A Warm and Fuzzy Future World

“I made compilation sheets of reference that included images of eye-popping Technicolor, old popular mechanics magazines, old movies,” says Joyce, who worked closely on the production as executive producer. Besides writing and illustrating a half-dozen children’s books, Joyce created Playhouse Disney’s Rolie Polie Olie, PBS’s George Shrinks and had been a character designer at Pixar before Meet the Robinsons started production. He also produced and designed characters for Fox’s film Robots. Throughout the process, Joyce would submit drawings, art samples and story ideas from his home in Louisiana to the staff in Burbank. “Early on, there were story points in the movie that appeared too purposefully to be straight out of the book,” he says. “And I said, ‘The book’s a lark; the movie should be a lark. I appreciate that you want to stay so perfectly true to things, but don’t let it weigh things down and get in the way. Just stay true to the spirit of it.’ And they did.”  

The story process for the film was unconventional for Anderson, who had started at Disney in 1995 with Tarzan and worked as head of story for Brother Bear and Emperor’s New Groove. “When I was handed the script in ’02,” says Anderson, “our head of development said that they wanted to try a different experiment with this movie. We assembled a story crew and an editorial crew and built reels for this movie, boarding the entire movie all the way through from A to Z. Then we were going to screen the reels internally and decide whether or not we’re going to make the movie. Amazingly enough, this was very unheard of at the studio.”