Flak Magazine: Review of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, 6-20-01

Competition has always been a driving force behind increased quality. For Disney's feature-length animation department, this was once only hypothetical, but is quickly becoming a scary reality. Dreamworks's Prince of Egypt, though imperfect, was not a miss, but a warning shot in the war to innovate techniques and expand audiences. After prodding, Disney shot back with the visually invigorating Tarzan and the retooled-for-laughs The Emperor's New Groove. But they must have seen that Happy Meal-friendly sidekicks and Oscar-friendly, aging-white-pop-star songs were a drag upon both those movies. And so, stripped of those distractions, Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire hits theaters with a much more direct blow.

To say that Atlantis is a counter-strike to Dreamworks's Shrek is a misread on the part of many entertainment journalists. Shrek's fairy tale targets the audience of children and their parents that Disney has sown and nurtured since The Little Mermaid. Now, however, Disney has sidestepped that former audience in favor of adolescents and twentysomethings with Atlantis. Parents who take small children might be upset at the crying stemming from Atlantis' well-earned PG rating — by my count, 191 sailors die in dozens of explosions. This seriousness of tone, along with strikingly similar themes of exploration and betrayal, suggests the movie is a response to the sci-fi themes and polished look of Fox's Titan A.E.. True, Atlantis would have been in production for two to three years before Titan A.E. came out, but remember the Aesop's fable of Antz and A Bug's Life.

Atlantis' plot is a solid one, and to give away any more than the previews do would be a disservice. A young linguist/cartographer joins an underwater expedition to find the lost city, continuing the path his grandfather began. Along the way is a series of adventures, during wheich he befriends both the ragtag crew and, upon finding Atlantis, a beautiful native. However droll this may sound, by the climax, as the hero cries, "We're going to rescue the princess, we're going to save Atlantis, or we're going to die trying!" the words have the poignancy created by the rest of the film to carry the audience along with him.

The excellent voice casting is key to this emotional force. In its "making of" documentary for The Jungle Book, Disney admits discovering that recognizable star voices serve as a shortcut for creating recognizable characters — Phil Harris made Baloo sound immediately approachable yet wise, and King Louie might as well have been the real Louis Prima. Since then, animated movies have cast big stars not only for their name recognition but also to save precious character development time. Michael J. Fox, with his slightly cracking voice and tendency to over-inflect, instantly makes Atlantis's hero, Milo Thatch, the underdog of his Back to the Future days. Joining him, James Garner and Leonard Nimoy, with their characters of the expedition's captain and the Atlantian king, stand as pillars; wise with experience, yet dangerous. Don Novello and Jim Varney (in his final performance) make their new comic roles recall their old ones — respectively, Father Guido Sarducci and Ernest P. Worrell.

These characters deliver lines that impress with their literacy. The movie goes a little overboard with its repeated use of Plato's discussion of Atlantis, but makes up for it with the more obscure reference to the biblical leviathan. A wonderfully subtle cameo of coelacanths in the giant fish tank of the expedition's financier also showcases this intelligence. Most interesting, however, are the lines left unexplained to younger audiences. Not only are subtitles used for Atlantian speech, but the screenwriting is unafraid to let a line like "P. T. Barnum was right" pass without further explanation. These touches would be refreshing to see in any film, let alone an animated one.

And what an animated movie it is. As its ad campaign suggests, the movie's striking visuals carry it. The animation is stylized yet sweeping, and while this can be impressive to the point of distraction, the movie is clearly animated with intent to amaze. Mostly it works, with its scenes of swarming fireflies or spinning, glowing masks. But sometimes the innovative techniques detract from the narrative. Perhaps the over-the-shoulder flying shots pioneered for Tarzan will become so commonplace that they will blend in better with a story. Now, however, they just seem like the heir to the "I'm barreling straight at you while I outrun this explosion!" scene.

What's truly impressive, however, is the movie's art direction, which is a wonderful amalgamation of others' work. (In fact, the influence of other animation is too much for some to ignore.) Atlantis borrows most heavily from the "Dinotopia" books by James Gurney. The mechanized sea-creature vehicles and the layout of the discovered city both seem to directly refer to those works. The Leviathan moves predatorily through the water like its counterparts in The Matrix. Upon first introduction, the Atlantians skirt across the screen, knived and masked in similar fashion to Princess Mononoke. And the perfect final touch is the influence of Mike Mignola, artist and scribe of the "Hellboy" comics. As a production designer for the film, he supplied both his wonderful angular designs and his grasp of mythic iconography to the city and its inhabitants.

If indeed Atlantis is a response to Titan A.E., it certainly has returned a solid hit. The animation is just as good, if not better, for its spectacle. The art design pulls together great ideas from varied sources. The voice casting is dead-on. The writing is convincing and reaches for a literate (in both senses of the term) audience. If, as some have said, Atlantis is Disney's contention for the newly-added Academy Award for feature-length animation, it should soundly beat out the only pleasant Shrek. As they give their acceptance speech, however, they have a lot of thank yous to give other animators.

— Andy Ross (apross@earthlink.net)