A Day With Wilbur Robinson

A Day With Wilbur Robinson is sort of The Day The Earth Stood Still meets Leave it to Beaver, together with the book The Great Gatsby and things that happened to me when I was a kid. …

I wrote and illustrated the book “A DAY WITH WILBUR ROBINSON” in 1990. In many ways “Robinsons” is my most personal and favorite book. It combines elements of my own childhood in Shreveport, the Science Fiction movies and cartoons I loved and T.V. shows like “Leave it to Beaver”, “Lost in Space” and the matter of fact absurdity of “Green Acres”.

Disney Live Action optioned it several months before its publication and so the wild ride began. 

William Joyce

When I read William Joyce’s A Day With Wilbur Robinson when it was released in 1990 I had no idea it would eventually become a movie, but it suggested something cinematic to me, something alive in time. It was what I’d imagined as a child, my life would be like in New York. Everything came together, the screwball comedy sensibility, the fox terrier, the sweetly domestic experiments with science in the form of curiously sensible philosophical inventions. But mostly there was the music I’d heard from five or six years old and grew to love: Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, particularly.

In a children’s book William Joyce had written:

Suddenly the faint familiar strains of “Potato Head Blues” came wafting from the house.

“That’s it!” yelled Wilbur. “It’s Friday — Grandfather’s in his lab working with his dancing frog band!”

We rushed to the lab. Sure enough, there was Grandfather with his friends Mr. Ellington and Mr. Armstrong….

The next morning the whole family was out front waving good-bye and singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” just like they always do.

The music was just there in the book: not introduced opportunistically, as it would be on the soundtrack of a movie, underlining (or creating) a mood. The music was a part of the story, as if it were on the page.

I read an interview with William Joyce that said that his book was optioned by Disney BEFORE A Day With Wilbur Robinson was released, and the first director attached to and then removed from the project, well before he directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, was Peter Jackson. The movie is a Disney animation, pitched towards the future, a Jetson’s like treatment that doesn’t grab me, even in the interests of curiosity, to see how the fox terrier character is developed. I had something darker and more retro in mind, something from the dawn of talking pictures, the sophisticated strangeness of a Preston Sturges movie. And in this movie Mrs. Robinson would be reading books that are partly electronic / partly organic with the music and the words just there, together, the electronic components introduced as unselfconsicously as a bibliography or a page marker.

My version of the “futuristic” A Day With Wilbur Robinson would substitute the sister  Blanche, who seems like she might have been a dancer with a Duke Ellington style orchestra, with an intelligently absurd and charming older brother who is a wild rock musician, and be played, in a cameo-as-himself by Benny Hotel, who inhabits and whose music describes, a world equally as inventive and compelling as Wilbur Robinson’s, and who has a family equally as vast and dear and smart and engaging.

The soundtrack for A Day With Wilbur Robinson has no jazz on it. There are a great many songs by Rufus Wainright.