Charming movie about learning from failure doesn't quite succeed

The digital 3-D animated movie is overloaded with lessons for the kids.
By ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL
"Meet the Robinsons" embraces failure.
This wildly eccentric scatterbrained sci-fi farce positions itself firmly alongside the great Walt Disney's own willingness to accept failure in the pursuit of excellence. And then it fails itself.
But it's brimming with ambition and charm. A movie reworked and joked-up after Pixar's John Lasseter took over Disney Animation, it's about an inventor-orphan named Lewis who fails repeatedly, but who is taken to the future to help fix the past. It's a way of giving Lewis hope when he has none.
"I have no future. No one wants me."
Wilbur Robinson takes Lewis forward in time to convince him that he's telling the truth about time travel. While there, the orphan kid meets Wilbur's loony family. The Addams Family has nothing on the Robinsons. Adam West voices one cracked uncle, a futuristic pizza-deliverer. Enough said.
The villain, a dopey beanpole out of a Tim Burton movie, literally twirls his mustache. He wants to claim the kid's latest science-fair failure as his own, and since he has also traveled from the future (sleek, shiny time-ships) we know he knows something potentially important and grand about Lewis.
A cute helper robot (voiced by Harland Williams), a demonic robotic bowler hat and a T.Rex have parts to play. Singing, swinging, ring-a-ding-dinging frogs croon.
Jumps off the screen
And if you see this in digital 3-D -- the only way to see it -- stuff pops off the screen at you. This is a lovely use of that technology -- startling depth and detail and colors.
Disney used real kids to voice the 12- and 13-and-unders here, and the one voicing Goob, Lewis' orphan-friend (Matthew Josten), is Charlie Brown Christmas precious.
But the plot is slapdash and derivative. To compensate, they overloaded this adaptation of the book "A Day With Wilbur Robinson" with lessons to pass on to kids. It's as if the animation team knew they had taken a swing, and missed, but they wanted children -- and maybe their Disney bosses -- to know aiming high and falling short is OK.
"Keep moving forward."
If you know your Mouse history, you know where that Robinson family motto comes from. The brand-spanking new Disney Animation logo (a snippet of "Steamboat Willie") trumpets that connection to tradition, too.
Three-D screenings of the movie will be preceded by a lovely looking but joke-starved 1953 Donald Duck/Chip'n Dale 3-D short cartoon, "Working for Peanuts." (Check newspaper ads to find a local theater showing it in 3-D.)
The 3-D "experiment" didn't take off in the '50s, and it may just be a fad now. But if "Robinsons" is how they're going to fail (and "The Wild" and "Chicken Little"), something a lot grander than "Cars" will come from this Disney-Pixar marriage, someday soon.