Meet The Robinsons At 15: An Oral History Of Disney's Underrated Gem

Disney's post-Renaissance era was marked by frustration and internal strife: The films were less financially successful, the studio was suffering a creative identity crisis, morale had hit a new low, and questionable management was a constant issue. While DreamWorks and Pixar were on the rise, Walt Disney Animation was floundering. But even as the slump persisted, optimism bubbled under the surface in the form of Stephen Anderson's "Meet The Robinsons."

At the heart of "Meet The Robinsons," there's a very delicate balance between the past and the future. It's a fitting tension for a film that arrived just after the studio's golden era, but before its grand revival. As though blithely self-aware of its positioning, the movie begins with a logo that calls back to Steamboat Willie and ends with a powerful mantra from the man who started it all, Walt Disney. But the mantra in question warns the audience (and studio) away from dwelling in the past, calling us to stride towards the future with three simple words: Keep moving forward.

A Disney veteran who served as story supervisor for "Brother Bear" and "The Emperor's New Groove," Anderson chose "Meet The Robinsons" as his directorial debut, jumping at the chance to tell the story of Lewis, a young orphaned genius who makes a new friend, travels into the future, and defeats a villainous mustachioed man-child in a bowler hat. But most importantly, Lewis meets the surrogate family of his dreams — an imaginative, whimsical, weirdo bunch called the Robinsons. Space travel and singing frogs are their norm, a much preferable alternative to days in the quiet orphanage where he still hasn't been adopted. But jumping ahead to the future is no way to live your life. Before he wins his happy ending, Lewis must toil through his present. That's something he and the movie shared in common.

As the studio's second fully CGI-animated feature, "Meet The Robinsons" revolutionized how Disney rendered human characters and paved the way for more complex CG projects. But that doesn't mean the film had an easy journey to the big screen. It took over a decade before the draft first penned by William Joyce even gained traction. When at last production began, it was interrupted by one of the biggest turning points in Disney Animation's history: The acquisition of Pixar.

So how did the filmmakers cross the finish line? Below is the story of how "Meet The Robinsons" came to be, told 15 years after its release.

"A Day With Wilbur Robinson" went into development as a live-action feature. William Joyce was asked to pen the screenplay and landed on a story that closely resembled his book.

Borden: It started with a baseball flying over the fence. That's how Lewis meets Wilbur. He was playing baseball and he hit it over into the Robinson yard. He goes to get his baseball back and [ends up] on an adventure with Wilbur.

Joyce: They were bringing in things from the dinosaur era, but the crux of [the story] was not about time travel and adoption. It was about Lewis finding his way. It was also about how two friends helped each other find their place within their families. And it took place in one spectacular day.

But the project fell into "development hell." Joyce worked on various drafts, the script was passed around, and the live-action adaptation of "A Day With Wilbur Robinson" always felt on the verge of entering production, but never did. It even got to the point of courting big-name directors, including Peter Jackson and Francis Ford Coppola.

Joyce: I wanted George Miller or Steven Spielberg. I was aiming high. Miller hadn't done "Babe" yet, I don't believe. But god, "Thunder Dome" was so awesome and I was like, "This guy, he's a great stylist." That didn't get much traction. So then I started developing a film with Francis [Ford] Coppola, and I tried to get him interested in it. He was doing "Dracula" at the time and wanted to do "Pinocchio," so that's where his head was at. Then [future President of Buena Vista Motion Pictures Group] David Vogel came in, and Vogel tried to get Spielberg. It didn't happen.

That's when the Peter Jackson stuff was bandied about. He had just done "Heavenly Creatures." We [also] talked about Diane Keaton directing it, because she'd done a film called, "Unstrung Heroes," which is exquisite, and so seldom seen, and it just didn't succeed, and that kind of dashed that idea.

I was in Shreveport, Louisiana going back and forth, and new to the intrigues of Hollywood. You never know, until the papers get signed. There can be all the enthusiasm in the world. People will say such nice things — "Oh, he loved it" — but you don't know.

Borden: We took several stabs at a [live-action] feature film.

Joyce: I wrote 11 drafts. Maybe 12.

Borden: But the response that we got was, "Oh my God, how are we ever going to make this? It's too expensive. It's too big. Singing frogs? Spaceships?!"

Joyce: David Vogel was a mercurial head of Disney. And so I got the feeling after the Spielberg thing didn't pan out, it seemed to die. And in that way studios can be, when something dies for them, they just move on.

Borden: We tried and we tried and we tried for a few years. Then all went quiet.

Joyce: Things got quiet for a long time. And there was this exec at Disney named Leo Chu, who was a real fan of the project. I'm pretty sure that I'd gotten to know Leo, and I talked to him about how unhappy I was with just "Wilbur" not going anywhere. And he goes, "Well, let's try to bring it over here. Can you write me a letter explaining why you'd like to do it in animation so that I can show Tom [Schumacher, then President of Walt Disney Feature Animation]?" I did and it worked.

Leo and David Stainton, when he became Head of Animation, were really pushing it. And they were the guys who made it come together and start to actually become a film. I remember having this meeting ... they asked me to do a parade for Disney's California Adventure and I did the pitch for that with Michael Eisner [then CEO of The Walt Disney Company] and he said, "I'm very excited about Wilbur Robinson. I hear we're finally in production. How long has it been, like four years?" And I go, "11. It took 11 years."

Borden: It took on its own life. Once it fell into the animated world, Bill stepped up and did a lot of the designing. The script was developed a bit outside of my purview. It was like, "Oh, it's an animated film now. We'll produce it. We'll pay you. We're going to make a good movie." Disney is very proprietary about their in-house producing [and] at the time, I wasn't an in-house Disney producer. The longer it went on, the less involved I was. I was a producer getting scripts, but I wasn't that active.

Anderson: When I was handed that original script, they said, "If you're interested in doing this, we want to do something different than what we usually do with our movies. We want you to build a story team and an editorial team. You're going to storyboard the entire movie, all the way through. We'll put it up on an animatic, we'll screen it, and then we'll decide if we want to make it or not."

Ruppel: It was a thing [Disney] did at the time called the "Bake-Off," where everyone presents the things [that are] up next for production.

Mike Belzer (animation supervisor): That tended to be the launch to get people energized about a film, see what kind of pull it has to get talent to come over and say, "Yeah, I really want to work on this."

Anderson: There were two other movies that also screened their development screenings that same week. One was called "Gnomeo and Juliet," made by a different group of people [than the eventual 2011 version]. The other one was such a cool project that many people are sorry never saw the light of day. It was called "Fraidy Cat."

It was like a whodunit mystery with animals, with a cat as the main character. It was an homage to Alfred Hitchcock movies. So the cat was, let's say, like a Jimmy Stewart character in "Vertigo." It was very paranoid, witnessed a murder, and was trying to unspool what actually had happened. And it was done in a very Hitchcock-style noir-ish presentation in the boards. It would've been really great. I wish it could have been made, but unfortunately, it didn't make it.

Those other movies were not the whole movie. I think "Gnomeo" was the first act. I think "Fraidy Cat" was act one and act two. But I think that's only because we had been working a little bit longer on our reels.

Ruppel: Steve was the only one that had all three acts up.

Anderson: It was actually quite an anomaly at the time because the studio would storyboard things piecemeal, and you would just put parts of it on an animatic. Sometimes you'd start production before you had the whole thing storyboarded. So this was a really exciting opportunity.

The whole story team thought it was fantastic, because as a team, as storytellers, we [could] make our full statement. Say what we want to say all the way to the end. It was almost like "Hey, if they don't make it, we made the movie anyways." Because we got to tell the complete story.

Ruppel: It was rare, at that time, to have all three acts in ... All the other shows that presented had a first act and maybe a second act. They were still finding their legs. "Robinsons" was fully formed and ready to run.

Anderson: It was probably one of the most satisfying creative experiences I've had in my life, building that first version of the movie, because it was just nothing but pure, positive creativity.

During this development period, the bowler hat became a sentient henchman, Tom Selleck got a meta shoutout, Lewis accidentally turned his exhausted roommate Goob into a supervillain, and many of the film's most memorable gags were born.

Anderson: There's an illustration in the original book where the Robinsons are having dinner and they are shooting meatballs out of little cannons. So we had a dinner sequence in the film and it was storyboarded by an artist named Nathan Greno, who ended up directing "Tangled." We talked through how it needed to progress the story but then the specifics were just left up to Nathan. So he went away and just storyboarded a bunch of ideas. And we knew we wanted to pull some of the elements from the book into it. So the meatball thing was one of them, and he turned it into this ninja-movie type sequence.

Of the three movies screened, "A Day With Wilbur Robinson" was chosen to move forward and officially began production in 2004, with its release scheduled for 2006. But it was not smooth sailing ahead. There were unexpected financial constraints to grapple with, and for some folks on the team, making a CGI-animated movie meant exploring brand new territory.

Anderson: Unbeknownst to us, we were already in a financial box before we got the green light. Whatever movie was going to go forward out of those screenings had to fit in a certain financial box and when we were boarding the movie, we were just trying to make the best movie we could. So we weren't trying to think about complexity, or how much something would cost, or how difficult it would be to produce. We were just thinking about the best movie. So when it came time to figure out how to make it, we realized, "Oh boy, we may have overshot the box that we're supposed to be in."

So in terms of financial issues and technology, we had to start figuring out, "Okay, how can we be smart? How can we be economical? How can we make this movie for a smart price?"

Adam Dykstra (animator): By the time the animation crew came in, they had already gotten pretty far with the story. We had all three acts boarded and everything up on the screen, at least in rough form.

Anderson: So we would do a new storyboard screening probably every three to four months, implementing notes and trying to make them better. And then began the process of building the sets, modeling the characters, trying to figure out the design philosophy — all that good stuff to get the production up on its feet.

Ruppel: So first you focus on getting all the designs ready for modeling. What does the classroom look like? What does the school auditorium look like? What does the memory machine look like? Once that's designed, it goes into modeling [and then] surfacing, which is texture, paint, and color. And then of course, the characters have to be modeled and rigged. They have to put a skeleton in them, so when they raise their arm, the shoulder crinkles appropriately. [Then] layout: Where's the character in the relationship to the camera? Do they cross screen left? Does she pick up something? Does the camera follow her? Do we cut to another scene? Once that's all set, we go into final layout and then lighting.

All the final stuff gets cut into the reels. So you always have screenings where you might have 50% rough animation, 50% storyboard. And then at some point it's 50% layout, 25% final layout, 10% color. So more and more of the shots get finished and come online. They get cut into the reel, to the point where you are starting to see the film evolve.

Anderson: There was a big learning curve for me, because my background was in traditional animation. So I had to, as quickly as possible, learn as much as possible about this new world of computer animation, so that we could bring that to life.

Belzer: "Chicken Little" was the first completely CG animated film [from Disney].

Dykstra: They trained a bunch of us to go from traditional animation to CG and we basically cut our teeth on "Chicken Little." And the next project up for CG was "Meet the Robinsons." That's how I got involved.

They decided to take a big group of us and they put us in a building. It was roughly about three days a week for six months in Glendale. We trained over there and then we would work on tests and assignments and then show them. And at the end of that training period, they would decide who was making the transition successfully. And some people who didn't might go into another division of animation, but generally speaking, most people were able to adapt and make it through the process.

Belzer: There was some fear involved, and understandably so.

Joyce: For people who had been in 2D, it was tough to make the transition. A quantum shift like that doesn't happen very often. Think about it: In the history of film, there was silent film and there was sound. There was black and white and then there was color. Those are the only things I can think of that were this pivotal. [With] computer animation, you can make an entire film with an entirely different set of tools. And I don't know when we'll ever see something shift like that again. Who would've thought, in 1950, there'd be this thing that you could make up a movie with?

Belzer: I always equate it to, when people say "Is 2D gone" or "Is 2D dead"? It's like, well, no, it's just a different art form. You don't throw out all the oil paintings because watercolor came along. There's certain principles that are in line with one another, but it's a very different process. And there's a number of individuals who came over from the 2D world to work in that realm, and they did very well. Others struggled.

Dykstra: The best description as an animator, it's like trying to draw with a 20-foot pencil at the beginning. You spend your whole career having the shortest distance from your brain to the paper and when you suddenly switch to CG, you've got a gazillion buttons to push and all these technical things to remember to accomplish the same task.

Anderson: My concern was that, as a director coming in and not really knowing anything about the technology, that I would be looked upon as, oh, this guy doesn't know what's doing. But everybody was so excited to help me learn what I needed to know to direct the project, and actually very respectful of the fact that I didn't know everything, but I wanted to learn. [They] were very willing teachers to me, and it was a great education in that new form of how to make animation.

Belzer: There's some directors you just remember. Steve was one of the best. I really loved working with Steve. He gave credit where credit was due and he let the people do their job. And that's often not the case with many directors that I've worked with over the years, where they try to stranglehold, "No, I want it done this way." Steve was genuinely curious. He'd listen and he'd accept ideas, but it was very clear, too, he was the director.

Anderson: I'm going to guess it was maybe early 2006 that the title changed. It could have been late 2005, but the feeling was that maybe "A Day With Wilbur Robinson" was a little bit of a mouthful. We wanted to try to find something a little sharper.

We brainstormed a lot of titles. The one that I really liked was "Inventing Lewis," which I think was maybe a little too artsy-fartsy for the studio. Funny enough, I remember there was talk of calling it "Tomorrowland." Because we had the Tomorrowland/Todayland reference in there, and it's all about the future, and inspired by Walt Disney's vision of a positive future. But we really wanted to have the name Robinson in the title somehow — that was very important to everybody. So then "Meet the Robinsons" became the title.

Settling on a title was hardly the biggest development of 2006. This was also the year of Disney acquiring Pixar and shaking up management by putting then Pixar chief creative officer John Lasseter and president Ed Catmull in charge of Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Joyce: Every regime change is going to be tough. [Steve] started out with Schumacher, then came Stainton, and then Lasseter. Three captains. Three admirals. Three warlords.

Anderson: John and Pixar became part of Disney in early 2006, so we were probably two thirds of the way through the movie. I love their movies, and had huge respect and admiration for what they did. So I was very intimidated, and already pretty exhausted, having gone through about three years of not only the production, but also what I feel was, frankly, some not very solid leadership at Disney animation, prior to John coming in. Leadership that had their priorities a little out of wack [and] was more reactive to what other people and other movies were doing.

Austin: We were pumping out movies that weren't doing half as well as Pixar movies, and I think most of the problem was that Disney was still adamant that they were making movies the same way as they'd always made them, which was the classic way of making movies. But making a digital movie is a different approach to a classic movie. You have to approach it differently. It isn't the same medium, so the process is slightly different.

It took them a while to adjust from basically saying, "Don't tell us how to make movies, we're Disney!" to learning that, "Oh, there is another way to make CG movies, and it's this way." And Pixar had made that evolutionary step, but Disney hadn't. Pixar was on the fast track, looking at cinematography and making digital movies more like live-action movies, and Disney was still locked-off cameras.

Anderson: When John and the Pixar folks came in, I feel like I didn't quite have enough energy to really stand on my own two feet and kind of say, "Here's what we want to do," and push back a bit on some of the notes that I didn't always agree with.

Disney was at the bottom of the heap at the time. So there wasn't a lot of respect for what we were doing. I didn't feel like I had any creative leg to stand on, to talk to Pixar on their own level. So I think there were some things that I went [along] with that made the movie different — but maybe not better — that I wouldn't have done.

Belzer: Often when you have a film that's being created, you'll have periodic screenings and you'll get notes. I remember there was one on a different film [where] a very high-ranking person — it's hard to get a higher up ranking individual than this at Disney — was making calls to add a certain character or make changes based on just a whim of a feeling of what he might want to do.

A lot of thought has gone into why these characters are this way, their character arcs, how they're responding to one and another. It's a very complex puzzle that's being created. So arbitrarily throwing something out is pretty disheartening. But when you have a high-ranking person tell you something, often it has to be done.

But now, flash forward, here we are with Disney and John. He is the high-ranking official, but he is an animator, primarily. He came from being an animator and he knows film. He's a wonderful director. So getting notes from John was very different.

Anderson: It was an interesting situation because on the one hand, having John coming in to lead the studio was so much better for the creative process because he's actually a filmmaker. We knew we were going to be led by really good creative as opposed to the business first or marketing first of the previous leadership.

However, it was tough because we'd already had a lot of struggles getting the movie to that point in early 2006, when the leadership changed. Ultimately, I felt like a lot of us were just trying to protect the movie from ... I don't know what the right words are, but notes that were less about making it a better movie and notes that were more about, "How do we make it more commercial?"

I understand that there is a reality to the world and that Disney is a large company and that we do have to make money to keep making movies. But I think everybody's feeling was, "If you make the best possible movie, you will find the audience, you will get the people, you will get the box office." But sometimes it felt like it was a little bit backward, putting the cart before the horse a bit.

Over the course of its many years in production, "Robinsons" also put its crew to work in the recording booth. And as the film entered its final stages, the cast was finalized.

Jen Rudin (casting director): So many of the in-house Disney Animation folks ended up staying in the movie. I think at one point, I recorded an art teacher or something because that's what happens when you're experimenting. Instead of having to hire an actor every time you want to hear something, you just grab people from the building and you're like, "Hey, can you go downstairs and record a couple of lines?"

Anderson: We call [them] scratch voices. So we did all of our own scratch, and it was very nice. Everybody really liked what I'd done as Bowler Hat Guy, but we did start talking with casting about potential candidates for the character — professional actors. But then soon after that, the studio said, "You know what, we decided we think you should stay doing the voice, because it has meshed with the character [in] everybody's minds." I was shocked. And then as it turns out, pretty much everybody on the story team does have a voice or two in the movie.

Rudin: Sometimes you get comfortable with a voice that you're like, "I can't even picture anybody else doing it." And then sometimes you're like, "That was great. Thank you so much for volunteering and helping us get the storyboards up. And now it's time to bring in Laurie Metcalf, a professional actor to voice the role."

Anderson: We got people like Laurie Metcalf, Angela Bassett, Harland Williams, Tom Kenny, and Ethan Sandler. This great cast of performers who really understood more of a theatrical animation voice type of acting. People with stage experience or stand-up comedy backgrounds who know how to appeal to an audience, which I personally think is better for animation than a lot of superstar actors. While many of them are great at what they do, I find that for animation, it's better to get people that have more of a stage background.

Harland Williams (voice of Carl): I think there was quite a few people up for the role of Carl. I like to improvise a lot during my auditions and just kind of let it fly. I think they really responded to that.

Anderson: Harland fit that bill perfectly. I had directed on a really silly cartoon show many years prior to "Meet the Robinsons" at a different studio, and he had done some voices for that show. His ability to improvise and come up with just off-the-wall, crazy things out of left field was so impressive that I thought, "Okay. I really like the notion of having that kind of mind in this movie."

And he was great. I mean, we would do it as written and then I would point to a particular line and say, "Can you just play around with that? Is there something else besides what we wrote on the page?" And he would just make stuff up. Some of it unusable. Funny, nonetheless. I have all the recordings and I used to listen to him in the car on the way home, on my commute, and just crack up and be so entertained by his ad-libs that we couldn't use.

I find improvisation to be really great in animation because there's just so much more that you can discover with the characters. It lets the actor own the character and inhabit the character when they're improvising in that character's skin.

Williams: It's helpful in everything really, just to be able to kind of fly by the seat of your pants. If your instincts are good, it can help. And if you're just being an attention hog, it can hurt. When you improv, you try and do it strategically, so that it's not overwhelming, but it's hopefully adding something that's usable. [In] most of my movies, I've been able to drop some good golden nuggets in. It's nice to have the freedom to do it.

Anderson: The philosophy we all had with casting the movie just in general was, "Can we find people that are really great performers?" And we tended to focus more on people that can do improv. People that have worked on the stage, in theater or stand-up comedy, that kind of thing. People that really understand how to play big and how to create broad characters.

For a while, because we had so many smaller roles in the movie, we thought, "What if we got one male and one female actor to come in and do all of the parts? All of the male Robinsons and all of the female Robinsons?" We started talking with a couple of female actors to do that and it didn't work out, which was totally fine. But, there are folks like Ethan Sandler in the film, who was a product of that. He does five or six characters in the movie, because he's extremely versatile and great with improvisation.

For the main roles of Lewis and Wilbur, we have to rewind back to the early storyboard screenings.

Anderson: The producer at the time very wisely said, "Since the main characters in this movie are two kids, we probably shouldn't have 30-year-old men do the voices. So what if we do actually hire some kids to come in to do scratch?"

Rudin: I understand it's much easier to hire a legal 18-year-old to voice a child. But to me, there's just nothing as authentic as a real 11-year-old boy playing an 11-year-old boy versus a grown woman playing that role.

Anderson: We didn't cast them. They weren't hired to do the roles. They were just hired to do the early versions. I think that's one of the hugest successes of that first screening, because [the kids] have to carry the movie, and boy did they ever. They really brought those characters to life, [so] we ended up offering the role to those two kids. So the two leads were set.

Anderson: It's so lucky with all of the music folks that we were able to get unique and original music in the film. There were so many animated movies doing needle-drop-type things like "Shrek" and the Smash Mouth song. Even [at] Disney, "Chicken Little" had R.E.M in it.

There were several discussions around our movie. We had to demo a few versions of certain sequences with pop songs in them. One in particular that I remember was when Lewis and Wilbur go to the future, there was the Green Day song, "Welcome to Paradise," which was a hundred percent [because] it has the phrase "welcome to paradise." But the rest of it's not a really positive song so I was like, "No, no, no." Those were the kind of hoops we had to jump through with leadership before John came in. Luckily those didn't stick. Nothing against the Green Day song, because it's a great song, but I don't think that's the right marriage of music and moment.

The "Meet The Robinsons" soundtrack ended up including four original songs written for the film, performed by Rufus Wainwright, Jamie Cullum, and Rob Thomas.

Anderson: We had a temp song, "I Can See Clearly Now," that was in everybody's head for years as the end song. And then came our music executive, Chris Montan. I forget how Rob Thomas came up but we went, we met with him, and he was really great. We talked about him doing the end song and then he said, "I'm playing around with something. Let me finish it up and send it to you guys and see if you think it would work." And of course, when we heard it ... the fact that it starts with "Let it go," which is, essentially the theme of the movie: Keep moving forward! He hadn't even seen the movie at that point. So, as far as I remember, none of that was intentionally put together, but it's one of those things that just was right.

As soon as I heard it, I thought, "Yeah, that's the song." It's a lovely, sweet, emotional song. His demo was just him on a piano, so it was even more melancholy versus the produced version that ended up in the movie. But beautiful nonetheless. So we replaced, "I Can See Clearly Now" with Rob's demo for the next screening, and people didn't know how to process it because "I Can See Clearly Now" is this very upbeat, peppy kind of positive. Rob Thomas' song was positive, but the sound of it was so much more deep, so people thought it was a beautiful song, but they were like, "Oh, but I don't know, does that work?" But I was like, "Yeah, trust us. It'll work." And of course, once it was all produced and put together, it was perfect.

Dykstra: I think every movie means different things to different people. ["Meet The Robinsons"] had an edge to it that caught my attention personally, and that is the whole mantra of "Keep moving forward." And of course, that quote came from Disney himself. I think that's such an important part of life. That quote at the end of the movie just really hit home for me. It's so easy to live in the past and not think about the present or the future, and it's very important to think about where you are right now. I think that Steve really brought that home.

Anderson: Having "Keep moving forward" in the movie came very early on in our story development. It came from myself and the original writer, his name is John Bernstein. He was talking about a friend of his who was adopted, and who had actually found his birth parents. And then I was talking about my own experience, knowing very early that I was adopted and as a kid being very passionate about one day finding out who my birth parents are. And then one day realizing, "You know what? I've exceeded the age where I could find out who they are."

My parents always said, "When you're 18, you're going to be old enough to go get your birth records and find who they are." And then cut to, years later, I'm 25. I realized, "Oh, I could have been doing that. I could have been searching for them all these years, but actually forgot about it because I was more focused on the family that I do have; on the family that I'm now creating with my wife and son, and the future that I'm building in animation at Disney." That became more important to me than looking backward. And so all of those things combined to create that notion of finding hope in life by looking to the future and not dwelling on the past. And then we were able to then distill that down into that motto, "Keep moving forward."

That was what Wilbur was driving into Lewis' head through the whole movie. And that was Wilbur's father's motto. And then even several years later, I was reading a book of quotes by Walt Disney. And I found that "keep moving forward" quote, and people said, "Oh, you should put that at the end of the movie, because that's amazing that Walt Disney actually said those three words."

So much of the DNA of "Meet the Robinsons" is rooted in that futurism, that optimistic look at how the world can be a better place — like Walt Disney had through Tomorrowland in the theme parks, and Epcot in Florida. I was always inspired by those things as a kid, and I really wanted to bring that feeling to the future of Robinson's. So then once we put that on the end, it brought every thing together and made it all come full circle.