Fridae

The standards for computer animated visuals just keep going up and up, even though the scripts may stay the same. Walt Disney's Meet The Robinsons will amaze you with its candy-coloured eye-popping 3-D images, but the story itself seems like a rehash of the Back to the Future movies. Indeed, it seems as if only Pixar (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles) knows how to create a truly fresh and original cartoon � everyone else just steals ideas from other movies...

Daniel Hansen and Jordan Fry both lend their voices to the central character of Lewis, a 12-year-old science genius who can invent anything from scratch using everyday objects. When his time machine is stolen by a skinny villain called Bowler Hat Guy, Lewis has to travel to the future to stop the world from turning into one big industrial mess.

The images, as mentioned, are dizzyingly beautiful. The score by Danny Elfman (who scored most of Tim Burton's film) is reliably good. But the story and the jokes reek of stale ideas borrowed from a hodgepodge of sci-fi movies and cartoons. A must-see for animation fans, a "maybe" for everyone else.