The movie Meet the Robinsons came out in 2007, and it has been my favorite animated film since I saw it in theatres with my parents.
It was a cute Disney movie, no doubt, but I really appreciated the deeper meaning, even at the time, when it probably shouldn't have resonated with me as much as it did. Of course, now, I understand why mom cried at the end, and I have a deeper appreciation for it.
The film features Lewis, an orphaned boy who spends his time creating scientific inventions; the beginning finds Lewis attempting to create a memory scanner, in the hopes that he will be able to use it to remember, and subsequently locate, his birth mom, who left him at an orphanage when he was a baby.
The story takes a turn when Lewis meets Wilbur Robinson, a boy from the future — who, ultimately, we learn, is Lewis's son. The two embark on an incredible adventure to the future. Central to the story, however, is Lewis learning to love Wilbur's family — his future family.
He had spent years trying to remember and learn the whereabouts of his birth mother, but when he met the Robinson's, the film's lesson — keep moving forward — prevailed.
At the end of the film, and now back in his own time, an orphaned boy with big aspirations and a loving family to look forward to, Lewis waits for his future to unfold before his eyes.
So, what does a film about foresight have to do with retrospect? I guess I'd say Meet the Robinsons teaches the keep moving forward lesson in reverse. For Lewis, he knows exactly what the future will hold as he enters it, and so he must let go of his past, the lost memory of his birth mother, in order to move forward.
Unfortunately, in a world without time travel, this lesson is taught to us forwards... or backward, depending on how you think about it. We must keep moving forward, even though all we have to go on is what has already happened.
We won't meet our Wilbur Robinson until he actually exists, and so in order for us to move forward, we need to be happy with the now, with what we find there, and with how far we've come.
Since we can't look foward, we have no choice but to look back, and we must be accepting of what we find ... either that, or we must let it go ... so long as we are able to be okay with it.
However, I confess I propose this lesson as a hypocrite, because since all we can really do is dwell on past events and nostalgia, rather than look forward to a guaranteed bright future, it is sometimes difficult to be okay with what we find.
I'm not really sure if it is possible to accept everything, but I guess I'd say we need to accept enough, in order to move on.
The present, however abstract and difficult to analyze in the moment, allows us to bridge the gap between past and future, and I believe a big part of that is being okay with the past.
And perhaps, just maybe, if we're able to move on, we will reach better things, which will change the way we view our retrospect, if only to allow us to think more fondly on some of our harder memories.
