A young boy looking for his mother stumbles upon a time traveler who takes him to the future, where he meets the time traveler's family and faces adversity from a malicious man in a bowler hat. Lewis is a brilliant young orphan, obsessed with the idea of finding his birth mother who abandoned him. He tries building a machine to scan his own memory to find details that can help him find her, but all he does is keep his roommate Goob awake and cause him to fall asleep from fatigue during the most important Little League game of his life. Like many of Lewis' inventions, the memory scanner doesn't work at his Science Fair when he needs it to. He also meets Wilbur Robinson, who says he has traveled back in time to find a man in a bowler hat who stole a time machine from him-- coincidentally, we see the man in a bowler hat steal what remains of Lewis' broken memory scanner. Wilbur takes Lewis to the future to prove that he's not a liar, but when they begin bickering in the time machine, they crash it, trapping Lewis in the future. Wilbur can't fix the time machine without Lewis' help, so he tries to keep Lewis hidden, to no avail, as Lewis becomes almost like part of the Robinson family. Lewis eventually learns that Wilbur's dad is a future version, making Wilbur his son, making Lewis angry at him. Lewis then discovers the real identity of the man in the bowler hat-- it's a grown up Goob, furious at Lewis for ruining such an important moment in his life, so with the help of the bowler hat (who is actually a robot named Doris!), they go into the past with Lewis' memory scanner and they change the future, causing it to be overrun with clones of Doris, taking over the world. Lewis is finally able to fix things by confronting Doris, who he finds out is something he goes on to invent, and he vows to never invent Doris, which then causes the hat and its clones to cease to exist. Lewis meets his future self, who convinces him to fix the past. He goes back to before the Science Fair, helps Goob stay awake during his game, he fixes what was wrong at the science fair, and he is adopted by his new parents: the Robinsons.
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Best part of story, including ending:
It's a fine diversion-- not one of the best animated Disney films ever, and certainly its time travel is goofy, but the characters are likable enough and there are some funny parts.
Best scene in story:
The future Goob sends a T-Rex to go capture Lewis, but the T-Rex sadly is unable to, due to the fact that his arms are so tiny.
Opinion about the main character:
Lewis is a plucky young genius in the vein of so many other cartoon leading characters. He's written very sympathetically, given problems plenty of us can understand.
