Titan A.E.
Movie: Titan A.E. (2000)
Watched with: Angelo
There was a brief period right around the turn of (this) century where all the second tier cartoon studios, and even Disney sometimes, tried really hard to make rousing Lucas/Speilburg style adventure stories as cartoons.
Some of these were pretty great (Iron Giant) some were mediocre (Treasure Planet) and some were sort of bad (poor Atlantis: The Lost Empire).
But whether they were good or not, they were at least artistically interesting.
The visuals were imaginative, the stories were simply but engaging (though they could've been better), and it was an all around fun experience.
The problem was, these movies didn't make any money.
Treasure Planet was Disney's biggest loss ever on a movie, and poor Titan A.E. here actually caused Fox Animation to flat-out close down.
While this was going on, Pixar was still making cute but intelligent CGI movies, which were pretty good. The problem was that all the studios that copied Pixar replaced "intelligent" with "filled with pop culture references" so you'd get a movie about Sharks or whatever voiced by celebrities and eventually that degenerated into, like, Doogal.
Cartoons have always been for kids, but now (with the occasional exception like The Incredibles), they're for little kids.
Financially, this makes sense, but it's kind of sad.
Titan A.E. isn't a great film, or even a great scifi film, or even really a great animated film, but it's darn neat.
The characters are cooly drawn and the locations are awesome (though you can occasionally see where they cut corners; sometimes the backgrounds are all CGI and sometimes they look like an old episode of Scooby-Doo...not that that's a bad thing). The story is engaging (two of the three writers were Firefly's Joss Whedon and The Tick creator Ben Edlund), and overall, it just makes me kind of sad that it could never happen again.
Unfortunately, Titan commits the Dreamworks sin and its cast is populated with arbitrary celebrities. Matt Damon pulls me right out of the space opera and right into Good Will's Harvard or at best a scene from Dogma, though Nathan Lane is funny as a menacing alien, cause you don't think of Nathan Lane as menacing but he pulls it off.
Also, I found the movie's attempt to make the bad guy ambiguous kind of silly. Once it's revealed that he's bad, his personality completely changes. It'd be a lot more compelling if he seemed like he was being true to himself while still running in opposition to the protagonist.
But then, it is a cartoon about spaceships, and one can't be too picky.
Watched with: Angelo
There was a brief period right around the turn of (this) century where all the second tier cartoon studios, and even Disney sometimes, tried really hard to make rousing Lucas/Speilburg style adventure stories as cartoons.
Some of these were pretty great (Iron Giant) some were mediocre (Treasure Planet) and some were sort of bad (poor Atlantis: The Lost Empire).
But whether they were good or not, they were at least artistically interesting.
The visuals were imaginative, the stories were simply but engaging (though they could've been better), and it was an all around fun experience.
The problem was, these movies didn't make any money.
Treasure Planet was Disney's biggest loss ever on a movie, and poor Titan A.E. here actually caused Fox Animation to flat-out close down.
While this was going on, Pixar was still making cute but intelligent CGI movies, which were pretty good. The problem was that all the studios that copied Pixar replaced "intelligent" with "filled with pop culture references" so you'd get a movie about Sharks or whatever voiced by celebrities and eventually that degenerated into, like, Doogal.
Cartoons have always been for kids, but now (with the occasional exception like The Incredibles), they're for little kids.
Financially, this makes sense, but it's kind of sad.
Titan A.E. isn't a great film, or even a great scifi film, or even really a great animated film, but it's darn neat.
The characters are cooly drawn and the locations are awesome (though you can occasionally see where they cut corners; sometimes the backgrounds are all CGI and sometimes they look like an old episode of Scooby-Doo...not that that's a bad thing). The story is engaging (two of the three writers were Firefly's Joss Whedon and The Tick creator Ben Edlund), and overall, it just makes me kind of sad that it could never happen again.
Unfortunately, Titan commits the Dreamworks sin and its cast is populated with arbitrary celebrities. Matt Damon pulls me right out of the space opera and right into Good Will's Harvard or at best a scene from Dogma, though Nathan Lane is funny as a menacing alien, cause you don't think of Nathan Lane as menacing but he pulls it off.
Also, I found the movie's attempt to make the bad guy ambiguous kind of silly. Once it's revealed that he's bad, his personality completely changes. It'd be a lot more compelling if he seemed like he was being true to himself while still running in opposition to the protagonist.
But then, it is a cartoon about spaceships, and one can't be too picky.
posted by Kane Lynch at
1:33 AM
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