An audience must be engaged in a
willing suspension of disbelief for a film to work. We really have to believe that the
Millennium Falcon can make the jump to light speed, that Roy Hobbs can swat a home run
that hits the scoreboard, that David Spade could date a supermodel. This is especially
true of animated features, where literally everything the audience sees is invented. The
best animated films build a new world that audiences readily accept and gladly join –
ten minutes into either of the Toy
Story movies, and it seems perfectly logical that Woody and Buzz can talk. Titan
A.E. fails to convincingly create such a world - it's a mismatched assortment of
components that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Titan A.E.'s co-director Don Bluth is a former Disney animator
who formed his own animation studio in the early 1980s and produced and directed films
like The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and The Land Before Time. While moderate commercial
successes, Bluth Studios films were always viewed as second echelon compared to their
Disney counterparts, both in terms of story line and animation quality. In 1996 Bluth and
Gary Goldman joined 20th Century Fox to head up the new Fox Animation Studios.
Their first production for Fox was Anastasia, which faithfully followed the Disney animated
musical template and served notice that there was now another major player on the field.
Titan A.E. is the second effort from Fox Animation, and co-directors Bluth and Goldman
have gone awry.
One problem with the film is its several different animation looks and
styles. It uses state-of-the-art CGI extensively for both scenery and spacecraft, and for
the most part looks impressively realistic. But CGI has its limitations - computers have a
far easier time representing hard, flat, and consistent surfaces than random ones. Toys
and spacecraft are easier for CGI to draw than human figures, hair or skin. It's only with
Disney's recent release Dinosaur
that a studio has used CGI to do a convincing job of representing complex images, like
individual hairs in a lemur's fur. To overcome this limitation, Titan A.E. uses
traditional hand drawn and inked 2-D cel animation for all its characters. And it is
unfortunately crude animation at that - the characters look like something from a Saturday
morning cartoon. Their facial expressions and the synchronization of mouth movements with
dialog are particularly imprecise. The juxtaposition of crude 2-D characters against the
more complex and real-looking 3-D CGI backdrop is jarring. Throughout the film, the
audience is constantly reminded: this is FAKE.
The Generic Space Opera story line doesn’t help. It's 3028 and the
Earth has been destroyed (A.E. = After Earth) by the Drej, evil aliens made of pure
energy. A few survivors escaped, but the human race has become a tattered and homeless
tribe, scattered across the universe. Their only hope is to find the Titan – a huge
spacecraft that was one of the last few vessels to leave before Earth's destruction - it
holds the secrets to recreate a new world. Cale (voiced by Matt Damon) is a reluctant hero
– he's the son of Titan's designer and holds the key that can lead to its discovery.
He allies with Korso (Bill Pullman), a human who once knew Cale's father, and Akima (Drew
Barrymore), a gorgeous and highly skilled pilot, to search for the Titan. A motley crew of
sympathetic aliens (John Leguizamo, Janeane Garofalo, and Nathan Lane) are also along for
the ride.
Five contributors to the screenplay are listed in the credits, but what
resulted from this committee is cliched and tired. The characters are strictly stock,
plot surprises aren't, and whole sections are purloined from other films. At times the
plagiarism is so blatant that individual scenes appear to have been created by tracing
over stills from Star Wars
and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. While not a musical,
there are several 80s-style rock tunes on the soundtrack during transitions in the story
– they might have added to the film if the lyrics had been intelligible.
There are a few impressive scenes – the destruction of Earth and
the rebirth of a new world are obvious big-budget numbers. But the only sense of wonder
that Titan A.E. ever inspires is curiosity - why its makers chose to use a cast
that looks so primitive and acts so predictably next to all the shiny high-tech toys on
display.
- Bob Aulert
