Hacker Cinema
Meet the Robinsons
2007 · Film · 95 min
Directed by Stephen J. Anderson
AnimationComedyFamilyScience FictionAdventure
Lewis, a brilliant young inventor, is keen on creating a time machine to find his mother, who abandoned him in an orphanage. Things take a turn when he meets Wilbur Robinson and his family.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Staggered how? They have averaged a movie a year for the last 40 years. The Disney live action movies have almost nothing to do with the release schedule of Disney Animation movies, nor have they impacted how many get made. They are completely different studios.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films
Their 3D movies in order are Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Tangled, (Pooh), Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya, Encanto, Strange Worlds. That’s 15 movies in 17 years, and Princess and the Frog makes 16.
Bolt, Tangled, Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana was an excellent run. (Disney acquired Pixar during production of Meet the Robinsons, and about 60% of the movie was remade, every movie since was produced by Pixar descendants.)
And Tangled is better than Frozen, even if it didn’t have the zeitgeist. (Tangled is the highest rated of any movie I listed on Letterboxd, followed by Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia, so I’m not unique in that opinion. Not sure what the Letterboxd community has against Bolt.) Outside of Chicken Little, there’s really not a bad movie on that list (I haven’t seen Strange World yet.)
If anything, acquiring Pixar doubled their animation output.
> I don't know what you think a Disney story is, but all of Disney's major works are based on existing folk stories and other works already in the public domain.
False. Here's some of their animated features based on copyrighted works (as best as I can tell):
Dumbo
Bambi
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Treasure Planet (partially based on the 1987 TV miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space)
Meet the Robinsons
The Princess and the Frog
Big Hero 6
(I'm using the list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films, and picking out the “based on” or ”inspired by” credits that look recent enough.)
Speaking as a former game reviewer, I think Disney's inability to enter the game market with quantifiable success is that they're still being reactionary.
Games are stories, regardless of how you look at them. They're either stories you're told or stories you tell. League of Legends is a story you tell so it's the originality of the game that makes it. Starcraft is a story you're told, and truth be told in the intervening years between the original and its modern iteration the gameplay is stale and generic it's been cloned a dozen times, but the modern iterations are still fun an playable.
So I think you're right. They just don't play games.
You see a change in Disney's movies when John Lasseter takes over. He took over prior to Meet the Robinsons release, and at his behest they scrapped over 60% of the movie. It was the first thing Disney had put out in a long time that was actually a good story, and it did it by shirking conventions. He scrapped what would become Bolt entirely. From then on everything just got better.
Why? Because Lasseter loves movies, he loves stories.
Square Enix manages to use Disney characters, but they're doing it in a massively unconventional way. So the characters themselves aren't an issue, it's the way they're used in games.
Disney puts out movie tie ins and the only game that was decently received was Epic Mickey and instead of solving its flaws and building on it they tanked it with #2 by falling into sequel mania.
Honestly Disney needs to find out what story it wants to tell and tell it through a game. They've got enough franchises under their belt that they could find a story that people want to hear - they've been doing it all the time with movies lately.
Disney isn't going to be original in game play. It's too big, it's too slow. The only way it can be successful is to tell a good story, and it just doesn't try to put even it's B-material into its games.
Starcraft 2 continued a great story. People don't play through a dozen near identical levels for nothing. They do it because it unlocks more story. It worked for Brood War. It worked for Mass Effect.
Fallout 1 and 2 are still the best games in the entire franchise because of how tight their story was. To highlight the power of a good story, TES fans still frequently call Morrowind the best game in the series. Most of the talk over Skyrim is good graphics and gameplay mechanics - lots of which were inherited from mods from Morrowind.
A couple of things that can lay some of the conjecture to rest.
1. Films are 24fps. 48fps is exotic and extremely rare.
2. Some stereo is planned to be done with conversion, some films are a hybrid between conversion and actual renders for each eye. If this movie is stereo it was very likely done by rendering each eye, as that has been the approach for their stereo films after Meet The Robinsons.
3. Films are still rendered at 2k. 4k is still extremely rare.
4. Typical frame times are probably between 2 to 10 hours on 8 cores. Many passes go into a typical frame, but usually only a couple are heavy (many hours).
5. Amazon and other clusters actually are being used and investigated by CG companies to be used during peak times (the last 6-8 weeks of a show). Profitability is not something that comes down to rendering however. It is an expense, but the vast majority of the money goes to pay the hundreds of people who work at the studio.
6. Hardware is not stored. It is on the farm and switched on, or decommissioned.
I have a soft spot for "Meet the Robinsons".
I went looking for the exact Walt Disney quote at the end of the movie, and discovered "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walt_Disney which includes quite a few quotes that can relate to entrepreneurship.
Hi I'm 18. I read this article like two months ago. It struck me as important but I moved on. I was thinking about the phrase that stuck with me "Do something hard" and came back and have reread it 3-4 times over the last month.
I also recently watched a Disney movie called "Meet the Robinsons". It has a great moral and at the end there is an amazing quote:
"Around Here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths." -Walt Disney
I was so struck by this quote that I printed it out and it now hangs above my desk. I don't think I've fully internalized these two quotes, this one idea. I'm working at it and its greatly affected already how I do work at work. How I view where my life is going and how I view the activity that I'm currently working on (speaking of which I need to stop reading HN and get back to work).
Even if this article doesn't fully sink in I think it can start the cogs running in the minds of our youth. I strongly encourage all of us to push high schoolers to read this article. There is a chance it could make a difference.
The movie "Meet the Robinsons" makes a point to children that we make the most progress when we are free to fail. Thanks for making the same point for grownups.