming more of a child, Jenny learns to take control of hers by becoming more confident and independent. In the final arc, when Chief succeeds in capturing X and bringing her to trial on Zyrgon, Jenny and Colin make the gutsy decision to accompany Dovis halfway across the galaxy (and right) to save her.

Not all Earthlings are so hospitable, of course, and X must also contend with alpha schoolgirl Michelle Froggat (Tenley Gillmore) and her lackey Dallas (Katrina Lambert), who've long looked down on Jenny and take a similar disliking to X for not fitting in (in the absence of Chief, they were essentially the closest thing the book had to corporeal villains). By the end of the book it's hinted that Michelle might be forming a grudging respect for X, after she wins a school race; in the series, their enmity merely intensifies in the second half, when Michelle's family move into the house next to the Jacksons and her father (Denis Moore) becomes equally fixated on their weirdness (her mother (Ellen Cressey) is more inclined to let them be, in a dynamic that vaguely reminds me of Patrick and Pippa from One Foot In the Grave). In all fairness to Michelle, she undergoes a pretty traumatic experience in episode 12, when Chief falsely imprisons her and assumes her form in order to lure X into a trap; I'm not sure I'd be so inclined to roll with all of these strange going-ons around me either. (It does mean that, for one episode, Gillmore gets to have an absolute ball playing Chief in Michelle's form, replicating Spence's uncanny lip energy.) 

The character who feels the most altered from his literary counterpart is Lox (Paul Kelman), the family's contact on Zyrgon. In the book he was a vain, unsympathetic character who cared only about his own reputation and status, and when the scandal about X's forged test papers came to light refused to help the family any further. He was also X's primary tie to her home planet, an attachment that revealed a more fanciful side to her hyper-serious character. She had aspirations of one day marrying him, in the same way that a schoolgirl might fantasise about marrying a favourite pop star, and was disappointed to learn that he'd become engaged to a kiosk attendant named Jady following her family's departure. Finally seeing through Lox, and her own foolishness in being so enamored of him, antecedes her willingness to let Zyrgon and the position of Family Organiser go. Her devotion to Lox represents her sense of affinity with the adult world (in her view, that she was "born in the wrong chronology"), which she comes to realise was deeply misplaced; in her final line in the book, it is implied that she might have transferred those affections to the more age-appropriate Colin. In the series, while still the object of X's naive pre-adolescent attachments, Lox isn't quite so self-serving and becomes much more of a comic relief figure. In this version, Jady (Kerry Armstrong) is no mere kiosk attendant, but the fiercely loyal assistant of Chief (she's also the source of the series' funniest running gag, in the conspicuous amatory tension between herself and Chief that their own tyrannical protocol keeps them from acknowledging), looking to honey trap Lox into revealing information about X's whereabouts. Eventually Lox is forced into hiding himself and joins the family on Earth, where he becomes fascinated with cowboys and westerns and attempts to emulate their culture, not appreciating how hopelessly out of place it is in 1990s Melbourne. He nevertheless proves himself useful in episode 19 by saving the family from Chief, then fresh out of his rubot era, and is inspired to return to Zyrgon as a dissident (albeit a mostly incompetent one).

Zeppy and Jenny 

Also dropping by to offer support are Aunt Hecla (Sandy Gore) and her pet Zeppy, a zepelope, or "hybrid antelope" as per the book (specifically, he looks like a hybrid of a pronghorn and Dougal from The Magic Roundabout), though if anyone asks he's a rare breed of Earth goat. Despite her eccentric appearance, Hecla is the voice of reason, a former Family Organiser who alone recognises how absurd it is to place that kind of responsibility on a child. She takes it on herself to shoulder X's burden, assuming X's form and giving herself up to Chief, although the ruse is uncovered once she is back on Zyrgon (Zeppy, meanwhile, remains on Earth with the Jacksons, but he becomes less prominent as the series goes on and by the end has completely faded into the backdrop). Hecla vocalises one of the story's key concerns, which has to do with the perils of parentification and of forcing children to grow up too soon. During her stay on Earth, she tries to dissuade X from feeling so accountable for her family with the reminder that she is only a child. This is echoed more harrowingly in the penultimate episode, when Chief is preparing to execute X by throwing her into the much-feared lava pit, and Hecla tries to reason with him to let her go on those exact same grounds. There's the implicit suggestion that there is not such a gulf between what parentification has done to X and Chief's attempts to literally destroy her. In Klein's book we might have detected a certain subtext, in which the whole of Zyrgon (there a less concrete threat) reads as a shorthand for the omnipresent anxieties that loom over X and keep her bound to her premature obligations. This analogy is even more pronounced in the series, where Zyrgon becomes a caricature of adulthood at its most joyless, a cold blue realm of endless discipline and uniformity, where fun is literally forbidden and sweet treats are unheard of (crucially, it is the residents' demands for ice cream - a classically childish request - that causes Chief to lose his control over them). Earth, by contrast, represents the freshness and boundless opportunities of childhood, a green and vibrant world in which the family are reborn and given the chance to reinvent themselves from scratch, and to discover the potential that they never knew they had.

Another major theme of the television series is immigration and diversity, with X and her family being foreigners attempting to start over in a world that is new to them, and which does not always understand them in turn. I feel this was the significance of making the Froggats direct neighbours to the Jacksons in the latter half, since it makes the issue of coexistence more explicit - we share a common world and need to live alongside one another, even if our customs and outlooks don't always accord. Mr Froggat despises the Jacksons for being different, and there's an obvious message about how such bigotry may be passed down through the generations, with Mr Froggat's bitter intolerance visibly rubbing off on his daughter. Which is not to say that there's no hope for Michelle. In episode 26 ("Dark Night, Star Bright") she finds herself caught between her parents' opposing views on the matter. Mrs Froggat encourages Michelle to accept the Jacksons and advocates multiculturalism, while Mr Froggat lays out his vision of a "perfect" society in which everyone is the same and non-conformity brutally punished, a vision that is chillingly reminiscent of the dystopian system on Zyrgon. Even Michelle, who looks up to her father and usually goes along with him, is disturbed by the notion. Elsewhere, in episode 15 ("Hearing A Different Drummer"), Dovis enters into a relationship with a young poet named David (David Walters), and admits to him that her family are originally from Zyrgon. While David likely doesn't appreciate that "Zyrgon" is a whole other planet, as opposed to another country, he is unfazed, sharing that his family is of Ukrainian descent and assuring Dovis that Australia is, historically speaking, a new country for a lot of its populace.

By the end of the series, while the narrative on Zyrgon is neatly tied up, the situation with the Froggats is a left little more open-ended. The Froggats must resign themselves to the fact that the Jacksons are here to stay (following a brief interval in which they'd announced their intention to leave, much to the delight of Mr Froggat and Michelle), but will relations between the two families be in any way improved going forward? Will Michelle continue to make X's life difficult in school, or will she finally come around to her, as she did the book? Sure, if X can depart Zyrgon on peaceful terms with Chief, then Michelle should be a doddle, right? The answer might lie in that powerful closing line, when the Froggats go outside to see the Jacksons returning to their property with a splashy new car, and receive the unwelcome news that they are not only staying put, but are now lottery winners. It seems that Father has been up to his old tricks again, although one would hope that this is just a one-off to give his family enough money to live comfortably in their new lives. "What luck", says Mr Froggat, barely concealing his deflation. X responds: "That's not luck, Mr Froggat. THIS is luck. There's a million billion of these planets, and we live on the best one." The final sequence shows the Jacksons, along with Jenny and Colin, running playfully around their garden, a collection of children and children at heart, while the Froggats observe them from the other side of the fence. The shot then pulls back to reveal Australia as viewed from outer space, part of a bigger world and indeed a bigger universe. Although the Froggats appear to be excluded from that final celebration, we might detect an implicit invitation in X's words, one that is being extended to the viewer as much as to her reluctant neighbours. After all, her closing statement is "We live on the best one", denoting the Earth's entire populace. The invitation is to see ourselves as part of a global community that is enriched by our individual differences, and in which we become stronger when we embrace and lean on one another (a message likewise conveyed in the conclusion to Chief's arc, when he and X both become stranded in the lava pit, and are required to cooperate in order to get out alive). To simply be on this wonderful planet, and to have so much splendour and diversity around us is, in X's terms, is to have done better than to have won the lottery. The opportunity to make the most of that is there, and the Froggats' final position in that equation is undefined in the same way that our own position is undefined - whether we choose cross the fence and partake in the Jacksons' celebration, or else stay leerily upon the sidelines, is ultimately in our hands.

The "Jacksons" - don't forget to turn left!  

[1] It is, I think, a bit of a stretch on Wikipedia's part to claim that the series can be divided into two distinct arcs. Broadly, it can be broken down into four different phases: the initial 12-episode adventure, the more laid-back interval from 13 to 18 that focusses on the Jacksons vs the Froggats, David romancing Dovis and the subplot about Father caring for Chief as a rubot, culminating in Chief's regaining his true form in episode 19, that rather idle gap between 20 and 22 where Mother goes to Paris and Lox goes home but not a lot else happens, and then the final arc where Chief reunites with Jady and they close in on X for the climactic showdown. Not the most even structure, but a lot of good times.

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 to which we are not here privy. 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 would be too costly and impractical an undertaking 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. 

A Fairy Tale (aka A Curious Case)

At first glance the title of Tony Ross's 1991 picture book A Fairy Tale might seem deceptive. It takes place not in a lush mythical kingdom, but in a grimy industrial city in the early 20th century and the narrative that unfolds is, on the surface, a predominantly down to earth one. The opening page has our protagonist, a young girl named Bessie, angrily rejecting a book about fairies because she can no longer relate to such concepts. Her yearning for books that are about "real things" lays out Ross's own ambitions to tell a story that says something authentic to children on the brink of the same disillusionment. Young readers who may be too old and jaded to believe in things like the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, but are also feeling the bleakness of that void and wondering what else in life could possibly come along to fill it.

Like Ross's Oscar Got The Blame, A Fairy Tale is about the conflict between fantasy and reality, more specifically a child's inclination to use imagination as a means of reckoning with their world versus the pressure to live in the real world. In this case the conflict is largely internal. Bessie is quite a bit older than Oscar and at the stage in life where she is questioning the value of escapist fantasy, yet she is clearly reluctant to abandon that lingering sense of childhood curiosity altogether. Her insistence that fairy tales are about made up things is challenged when she gets to know her elderly neighbour, Mrs Leaf (full name later revealed to be Daisy Leaf), who suggests that she herself might really be a fairy. Bessie is initially incredulous, since Mrs Leaf does not meet her preconceived notions of how a fairy should be, but Mrs Leaf explains that fairies only look dainty and beautiful when they are happy; an unhappy fairy would look absolutely wretched. Bessie observes that if Mrs Leaf were a fairy, she would have to be very deeply unhappy, a comment she immediately regrets but that Mrs Leaf does not appear to take too personally. Mrs Leaf, it seems, is indeed a deeply unhappy woman - the source of her unhappiness is never explicitly cited, but can be readily deciphered by anybody reading between the lines. Over the course of the story, she and Bessie forge a close friendship that endures as the latter comes of age, experiences love and loss, and enters into her twilight years. By the ending, which takes us up to the present day, Daisy is still by her side, and it becomes apparent that the ageing process has worked rather differently for her.

From the text alone, there might be some ambiguity regarding Daisy's claims to fairyhood. Ross never flat-out confirms that she is a fairy, much as he never flat-out confirmed what was really going on in the text for Oscar Got The Blame, although in both cases the illustrations appear to favour a particular conclusion. For the first half of the story it seems entirely possible that Daisy is simply humoring Bessie, by giving this frustrated child one last peculiarity to chew on before this kind of fanciful imagining becomes totally inaccessible to her. Bessie notices things about Daisy that make her different to others but do not, in themselves, prove that she is a fairy - for example, her vegetarian diet and her tendency to forage for wild berries (berries that she warns Bessie would be poisonous to anyone not of elfin origin). Then, as Bessie grows into an adult, Ross insinuates more heavily that there might indeed be something genuinely uncanny about Daisy. She does not show up as anything more than a ghostly smudge in Bessie's wedding photographs, although we are offered the glimmer of a rational explanation, with her husband Robert thinking nothing of it and insisting that no picture he's been involved with has ever turned out quite right. Bessie also observes that as she has come of age, Daisy only appears to have gotten progressively younger, although we could still chalk that up to Bessie's friendship bringing out a new lease of life in Daisy. But is there any way to make sense of Daisy's remarkable longevity, and the fact that she's still with Bessie at the end of the book, other than to concede that she is exactly what she says she is?

Bessie's initial distaste for fairy tales stems from her assessment that they do not reflect reality, but at the same time it is clear that she is not exactly satisfied with what reality has to offer. We sense that she turns on childhood fantasy as angrily as she does because she sees it as having betrayed her in not reflecting the world as it really is. And when she attempts to discuss her unanswered questions with the other children at school and gets predictably ridiculed for it, she becomes frustrated with the intolerance of the non-elfin world in not allowing room for such thought. Bessie cannot relate to fairy tale fiction, but nor does she feel at home in the world in which she's required to take her place; in many respects, Daisy's quest is less about convincing Bessie that fairy tales are real than it is steering her toward the qualities worth celebrating in a world that does not align with childhood expectation. The things she encourages Bessie to see as remarkable are, on the surface, very small and ordinary ("Have you ever had a magic moment...a summer afternoon when the sky's so warm the world stops, or the night before Christmas when you can feel the happiness in the air?"). The real world harbours ample magic, but it manifests in subtler, more unassuming means than one might find in an archetypal children's storybook. It is notable that when we first meet Bessie and Daisy, their respective living spaces are marked by dominant colours that point to the state of their internal worlds. Bessie's bedroom is blue and shady, reflecting her general gloom and dissatisfaction. Daisy's living room, by contrast, is green and vibrant, evoking both her connection to nature and, by extension, the fairy domain she describes to Bessie as being covered in grassland. It also hints at Daisy's latent vitality, and at the other hidden depths she possesses, something underscored in having her house's exterior seem as gloomy and disconnected from the natural world as everything else in Balaclava Street.

Daisy tells Bessie that the human world and the fairy world exist simultaneously, and together, but are like two sides of the same coin. Ordinarily they can't see each other, although cracks will occasionally appear between the two, allowing fairies to wander through into human dwellings, only for them to retreat in an instant. The implicit message here is of the duality of life, as Daisy teaches Bessie to consolidate the harshness of reality with the ephemeral blessings it also brings, which Bessie must be alert to in order to seize and appreciate. The cruelty of the human world takes many forms, ranging from the teasing Bessie receives from her schoolmates when she lets her fairy agnosticism slip to the onset of the world war that will eventually claim the life of her beloved Robert. Ross's story centres on the transformative power of the friendship that persists between Bessie and Daisy and how both parties are mutually lifted from their respective solitude and despair. The friendship proves physically transformative for Daisy, but it also visibly changes Bessie's world. As the two grow closer, the illustrations depicting the happenings in that grimy industrial burg already seem brighter and more colourful. The street outside Leach's shop, in which Bessie and Daisy have their second encounter, looks warm and lively, even beneath the clouds of factory smog, and populated by other individuals who are likewise seizing the moment (two men engaged in intimate conversation, a boy hoop rolling). Sharp-eyed readers might notice that littered through the book's illustrations are various hidden fairies and gnomes, lurking somewhere within the corners or, in the case of the illustration depicting the military cross issued posthumously to Robert, right within plain sight. It is a charming touch that seems to bear out Daisy's words about the fairy world always being connected to the human world and the magic intermittently seeping its way in, but the real revelations are in the broader sense of atmosphere and how alive Bessie's ostensibly humdrum existence becomes when she is sharing these experiences with Daisy. Ross's description of the Whit Monday they spend together seems hauntingly reminiscent of Daisy's earlier words on the magic of a summer day in which the sky is so warm that the world seems to stop. Nothing especially out of the ordinary happens. Daisy watches Bessie participate in a parade, they have a celebratory meal in the church hall and then walk home together. But each individual moment is fused with an elation that Bessie wishes could go on forever. It proves a day more magical than any fairy tale.

Bessie cannot actually stop time, of course. The blissful Whit Monday she would have gladly inhabited for all eternity is followed immediately a time leap, in which Bessie becomes a young woman and her perspective on life somewhat changes. She begins to identify as Bess, and her unanswered questions about the existence of fairies are largely put to one side. She and Daisy still talk about it, but have contextualised it as a fond memory of a bygone time in which Daisy had playfully tried to make her believe in fairies. Now Bess's interests lie with more adult pursuits, such as her job in one of the local factories and her romance with her colleague Robert. The idyllic future she might have built with Robert is savagely ruptured by the coming of war; Robert goes away to fight and is killed in action. Bess is naturally distraught, but Daisy is able to support her through the grief until, some years later, "the sadness about Robert turned into happy memories, just as Daisy said it would." Implicit in this line is, I think, the most salient hint regarding the source of Daisy's own implied sadness when first encountered by Bessie. Daisy does not reveal much about her background, other than to suggest that she became stranded in the human world after being unable to find her way back to the fairy world, although we might well have read some significance into her identifying as Mrs Leaf. With that in mind, Daisy's assurances of light at the end of the tunnel following the loss of Robert could be taken as stemming from personal experience. Perhaps when she described being unable to get back to the fairy domain she was speaking at least somewhat metaphorically, referring covertly to the loss of the life she had previously known when her husband was with her. Eventually, it seems that her sorrow transmuted into happy memories, but it took the renewed joy from her friendship with Bessie to get her to that point. Daisy is now able to return the favour by being there for her friend during her own voyage through grief. But even before then, before Daisy's companionship had clearly always helped in filling a hole in Bessie's life. From what we know of Bessie's school life, she was teased and something of a misfit among her peers. There is a passing reference to her mother and we get to meet her uncle Harold, who is a pigeon fancier and points to the birds' homing instincts as an example of the inherent mysteriousness of life. But by all indications Bessie felt more of a connection with Daisy than she did her own flesh and blood family, who stay largely out of the picture. Daisy helped the lonely Bessie find a sense of belonging the real world once before, a function she is able to keep on fulfilling for the adult Bess.

Ross's story ends more or less where it began, with Bess and Daisy in the present day, as close knit a pair as they've always been, although the two of them have now switched places. As we can see from the closing illustrations, Bess has grown old while Daisy now looks young and dainty. By now, Bess feels that she's finally attained clarity for those unresolved questions she had many years ago regarding the existence of fairies. "Maybe old friends never notice the changes in each other. Now and again though, a faint memory comes to old Bess. Something about fairies looking young and beautiful when they're happy...stuff and nonsense, she knew there were no such things...she'd always known." Ironically, Bess's sense of closure on the matter arrives right as Ross gives the reader what looks to be irrefutable proof of Daisy's fairyhood. Is Bess's ageing intended to be symbolic of her relinquishing of childhood fantasy? I would argue not. While the story closes on an unmistakably poignant note, it still reads to me like a positive ending. The implication is that Bess no longer feels the need for fairies, because she has found assuredly the fulfilment she'd long deemed to be lacking in the real world, and is contented with the friend she has, who also just so happens to actually be a fairy. Her friend too could not be happier. Significantly, the final illustration, which has the two friends walking along 1991-era Balaclava Street, appears to show them heading out of the urban environment that has dominated the narrative and in the direction of a distant stretch of greenery. The feeling is one of transcendence, as if the fairy world is their ultimate destination. Their hands linked, we see them bridging the gap between the young and adult worlds, with youthful innocence and graceful maturity co-existing side by side. The pair compliment one another perfectly. Far from a mournful story about the inevitable abandonment of childhood awe, A Fairy Tale is an optimistic yarn about its endurance, and its ability to grow and develop along with us. Life is filled hardship - in that regard it's not so different to a fairy tale - but we've a valuable ally in the magic that floats up through the cracks.

 

Bundles of Joyce: Epic (aka Blue and Green Should Never Be Seen?)

I find it fascinating how in vogue the works of American children's author William Joyce were among animation bigwigs as the 2000s were going into the 2010s. In a period of roughly six years, we received no less than three feature adaptations of Joyce's books, each from a different Hollywood animation studio. Disney got in first on this trend, with the 2007 offering Meet The Robinsons, a loose re-working of Joyce's picture book A Day with Wilbur Robinson. In late 2012, DreamWorks' animation released Rise of The Guardians, taken from Joyce's book series The Guardians of Childhood, only for Blue Sky to round out this unofficial trilogy a few months later with Epic, their take on The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs. Joyce, who was also a prominent figure within the animation industry, having worked as a designer for Pixar's early features and a producer for Blue Sky's Robots (2005), had a finger in all three pies, serving as an executive producer for the Disney and DreamWorks entries and a screenwriter and production designer for Epic. A little project I've decided to set myself for 2025 is to provide a full retrospective of all three films, considering not only how they handle the themes and spirit of Joyce's works, but also the personal stamp that each studio managed to bring to the production. I'll admit to having a soft spot for this unsung triad; they basically all came and went, leaving nary a dent in zeitgeist, but stand out to me now as underrated examples of their respective studio's output, each very worthy of revisiting.

We'll be starting this retrospective with Epic - which was, chronologically, the last of the three to see the light of day, but this is a case where I'm allowing the seasons to dictate my ordering. Epic feels the most appropriate to be exploring during the transitional period between spring and summer, when the greenery is lush and the outside world is fully in bloom (the film is, specifically, set at the summer solstice, but I'm sure I can be forgiven for getting in a few weeks ahead). Meet The Robinsons, with its emphasis on overcoming regret and anticipating what the future will hold, seems better suited for the wistful days of a waning summer. The Rise of The Guardians technically takes place at Easter, but it so wants to be a Christmas movie and, as far as popular perception is concerned, it is a Christmas movie, so it can wait until the year is nearly through.

Besides, I have been wanting to get it off my chest for some time just how much I miss Blue Sky, now that they've been consigned to the Hollywood history books. They were not my favourite animation studio. I suspect they were the favourite of very few people, possessing neither the prestige of Pixar, the subversiveness of DreamWorks or Illumination's canniness in conceiving the most prolifically, nefariously merchandisable of characters. They were there, and they were relatively consistent, churning out Ice Age films on a regular basis, and projects that were generally pleasant, if unremarkable. It was easy to take them for granted. And yet when their closure was announced in April 2021, I and a lot of other animation fans felt very melancholic about the news. Just knowing that we'd lost a major voice in Hollywood animation felt like such a massive blow. I wouldn't say that I went as far as mourning the (ostensible) extinction of the Ice Age franchise, which had whittled down whatever patience I had remaining by its fourth installment, but I couldn't help but wonder about all of the other stories the studio might have told, and what new talent and direction could eventually have emerged that we would now never get to see in this timeline. In truth, the writing had already been on the wall for Blue Sky, as soon as their overlords at 20th Century Fox were acquired by Disney. The official explanation for the closure was that COVID-19 had made the studio's operations unsustainable, but even in late 2017, when the acquisition process was in its early stages, I remember there being a lot of speculation as to whether Disney would have sufficient interest in keeping Blue Sky going. They weren't exactly starving for animated output, and Blue Sky had spent much of the late 2010s struggling to find a money maker as reliable as the Ice Age franchise (which itself was beginning to show signs of diminishing financial returns with the fifth installment). Some might look on the development as the Circle of Life at its most unrelentingly brutal, as according to one of the testimonies in Dan Lund's 2005 documentary Dream On, Silly Dreamer, it was the overnight success of Blue Sky and the first Ice Age in 2002 that convinced the heads of Walt Disney Feature Animation to pull the plug on traditional animation. Blue Sky were, at one time, considered a threat by Disney. They played their part in redefining the course of Hollywood animation, only for Disney to ultimately claw its way back to the top, get itself into a position of authority over their former adversaries and to neutralise them without mercy.  As things stand, Annapurna Animation, which was founded by Blue Sky executives Robert L. Baird and Andrew Millstein in 2022, looks set to become their successor, their first release being Nimona (2023), a production previously scrapped under Disney's rule. Perhaps not surprisingly, the demise of Blue Sky wasn't enough to keep those pesky Ice Age critters from resurfacing - a spin-off film, The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild, dropped on Disney+ in 2022 (sans most of the original voice cast) and Ice Age 6 has since been confirmed, but that's all Disney's bugbear now.

Let's go back to May of 2013, when all that drama was still a number of years away, and Epic was the freshest entry into Blue Sky's canon. The film had been in gestation since as far back as 2006 and at one point had apparently come very close to moving over to Pixar (now that would have been an interesting turn of events, especially given Pixar's otherwise total avoidance of doing adaptations, unless you want to count A Bug's Life as an adaptation of the fable of the Grasshopper and the Ant). It pulled in decent enough numbers at the box office, but nothing that was likely to convince the studio to abandon Ice Age in favour of a Leaf Man franchise, and reviews fell largely within the lukewarm range. I confess that I wasn't overly enthusiastic about it at the time. But there is something about it that intrigues me, and over the years has slowly worked its way into my affections. In fact, these days I might even go so far as to call it the standout of Blue Sky's output. That might be a contentious opinion, since I reckon a lot of people would argue that The Peanuts Movie (2015) is where they peaked. And yes, The Peanuts Movie is a very sweet and warm and loving tribute to the brainkids of Charles M. Schulz, but here's the thing - if I want to spend time with Charlie Brown and friends, I'm still far more likely to watch the traditionally animated television specials. It's a nice film, but by its nature kind of a redundant one. Whereas Epic is one of those films with a curious, even ludicrous hold on my fascinations. It's no masterpiece, but its numerous glaring imperfections make it all the more enthralling to me. My obsession with Epic is one with trying to parse the tensions between a messy final product and an underlying maturity that feels like it was desperately trying to find its way out into the open.

Children's picture books don't always make the most auspicious starting point for feature storytelling. Consider Hollywood's chequered history of bringing the works of Dr Seuss to the big screen (Blue Sky's own attempt, Horton Hears A Who, is broadly considered one of the better examples, if not exactly a classic). The recurring challenge tends to be that picture books usually don't have sufficient plot to fill up feature length, so you have to add a lot of extra detail and narrative fussiness to stories that were designed to be told with brevity. On the other hand, picture books often make for enchanting examples of visual storytelling, and it stands to reason that a filmmaking creative might be inspired to want to recreate a bit of that graphic verve on a cinematic canvas. The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs is also a much more plot-driven picture book than A Day With Wilbur Robinson, so in theory Blue Sky should have had the advantage over Disney here. Let's dig in and see how they fared.

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs about?

Published in 1996, The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs tells the story of an elderly woman who loves her garden and recalls it being a place where magical things occurred in her childhood, although her memories are hazy as to the finer details. One day the woman falls ill, and her favourite item within the garden, a rosebush, begins to decline along with her. The grief of the woman's grandchildren is paralleled with that of the bugs who live in the garden and fear for the bush's future. A small metal toy that has lain lost in the garden for many years advises them to summon a legendary band of creatures known as the Leaf Men; to do so, they must ascend to the top of the tallest tree just as the full moon touches its topmost branch. A guild of doodlebugs (woodlice) makes the daring climb, and is opposed en route by the malicious Spider Queen and her ant minions, but manage to summon the Leaf Men, who defeat the Spider Queen. They then restore the rosebush to health and carry the Long-Lost Toy to the bedridden woman, along with one of the flowers from the bush. The woman is suddenly hit with a flood of memories, recalling that the toy and the rosebush were gifts from each of her parents as tokens of how they would always love and protect her. The woman recovers from her illness, and shares with her grandchildren the stories her parents told her in her childhood about the Leaf Men who lived in the garden and watched over it. Her grandson asks if the stories are true; the woman responds: "Things may come and things may go. But never forget - the garden is a miraculous place, and anything can happen on a beautiful moonlit night." The final illustration shows the bugs standing around a framed photograph of the woman as a small child, planting the rosebush with her parents. The book is dedicated to the memory of Joyce's friend John, described as his "brave, best pal".

 

How much of this is in Epic?

Not a lot. At this point I should highlight that the source story is specifically credited in Epic as the inspiration for the Leafmen characters ("Leafmen" being the stylisation the film prefers), which in itself is very telling. They are the only participants from Joyce's pages to have recognisably survived the transition to Hollywood blockbuster. Gone are the woman and her grandchildren, the doodlebugs, the Spider Queen, the ant goblins and the Long-Lost Toy.

Instead, the plot of Blue Sky's film focusses on the teenaged MK (voice of Amanda Seyfried), who following the death of her mother has returned to the home of her estranged father, Professor Radcliffe Bomba (Jason Sudeikis), an eccentric scientist attempting to prove the existence of a race of tiny humanoids in the local forest. MK takes one look at his research, decides that he's a lunatic and she should scarper, only to get shrunken down and caught up in the ongoing conflict between the very real Leafmen, promoters of life and growth within the forest, led by the hard-headed Ronin (Colin Farrell), and the sinister forces of decomposition, the Boggans, led by the smarmy Mandrake (Christop Waltz). The forest's ruler, floral being Queen Tara (Beyoncé Knowles), has just selected the pod set to bloom into her equally benevolent successor - but should the pod fall into Mandrake's hands, it will become corrupted, and the seed of the forest's inevitable destruction.

Director Chris Wedge called Joyce's original story "wonderful" but also "quaint", and cited Star Wars as the narrative the film more closely resembled. Between this film and Pixar's Lightyear, I am starting to think that it's maybe not such a great sign when an animated feature (or any type of feature) claims that it's specifically out to replicate the scale and feeling of Star Wars. Star Wars was one of those real lightning-in-a-bottle successes that Hollywood has been trying to emulate since the film's release in 1977, and learned many times over that it can't be done on demand. Still, in Epic's case, there is a certain poetic charm in the comparison. Star Wars was all about looking out to the galaxies beyond and wondering what kinds of vast, sweeping stories they could accommodate. Epic is about looking inward, at our own world, and wondering what kinds of similarly vast, sweeping stories might be happening on a microscopic level beneath our feet. There is plenty of magic, it argues, in the blades of grass growing beside our own doorstep, a view that is not out of step with the final assertion of Joyce's book. The Star Wars influence broadly manifests in the re-envisioning of the premise as a larger-scale struggle between forces of good and evil, but is at its most salient during a bird-racing sequence that seems consciously designed as a homage to the infamous pod race in The Phantom Menace (1999). Otherwise, comparisons feel more apt with Bill Kroyer's traditionally animated film FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), another tale of a shrunken human accommodated by a race of tiny magical beings within a threatened forest.

Of the three Joyce feature adaptations, Epic is also notable for having the title that's furthest removed from its source material. The film's working title had been Leaf Men, and the decision to change it to Epic was apparently forced on the production by Fox's marketing department, to Wedge's chagrin (I do not blame him; Epic is a silly title). I can only assume that this was done in response to Disney's early-2010s love affair with vague, one-word titles designed to be snappy and to conceal any whiff of fairy tale quaintness (see Tangled, Brave, Frozen and the cancelled Gigantic).

 Where does Epic falter?

The translation from book to feature was an evidently uneasy one - there are five credited writers (including Joyce himself), a sign that it underwent multiple rewrites - with a finished production that feels like it's pulling in a myriad of directions. I can feel Blue Sky really wanting to grow and mature as a studio through this project. Wacky buddy comedies with talking animals were their bread and butter for most of their lifespan, so I did appreciate the attempt to craft a story with a noticeably more serious sense of adventure and mythology. Old habits die hard, however, and Epic isn't the radical break from the studio's formula that it might have been. The anthropomorphic minibeasts, though a part of Joyce's original story, muddle the world-building and mostly lower the tone (the non-anthropomorphic creatures, by contrast, are brought to life with flair and majesty, particularly a mouse that's able to be both adorable and wickedly threatening in the same sequence). The comic relief molluscs, Mub and Grub (Aziz Ansari, Chris O'Dowd), are very typical Blue Sky characters, heavily reminiscent of the possum duo from the Ice Age series, and so functionally useless as to suggest that they were worked in very late into the drafting process. The worst offender by far is an amphibian bookie voiced by Pitbull, whose screen presence proves mercifully minor. Every last detail about this character - his dialogue, his demeanor, his design, his wardrobe - marks him out as egregiously out of place within this world, and better suited to one of those "hip" and "modern" Beatrix Potter "adaptations" that weren't so far on the horizon.

Something else that I suspect was compromised between drafts are the environmental themes that go hand-in-hand with this type of setting, and feel frequently as though they're on the tip of the movie's tongue, only for it to pull back and play things entirely safe. The environmental themes in FernGully: The Last Rainforest are often criticised for being too broad and on the nose, but at the very least that film was entirely confident in what it intended to say via those themes. It's a cautionary story about humankind's sense of disconnect from the natural world, something that's challenged through the absorption of a man into a hidden world and his coming to see the consequences of his actions from a new perspective. As an eco-narrative, Epic seems hesitant to say anything much bolder than that the forest is good, and maybe mysterious. It's not that its environmental themes are more subtle than those of FernGully - more that they've been watered down to the point where they're barely present and, at times, barely coherent. We're told early on that, at its purest, the conflict between the Leafman and the Boggans constitutes a "balance", implying that both sides are playing a vital role in maintaining the forest, and that they might do well to look past their enmity and see their interactions as a form of as cooperation. This makes sense when we consider that decay is part of the process through which life is perpetuated. But it's belied through the depiction of one side as inherently good (identified as such in the opening narration) and the other as innately evil. The Star Wars model of a light side and a dark side seems curiously misapplied to the natural order.

But, enough carping. I've already established that Epic is no masterpiece, but I do think that it also has a lot going for it. The reason why it's slowly grown on me, particularly in the years since Blue Sky's closure, is that it is the picture that best exemplifies why I was so saddened to see them go. They were a studio that had the potential to grow into something much greater. They never quite got there, but you can see the glimmers of ambition and adroitness in this production. It's an incredibly good-looking film (there is a slight stiffness to some of the humanoid characters, but my god is that foliage to die for) and it takes itself and its world seriously whenever those molluscs and the (Pit)bullfrog aren't the focus. And for as little DNA from Joyce's book appears to survive in the final product, the hearts of the respective stories really aren't in such disparate places. There are themes from The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs that Epic carries over and recontextualises very ably into its revised setting.

 

What is The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs REALLY about?

Nestled in Joyce's quaint story of brave bugs and arboreal soldiers is an implicit message about death, loss and renewal. The woman's parents are presumably long-departed, but we see how they have continued to be an active part of her life through her relationship with her garden, the items that were tokens of her parents' devotion and the memories they created together. The Long-Lost Toy (aka the Metal Man), a gift from her father, represents a connection to childhood innocence that was not gone for good but lying dormant all this time, waiting to be rediscovered. The rosebush that was planted by her mother gives life and comfort but requires nurturing in return (much like Mother Nature) - when the woman falls ill and is unable to care for it, the bush shrivels, threatening the creatures that depend on it. The triumph of the doodlebugs and the Leaf Men over the Spider Queen is the triumph of hope and resilience against the forces of despair. The fate of the garden is linked to the fate of the woman, but at the end of the story we see her pass the baton to the incoming generation by telling her grandchildren of her parents' legacy, through the gifts they left behind and their stories of the Leaf Men who continue to watch over the garden. The inevitability of death is evoked in the woman's reflection that "Things may come and things may go," but the garden is upheld as a constant in which wonderful things may continue to happen. This ongoing cycle of parental (and grandparental) reassurance is intertwined with the broader cycle of life, with the natural world becoming a site in which youthful imagination and wonder may remain forever active. It is a connection to the past that sustains the present while holding the seeds for the future, and much like the memories of our departed loved ones, requires that we cherish and tend to it for it to remain fresh and vibrant.

 

And how much of this is in Epic?

At heart, Epic is not fundamentally a story about tiny people who live in the forest and battle pint-sized decay-spreading demons. All of that action adventure stuff is really window dressing to a story about a father and daughter re-establishing communication after years of silence and coming to terms with their mutual grief for the absent mother. It's the scenes in Bomba's abode, focusing on the interactions between the our two human participants, that I specifically find the most earnestly intriguing. Bomba is the film's strongest character, not least because his character design is the most distinctively Joyce-esque.

The initial interplay between MK and Bomba establishes that communication between both parties is totally defunct. MK does not take Bomba up on his offer of discussing her bereavement, insisting that she is working through it on her own terms. And Bomba in turn does not pay due attention to MK when she attempts to raise the possibility that she might do better to live independently. When the shrunken MK later returns to the house and attempts, in vain, to gain her father's attention, very little has effectively changed, with Bomba still failing to grasp what is right under his nose because his sights are focussed in the wrong direction. Bomba has dedicated years to a fruitless hunt for the legendary Leafmen, peering at the world by way of the assorted surveillance cameras and monitors he has installed around the area, revealing to him only leaves and hummingbirds (we discover that the Leafmen are well aware of this "stomper" on their trail, and have been purposely misdirecting him this whole time). There transpires to have been a hidden agenda to this seemingly psychotic preoccupation - Bomba later admits to MK that he became increasingly subsumed in his study of the Leafmen because he'd hoped that if he proved their existence it would bring her mother back to him (an end goal that was ultimately more delusional than his belief in the Leafmen). This obsession with a past that's already slipped him by has merely impeded his ability to take advantage of what is there for him in the present, allowing his relationship with his daughter to grow distant and stagnant in a way that's contrary to his desire to salvage the family he's thoroughly alienated. At one point, MK calls him out for being so fixated on taking advantage of every given opportunity to scout out the Leafmen that he misses an opportunity to be there for her as a father.

A prevalent theme of loss runs all throughout Epic, with most of the main characters grappling with some form of personal bereavement (this theme becomes all the more palpable with the knowledge that MK, or Mary Katherine, was named after Joyce's own daughter, who sadly passed away in 2010). Nod (Josh Hutcherson), the brash young leafman with eyes for MK, was taken under the wing of Ronin after the death of his biological father. Ronin suffers his own loss when Queen Tara, his long-running love interest, is fatally wounded protecting the pod (like MK, however, he chooses to keep his emotions bottled). Even the evil Boggans are not immune to feelings of grief. Adding a little dimension to Mandrake's villainy is that he is himself in mourning for his son and general Dagda (Blake Anderson), who is killed in an early confrontation with the Leafmen. Part of his motivation for seizing control of the pod is that he sees it as a way of regaining the heir that was taken from him. A very paternal figure, his quest becomes a darker echo of Bomba's objective of obtaining proof of the Leafmen in order to regain his lost life; both are scenarios in which destruction will invariably follow.

What MK and Bomba have in common is that both are alone in the world. Bomba has spent the last decade or so being shunned professionally and familially for devoting all of his time and energy to his crackpot research project, while MK has just lost her caregiver and emotional bedrock and been consigned to a man who is effectively a stranger to her. They spend the narrative in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a beautiful but remote wilderness that emphasises their sense of separation from anything beyond themselves, not least one another. There is, notably, only one other human character seen in the entire 102 minute runtime, that being the taxi driver (Judah Friedlander) who drops MK off at her new abode and promptly high tails it out of there. Bomba is absorbed in the Leafmen's domain in a figurative sense, lost in his aspirations of finding vindication and recovery within. MK's literal absorption, meanwhile, becomes a metaphor for her having to navigate through a big and overwhelming world in which she is seemingly all on her own, unable to make herself heard and at constant risk of being devoured whole. She finds solidarity in the Leafmen, who introduce her to their philosophy of "Many leaves, one tree", by which all things are connected and each individual becomes valuable in relation to a bigger picture. This is challenged by Mandrake, who proposes that the tree is ultimately indifferent to the fate of the individual leaf, pointing out that, "In the end, every leaf falls and dies alone". Mandrake gives a menacing voice to MK's feelings of parental abandonment, while the Leafmen, whose final display of unity is enough to decisively thwart the king of decay, become proxies for familial devotion, reaffirming the same sense of enduring parental security as they did in Joyce's book. The symbolism of nature as a force that nurtures and sustains us all is also discernible.

The rosebush and the Metal Man do not feature in the film, but there is a character who serves as a kind of equivalent to both, in the form of Ozzy, the three-legged, one-eyed pug who was the Bomba family's pet during their time of unity, and was left with the professor when MK and her mother moved out. Quite how long MK has spent apart from her father is not established, but it's clearly longer than the average pug's lifespan - on arriving at her father's home, MK is vocally surprised to be greeted by Ozzy and to discover that her childhood pet is still alive. The dog is a connection to a more innocent past, and an indication that her bond with her father is not as dead in the water as she assumes; Ozzy's battered physique reflects the damage inflicted on their relationship by their time apart, but his amazing vitality offers reassurance that their underlying love has ultimately endured. A photograph showing the young MK with her parents and Ozzy as a puppy features a couple of times in the story, echoing the photograph illustration seen at the end of Joyce's book. Ozzy's movements and actions often anticipate Bomba's, indicating that he functions as an extension of her father; he becomes an inadvertent threat to the shrunken MK right before Bomba unwittingly creates trouble for her, and he later saves MK from a Boggan, prefacing Bomba's coming to her aid at a crucial moment in the climax.

By the end of the film, MK and Bomba have succeeded in overcoming the hurdles that have prevented them from efficiently communicating. MK finds a way to let her father in on her location, by repositioning a thumb tack on his map of the forest, while Bomba is able to use the technology he's honed during his pursuit of the Leafmen to make MK intelligible to his ears. By the time MK has been restored to her proper size, she and her father are now firmly on the same page. The wilderness that once reflected their mutual isolation becomes a source of open affinity, with MK able to freely resume her dialogue with Nod via the surveillance monitors, mirroring the open communication she now enjoys with her father. Whether Bomba can get the wider scientific community on board with his latest findings now that he has his daughter to back him up is irrelevant - what matters is that the study of the Leafmen, a once contentious topic that kept them at odds, is now a means for them to grow and learn together. We leave with them racing out enthusiastically into the woods, eager to enhance their bond with their diminutive friends.

One criticism I do have of how Epic handles the theme of loss, compared to its source material, is that the deceased mother is never fleshed out in a way that causes her to feel like anything other than a plot device. We don't learn anything about her other than the most obvious details needed to kick the conflict into gear - ie: that she was close to MK and disapproved of her husband's research. The parents in The Leaf Men and The Brave Good Bugs were never seen in the flesh, but had a distinct presence via the components of the garden and the memories the woman had created therein; you felt as though you knew so much about their relationship and they ways in which they were still being felt just by glancing at that poignant illustration of the Metal Man and the rose in her hand. Epic would have benefited from giving us at least a little more flavour of who MK's mother was, perhaps through an item of her own that she'd left behind at the house. But as a story about mending broken bridges and finding your way back into a kinship thought long-lost, it really is quite lovely. That we may perceive in it an expression of Joyce's own desire to reconnect with the real Mary Katherine makes it all the more poignant, and genuine.

In addition, I really do love that entire sequence with the predatory mouse. It so neatly exploits the fact that, when you view a mouse or rat's head from the underside, it does kind of resemble a shark.