Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
The El Capitan Theater on Hollywood Boulevard is right across the street from the world-famous Chinese and the development that is going to be the new home of the Academy Awards. It was rescued and restored by the Disney corporation, and it's their flagship theater. They charge more for a ticket, they have reserved VIP seating, they have a live organist before the films, and they even have exits that dump you directly into the Disney Store so you can stock up on all the plastic crap they have stamped with whatever licensed characters are hot this week.
Inside, it's a beautiful restoration job, particularly in the elaborate woodworking that lines the ceiling of the theater. When you sit in the upper balcony, there's no better view of a screen in town, and there's no finer sound system, either. On the other hand, the rows are prohibitively tight, one right on top of another, and considering I'm 6'2", it's like some form of medieval torture to sit through anything longer than 100 minutes in the theater.
Last night, I made a last minute decision with John Robie to take in the late show of ATLANTIS, currently playing an exclusive engagement at the El Capitan. I had no idea until after we'd choked down the $8 parking fee that the tickets for the film were $13 each for general admission or $22 each for the VIP tickets, which gave us preferred seating and allowed us to bypass the line. We opted for the "cheaper" tickets, timing it so that by the time we were finished with our purchase, the line had already been let in, and we were able to just turn and head right inside.
We ran into some friends in the lobby, then headed upstairs and claimed some great seats, just off-center, and settled in. The trailers were only for Disney product (typical live action Disney crap MAX KEEBLE'S BIG MOVE, the sensational MONSTERS, INC. trailer that premiered last week online, and the truly horrifying spectacle of Garry Marshall's THE PRINCESS DIARIES, a children's film being sold as "From the director of PRETTY WOMAN," a film that made every little girl in America realize that they, too, could be a whore for Prince Charming), which kept it brief, and after a lens flip from flat to glorious scope, the film began.
Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise have directed Disney features three times now, and each time up, they've managed to make films that are in some way marked by daring. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is their undisputed masterwork, and it stands as the most iconic and enduring of the modern-era animated "classics" from the company. It was as entertaining a musical as I've ever seen, live-action or otherwise, and it featured wonderful performance work by the animators and the voice talent. When they made HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, I think it's more of a grab bag, with some artistic highs that balance some unfortunately obvious decisions as well. There's a musical number in HUNCHBACK about temptation, peformed by the lead villain, that is startlingly adult, and there's some great material in the movie. The three stone gargoyle sidekicks really mar the film, though, and it seems to chicken out at key moments. Still, credit is due for the maturity that shines through in the best moments of their work.
Now, with ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE, Trousdale and Wise have dared to try for a PG-rated adventure film with no songs and no cute talking animals, and they've been successful to a degree. I don't think ATLANTIS is the powerhouse it strains to be, and the more I think about elements of it, the more I see missed opportunities, but what's good about it is very good. In a summer like this one, it stands out and deserves to be embraced by audiences hungry for solid commercial fare.
Tab Murphy gets screenplay credit here, and the only thing I've ever read by him was a version of STAR BLAZERS that was, I thought, generic bad ensemble cast of stereotypes SF goofiness. It should come, then, as no surprise that this screenplay is generic bad ensemble cast of stereotypes SF goofiness. If this were a live-action film, my interest in discussing it would pretty much end with the wafer-thin excuse for a plot in which there is no real threat or urgency or drama of any kind, and I would just give you a cursory run-down on the cast and be finished.
This is a Disney animated film, though, and what that means is visuals, lush and fantastic, and it's on visual strength alone that I would suggest seeing this film on the biggest screen possible with the best sound possible. It's a technical marvel, and there are many sights that are just jaw-dropping, lovely and memorable. The mix of the 2D characters and the 3D models is subtle and utilized well, and it ends up selling the environment in a far more convincing way than TARZAN ever did with its eye-popping-but-ridiculous Deep Canvass work.
Milo Thatch, the plucky lead of the piece (and he is indeed "plucky," with all the cornball attitude that word suggests, just like all Disney heroes seem to be) is given voice by Michael J. Fox and animated by John Pomeroy, who makes his Disney lead debut here after a long career of working with Don Bluth. He was the director of animation on the beloved SECRET OF NIMH, and there's an expressiveness to his work on Milo that is perfectly suited to the familiar sound of Fox's voice. Unfortunately, this movie almost feels like a Don Bluth film in terms of taking its time and showing off instead of sticking to the story, no matter how thin it is. There's an awful lot of shots of characters looking at something, jaws hanging open, amazed. That's our job as the audience, and when characters spend too much time being amazed, the film becomes too passive, which is what happens here.
It didn't help that after we walked out of the theater, we were all herded next door to a special Disney bunker of some sort that has been set up with aquariums and a Touch Tank (tended by a young man who gave off a strong "Lenny in OF MICE AND MEN" vibe) and a Lazer Tag maze complete with glow-in-the-dark paint and a smoke machine that was pumping out something that made my lungs twitch. The entire experience felt more like an EPCOT display than an evening out at the movies. There was a distinctly creepy Scientology vibe to the employees at the Capitan and the display next door, a blank-eyed corporate drone quality to every interaction. I felt like Disney had its hand in my pocket from the moment I got out of the car. Movies are pricey enough right now; this was more like being mugged.
I'd like to commend the design team on this film for the work they did on things like the Leviathan, star of the film's best sequence, and the people who designed the cultural look of Atlantis itself. The film definitely owes a good deal of its inspiration to earlier classics like Miyazaki's NAUSICAA and CASTLE IN THE SKY, but there's something about being set free on this sort of world that seems to have brought out the best in the animators who worked on this. The action sequences are exciting and well-designed, and the final conflict is not just satisfying, but actually involving. ATLANTIS is at its best when it just shuts up and does its job. It's at its worst when it is trying to introduce the unweildy supporting cast including Audrey Ramirez (voiced by Jacqueline Obradors), an annoyingly spunky girl mechanic who almost looks like a TINY TOONS escapee; Vincenzo Santorini (Don Novello in full-on Guido Sarducci mode), the demolitions guy; Helga Sinclair (Claudia Christian), the Nordic goddess uber-bitch bodyguard of Commander Lyle T. Rourke (James Garner), the man in charge of getting the team to Atlantis and back. Anyone who saw TITAN A.E. already knows the big "twist" when it comes to Rourke's character, and even if they don't, it's telegraphed early on. It's a shame, too... it's pretty much a direct rehash of the way Clayton became the bad guy in TARZAN... it's just convenient is all.
Cree Summer is Princess Kida, and her father is played by Leonard Nimoy, and they both do exactly what they're supposed to. It's actually kind of hard to make anything of roles like these that are all exposition. All the "personality" of the film seems to be poured into a few comic relief characters that barely work, if at all, and it's the three talking gargoyles all over again: if the film had been bold enough to lose the cheap gags and focus on the story at hand, chances are it would have been stronger and more entertaining. Instead, "The Mole" (voiced by Corey Burton) and "Cookie" (Jim Varney) are drawn as "wacky," constant joke-a-minute wallpaper that contributes nothing and actually defuses a few really good moments at just the wrong time. It's missteps like this that prove Disney incapable of real change. They are slaves to formula, and I wonder what their films would look like if they actually trusted their filmmakers to follow their instincts.
"Moriarty" out.
