VILLAINS are loose again in the streets of Euro Disney, or rather a particular villain. He's called the Bowler Hat Guy. Like a comical Terminator he's come back from the future to make life difficult for a spikyhaired little boy-genius called Lewis - an Einstein in the making - who's about to change the world with his brilliant inventions.

Never mind thatMeet The Robinsons, the Disney cartoon in which Bowler Hat Guy and Lewis feature, doesn't even open until just before Easter. With Pixar's John Lasseter now in charge, following the merger of the two studios, Disney is cocky enough to act as if it already has a winner, after a decade-long string of disappointments.

So here's Bowler Hat Guy joining Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck to sign autographs in the Town Square of Main Street, USA, a slice of the Magic Kingdom transplanted to Euro Disney.

When 50-year-old Lasseter last year became the first filmmaker to run Disney's animation and theme park operations since Walt Disney died in 1966, he immediately met with Steve Anderson, the director of Meet The Robinsons, which was at that stage 85% animated.

Although he loved the story of the little orphan Lewis who builds a time machine in the hope of finding his mother, he felt it needed more emotion. Even more importantly, he wanted the Bowler Hat Guy to be more frightening. All his Pixar movies had scary villains, whether it was the thuggish grasshopper in A Bug's Life, the neighbourhood bully in Toy Story, or Randolph the sleazy snake in Monsters Inc.

"We had to redo about 60% of the picture, " producer Dorothy McKim tells me. "What John was doing was just supporting Steve, saying make the movie you really want to make but let's build on the emotion."

Steve Anderson conceived the Bowler Hat Guy character as a classic Disney villain, kind of like Captain Hook. "He's a complex personality, a full-grown man with the mentality of a child, " says Dick Zondag. "Steve wanted me to look at the childlike behaviour of PeeWee Herman and Mr Bean, but also the over-the-top look of the Riddler in Batman, and John Cleese from Monty Python, with his silly walk. On top of that he wanted the character to have a little of the sneaky lizardy quality of Randolph in Monsters Inc."

Lasseter helped bring out these nuances. "The changes suggested by John were not horrific, " says Zondag. "It's not unusual to change pictures. Filmmakers keep sculpting pictures until the last minute to make them better. When two huge powerhouses like Disney and Pixar come together under one roof you draw on that strength."

Yet Meet The Robinsons remains first-time director Anderson's picture. Its story of a small child looking for his lost mother - a recurring theme with Walt Disney, from Bambi onwards - is Anderson's own story.

"When I got the script, I immediately connected to the story because of my own situation of being adopted, " says 38-year-old Anderson. "It was a complete coincidence, of course. . . but to have that personal connection to the material really inspired me. I immediately understood this boy and I knew what was going on in his head. I handcuffed myself to the script and said this is mine, I'm going to do this movie, I've got to tell this story."

Unlike Lewis, Anderson was not brought up in an orphanage. He was adopted very young, growing up in Plano, Texas. "As a kid I was quite an introvert who liked to sit at his desk and draw cartoons in a sketch book, just as Lewis has notebooks full of inventions. My parents always told me we will support you if you want to find your birth parents. There was no question in my mind. That became my target. But then one day I woke and realised, 'Hey, I'm in my 20s now.' I'd forgotten about it. I didn't see it as something I needed any more. What was more important was the life I was creating for myself and the future I wanted to have. So that notion in Meet The Robinsons - that it's not the past but the future that matters - evolved out of my own feelings."

Lewis's search for a home propels him not into the past as he intended but to a future where he is embraced by a family of glorious eccentrics who delight in doing the unexpected. They positively celebrate failure, telling him never to be afraid to try to do anything. "It's a different kind of message to put out there, but there's truth to it. It says a lot about the Robinsons and speaks to the whole theme of the movie about keeping moving forward. Failure is a part of life no matter who you are or where you come from."

Quite apart from its un-American respect for failure - which it sees as the mother of invention - Meet The Robinsons is a radical departure from traditional family entertainment with its complex time-travel narrative.

Production designer Robh Ruppel argues that Hollywood keeps underestimating children. "Children are much brighter and visually sophisticated than we think they are, " he says. "They've been exposed to so much more than we were. If you do really strong stories with strong emotions they will respond to them."

Anderson had no problem with Pixar and John Lasseter's involvement. "What they offered were fresh eyes, " he says. "Animation takes so long to make it's important to get people in now and again who have not seen it, because your own eyes start to get very stale seeing the movie day in and day out. Pixar really responded to the story and the characters but gave us some ideas about how we could make the movie better."

If discussions got too tense, according to McKimm, "We'd break and all go down to Disneyland and go on the rides." Anderson, who has a seven-year-old son Jake, laughs when he hears this. "I think everybody in animation still has one foot in their childhood, he tells me. "I think that's the key for a lot of this movie. The Robinsons are very childlike in their sense of freedom and their curiosity. That's what I think makes the movie universal. It has themes that cross all generations and all cultures."

'Meet The Robinsons' opens nationwide on 30 March