Case 5: Treasure Planet vs. Titan A.E.

            So you like cartoons right?  Of course you do, you’re friends with me.  Remember when the medium almost died?  Twas the mid 2000s, you probably don’t remember it that way but it’s sort of obvious in retrospect if you’re a freak like I am who does nothing but read TV Tropes and Homestuck, giggle to himself, and write treatments for fantasy stories labeled “porn” so nobody suspects that you like fantasy.  Anyways, there was a severe lack of traditionally animated material in theaters at the time.  You might attribute that trend to the rise of Pixar, which had just begun its long, almost untarnished streak of success.  Yes, you think, after that Disney started making mostly CG films until The Princess and the Frog, years later.  And after the success of Shrek, Dreamworks has made nothing but CG films.  But a new medium does not simply replace an old one, unless people begin to think of it as inherently superior.  People still read books even though Kindles exist for example, because the print medium has many advantages over virtual reading (it’s not stupid, for example). 

            So what’s the reason for the decline in traditional animation?  Disney was just coming off an entire decade of critical successes, like they’d just rolled all the best numbers on their collectible bloodstone D20s.  All of them.  Every movie they’d made between The Little Mermaid and Tarzan was an epic win.  But quick!  Tell me what movie comes after Tarzan in the Disney Animated Canon?  You can’t can you?  You pitiful child: #38 Fantasia 2000, #39 Dinosaur, #40 The Emperor’s New Groove, #41 Atlantis: The Lost Empire, #42 Lilo and Stitch, and #43 Treasure Planet.  Now, there’s nothing wrong with any of those movies, I certainly like them, but damn it’s like they were made by a completely different company.  Can you really fit New Groove into the same canon as Beauty and the Beast?  If, in some alternate universe they had in fact been made by two distinct companies, and you wrote a fanfiction crossover about those characters, people would accuse you of smoking Toasty, the crazy alternate universe version of crack, or something.  It’s no wonder you don’t remember them quite as well as The Lion King or some such. 

            You see, those six movies were released within three years of each other.  When Disney essentially saved animation with the advent of The Little Mermaid in ’89, they released one film a year until 1999, when they released both Tarzan and Fantasia 2000, and then they released two films a year until ‘03.  The reason that Tarzan is considered the last film of the Renaissance of animation is because Jane was smokin’ hot I mean because the next few films were radical departures in style or quality, the later at least in terms of ticket sales.  Disney had the same thoughts that you just did, that traditional animation was simply losing out to CG, despite the critical failure of Dinosaur.  Like, they rolled all ones on their collectible fluorite D8s, and one of them broke in half.  So, Disney decided to risk it all on one last attempt at their classic style, in the traditional animation method.  They pulled out their lucky collectible lignum vitae D12 that they’d had blessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, had Jane blow on it sensually, closed their eyes, and made a saving throw.  Now name the next three movies after Treasure Planet.  Let me guess; something, something, and Chicken Little.  The die had somehow manifested a thirteenth side, bearing a 0.  That was beyond a critical failure.  That was taking more damage than if you’d opted not to cast the die at all.  So it was that Disney renounced traditional animation.

            But why did Treasure Planet do so badly?  It’s a good movie I swear!  And so may some of you.  Let me tell you why—but first let me tell you about Don Bluth.  He may well be the least fortunate man in movies, seeing as his work is consistently mistaken for Disney.  To be fair, he got his start working on Sleeping Beauty and quit Disney during Pete’s Magic Dragon to start his own studio (thank you TV Tropes).  He made about a dozen films, most of which are classics.  The Secret of NIMH.  An American Tail.  The Land Before Time.  Anastasia (well I liked it!).  All Dogs Go To Heaven.  Though it’s alright to mistake that last one for a Disney movie seeing as the little girl basically IS Snow White.  But I digress.  In the later parts of his career, Bluth’s movies started becoming increasingly less successful, in my opinion due to lesser writing and poorly incorporated CG.  The last full length movie he ever made was called Titan A.E.  I remember seeing a trailer for it in a movie theater.  Once.  The movie was a space opera concerning the destruction of the planet Earth and the human race’s quest to find a new home, during which they come to be regarded as the homeless of the universe and treated with as much respect. 

            This movie came out at about the same time as Treasure Planet.  It’s ironic (or not??) that they’re both space movies because what happened reminds me of this picture of two galaxies that got too close and started cannibalizing each other.  The production of both films was plagued by the existence of the other film, and pressure to be the better of the two, and much cloak and dagger spying bullshit went on, whereby both films ended up copying each other’s plot points and characterizations.  They’re both very different movies, and yet—TV Tropes says it best:

“Fatherless boy tries to solve his daddy issues by going on a space voyage in search of a long-lost treasure, hidden on a Big Dumb Object, with a less-than-stellar crew of galactic Petting Zoo People, one of whom is a Parental Substitute, but proves to be The Mole, using a starmap only he can read. The villain redeems himself in a Take My Hand moment while trying to activate/deactivate the forgotten Doomsday Device. Both films were deliberately marketed to single-parent Gen-X kids, with an uplifting Grunge soundtrack. One is about Pirates in a Steam Punk Alternate Universe, based on a classic novel. The other is about Space Pirates After the End, inspired by Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Both films got an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.” 

Don’t click any of that.  Mind you, the goals of the two movies are wildly disparate.  Treasure Planet is of course about finding a planet full of treasure.  Titan is about a ragtag bunch of misfits trying to find a lost spaceship named the Titan which is supposedly the last hope for humanity after the destruction of Earth.  Its purpose is to actually build an entirely new planet in an incredible scene where it absorbs all of the surrounding material, a magnificent planetary ring of ice! 

            Now, to the part of the essay that you slogged through several pages for: the penis jokes.  By which I mean the actual analysis, as opposed to useless background information.  I bet you know who my favorite troll is!

            Let’s talk first about the setting.  I’m going to say right off the bat that of the two movies, Treasure Planet has the better setting.  The quote up there says “steam punk”, but I’m sure that it’s for lack of a better term.  There’s nothing really like what Treasure Planet’s setting is, at least of all the things I’ve seen.  Maybe something out of a JRPG has come close, but there’s not really a word for that either due to the game industry’s equating gameplay with genre.  But that’s a tangent.  What I mean is that there’s nothing that really looks like its steam powered in the movie, except perhaps the Montressor police robots.  What’s more, everything’s based on Enlightenment era aesthetics and science, rather than Victorian era.  People wear colorful tail coats, tricorne hats, and ruffled cuffs.  The guns look like old flintlock pistols, but they have a cylinder like a revolver that carries laser charges instead of bullets.  The spaceships are actual ships, proud old galleons and pirate ships, which sail on “luminiferous aether”, based on a late 18^th century idea that light required a medium to travel through, explaining why the spaceships are exposed to empty space: it’s not empty.  Essentially, the setting is a seamless mishmash of classical aesthetics and culture with futuristic technology that really just makes your eyes pop.  Even the most vocal critics of the movie all agree that it looks fantastic.

            Titan A.E. had a good setting too though.  It really tried to convey the whole “used future” aesthetic started with Star Wars.  There is definitely something of Star Wars in the look of the movie; it looks like a world in which people actually lived.  That said, it’s just not as iconic.  In a really good space opera, you always remember what the ship looks like.  The X-Wing, The Millennium Falcon, The Enterprise, Serenity, the galleys from Treasure Planet.  With this movie, I can remember what the ship was called, The Valkyrie, but it just looks so generic that I don’t even have a general idea of what it looks like.  Boxy?  Maybe.  They had some really creative designs in other areas though.  Planet Sesharrim is a beautiful red world covered in water, with huge “hydrogen trees” that look like organic hot air balloons.  It’s inhabited by my favorite part of the movie, the Gaoul, the parasitic aliens from Stargate SG1—I mean a race of flying humanoids.  They’re dark red and scary looking amalgamations of bat, pterosaur, and vulture, they communicate in grunts and gestures, and they’re totally friendly and badass.  They’re only in the movie for a little bit though, which is a shame.  The next best looking scene in the film is when Cale, our protagonist, is allowed to fly the Valkyrie through a big beautiful nebula while huge flying aliens called angels bask in the ship’s wake.  It’s just damn beautiful, but I think it went on too long.  All the same, A.E. loses because of the poorly integrated CG.  As cool as the design of that planet was, the execution failed.

            Speaking of the aliens, I’d say A.E. had the more creative designs while TP had the better looking ones.  The aliens in A.E. felt more, well, alien,  they looked weird and had all these strange fleshy bits, they ate strange foods that the humans couldn’t quite stomach, but a lot of them were just ugly and sort of forgettable, except for the crewmen and the Gaoul.  The creatures in TP were largely animal folk; our captain was a cat lady, the doctor was a dog, Silver was a cougar (?), etc.  They had human names and human mannerisms, and the only ones that didn’t were basically side characters, with the exception of the monstrous crewman that terrorizes Jim throughout the voyage.  This has led me to believe that the main characters aren’t really aliens but new species created by biotechnology experiments, but it’s not really relevant.  In contrast, the alieness of the aliens in A.E. is played up to really drive home the homelessness of the human population.  There is an amazing scene, written by Joss Whedon no less, where the crew tries to rescue one of their members from an alien jail by disguising themselves as alien slavers, but the guard pokes all kinds of holes in the charade about their posture and mannerisms, concluding that they’re up to no good, and the crew has to resort to violence.  But the ones in TP looked good, so nyeh.  A thought occurs: there is an alien in TP that communicates in farts.  No matter how good or deep a movie is, if it’s marketed to children, there will be a single flatulence joke that will be the only part the kids remember.  I still recall the chorus of my nieces and nephews proclaiming their butts to contain machine guns after Astro Boy, but that’s another tale.

            Holy shit we’re almost on the fifth page now.  Most of you have gotten bored and wandered off by now so let’s take a break (loosens tie).  What’d you do this Christmas?  Tradition at my house says we have a big potluck and exchange gifts at midnight.  I stayed up until two to watch my Rankin/Bass Christmas DVDs, my present to myself.  I woke up real late on Christmas day and started reading Game of Thrones, which had been languishing in a shopping bag for over a year.  Fuck, what am I even talking about?

            I suppose we should get on with the characters.  Both films, as has been made obvious, feature the dynamic between a mechanically inclined fatherless punk with a heart of gold and a gruff crewman.  We’ll start with the mechanically inclined punks, our protagonists.  Jim Hawkins is the main dude in TP.  He’s a sullen little shit with a bad haircut that learns to open up around other people by the end of the movie.  He certainly acts more disillusioned that Cale, the protagonist of A.E., who is a snarky jerk.  Of course, Cale is about twenty, and has had to deal with disparaging aliens his whole life, and had to develop a quick wit to survive, while Jim is in his early teens and lives in a comfortable home with his mother and can therefore afford to be antisocial.  That said, I think I like Jim just a bit more than the other kid.  He seems more sincere and therefore a bit more likable, but I wouldn’t say that there’s anything very special about either of them, except that Cale is totally a blonde version of Dmitri from Anastasia, on whom my sister has a crush. Tangents!

            Now for the fatherly mentor crewman!  Silver, the obese cyborg cook, serves this role for Jim, while Korso, captain of the Valkyrie, is this for Cale.  Once again, TP wins out.  I try to be impartial when I do these jiggers, but Treasure Planet is clearly the superior film.  Not that A.E. is bad at all, except for those visuals I keep mentioning.  Let’s get back to what I was saying though.  It’s clear from the beginning that Silver is going to betray the crew, TP being an adaptation of Treasure Island and therefore everyone should know the damn story by now, so Silver’s friendship and mentoring of Jim is reluctant, but the two of them clearly need each other.  Since his motivation is to steal the treasure when they finally find it, he’s very much not there to make friends.  Korso’s friendship seems more genuine at first since we don’t know that he’s planning to betray Cale, but it becomes quite obvious after the somewhat tacked on seeming scene where he loudly declares his intentions to sell out Cale to his superiors in a private conversation.  By the way, his superiors are the aliens that blew up earth, so fuck this guy.  The essential difference between the two characters is that Silver is basically a good man (cat?) with badness in him while Korso is a bad man with goodness in him.  I think Korso’s betrayal is more painful because it was completely unexpected (at least by me), and his return at the end of the film to the side of good was more emotionally fulfilling, because he actually had to make a moral choice, humanity or himself.  Silver chose Jim over the treasure at the climax, but that was because he legitimately valued their friendship, and the also the planet was exploding.  All that said, Silver is just the better character.

            I suppose it’s to the credit of the film-makers that the casts of characters don’t line up that perfectly, so I’ll just briefly go over the supporting characters, although their places in the film don’t exactly correspond.  Let’s see…Preed!  He’s a jackass alien pervert and part of the crew of the Valkyrie.  At the end of the film, he actually betrays Korso so he can get a bigger cut.  The Korso snaps his neck like it’s not even a thing.  Badass.  It’s established throughout the film that Preed’s a bloodthirsty monster with delusions of eloquence, and probably even the dumbest of viewers guessed that he’d be the one to betray the crew—making it all the more surprising that he and Korso are in cahoots.  Anyways, he kinda sorta looks like an evil version of—

            Dr. Delbert Doppler!  The good doctor is a kind soul with a somewhat funny voice.  He’s technically the leader of the expedition to find Treasure Planet, since it was his idea and he funded the thing, but he does very little leading.  He’s also a crack shot with a flintlaser as I suddenly decided to call them.  Best scene: he shoots his gun and it looks like it missed, but it actually hit some loose junk, causing it to fall on the pursuing pirates, knocking them into space!  Captain Amelia asks if he was actually aiming for it and he assures us that he was.  Crack.  Shot.  That said, he also speaks the fart language (he’s not very good at it though), losing him about twenty cool points.  He’s not really as important to the plot as Preed was, though he’s definitely more likable.  And he hooks up with the captain later, so that’s a plus.  Speaking of badass female crewmen:

            Akima!  Cale’s love interest and fellow human.  I’ma just go ahead and say that she is a very attractive Asian woman.  She’s also much more optimistic than Cale despite having been worse off before joining the crew (mind you, no human had it easy without the Earth, there are just degrees of suckiness), and is just as proficient with machinery as he is, and a better fighter.  Seriously I don’t think Cale even picks up a weapon the whole movie, despite what the trailers may show.  The two have a sort of slap-slap-kiss relationship, though Cale is the tsundere.  Fuck, the people who don’t read lots of TV Tropes and manga didn’t understand that at all.  Best scene: Cale takes her to a healer after she’s injured by Korso, and the lady tells someone to bring her some whiskey.  Cale asks if it’s for the wound and she says it’s for him; he looks like it’s about to pass out!  D’aww, they really do like each other.

            Captain Amelia!  She’s more of a badass than Akima.  She’s the captain of her own ship!  Which she parkours all over using her badass cat-lady powers!  And her crew is composed of horrible monsters!  You just know that the only reason they had the gall to mutiny against Amelia is because they were being led by an even bigger badass: Silver.  I suppose all this makes her a better role model for the little girls than Akima too, but I don’t actually care about those sorts of things.  That said, I think Akima is actually the better character of the two; she just does more things by the end of the film.  Amelia also does not get a shower scene, so ha.

            Oh yeah, Amelia also has babies with Doppler.  Which is weird, considering he’s a dog and she’s a cat.

            Fuck, it’s almost the end of the article and I still haven’t established a running gag!  I think the previous one didn’t have a running gag either.  Shit.  Maybe I’ll just use my meta-running gag of mentioning something and describing it, then simply concluding with “I liked that one”.  Nah, I want a proper running gag.  Let’s see.  Um, I did make a bunch of dice metaphors earlier, but I think I used them all too early for it to count.  Oh I know!  You know Jane from Tarzan?  She’s hot.  Two birds, one stone.  Actually, now I think of it, I did point out a lot of the times I went off on a tangent…um, of which this is one?  Shit just got meta yo.

            Oh wait, damn it, I’m getting ready to finish and there’s still the matter of the “bigger bad” as TV Tropes would have you say; the villain behind the villain.  The whole plot of Titan is set off by the Drej, a race of energy beings.  They felt threatened by humanity’s development, because Humanity Is Special and Most Writers Are Human, so they blew up the Earth.  Now, they hunt the surviving humans, but more importantly they hunt the Titan, because they actually know what it can do.  They’re actually a pretty cool concept, with their eerie blue spaceships and their insectoid, blue energy bodies, but unfortunately they are completely made up of that poorly executed CG in nearly every shot.  The creators of the film have said that this was done intentionally to make them look more wrong and out of place, as if they came from some other dimension, but I’m not buying it, guy, you’re just trying to make up for subpar effects.  Anyway, they do finally find the Titan thanks to Korso’s betrayal, but Cale and Akima rig the thing to absorb their energy to power the planet building scene of awesomeness!  That’s pretty badass, and it destroyed the—one Drej ship?  Was…that all of them?  ‘Cause, if not, the rest of them probably know where planet Bob is (dammit Cale), and unless only that specific ship was armed with the planet smashing weapon, then you’re out of a planet again bud!

            Captain Flint, the legendary pirate whose treasure is up for grabs in TP, is not quite really in the same category, but he is the cause of the story, and is really badass to boot, so I’ll mention him here.  He built (or found apparently, according to the official art book of all things) some very advanced technology, such as a portal generator, which allowed him to strike anywhere in the galaxy at any time, making him the most powerful and wealthy pirate ever.  It also led to an artificial goddamned planet just to store all of his bling!  Dude was a pimp.  He also rigged the thing to melt down and explode in a spectacular fashion in case anyone ever found it, destroying the wealth of entire civilizations with it, presumably as a final fuck you to the universe that did not allow such a badass to live forever.  He’s basically the opposite of Gold Roger from One Piece if you think about it.

            I don’t think I do conclusions any more.  I guess this is the really meta episode?  Also the one where I say “meta” most often, meta.  Anyways, watch both of these movies, but you’ll prefer Treasure Planet.  Maybe if you do, Don Bluth will make things again?  We can only hope….

I’m gonna break the mold and not have this article end on a stinger.  Oh wait….