| Saturday, December 7, 2002 |
20:59 - Titan T.P.
|
(top)  |
Well, I just saw Treasure Planet.
They say that in sci-fi stories, you get to break one rule-- and the rest of the universe has to be internally consistent. That works really well, under most circumstances. Some of the best sci-fi can get away with that kind of world-building by making sure the rest of the tech is either absolutely impeccable in its design, or never mentioned.
But Treasure Planet isn't sci-fi, really-- it's more fantasy than sci-fi, and the big space rule they break-- "don't worry about whether there's air to breathe"-- lends more to the animators' ability to turn the movie into an unapologetic style piece than to allow writers with a sci-fi bent to go nuts with the world design. Instead of trying to rationalize how wooden ships and 17th-century dress blend in with insterstellar solar-sail-based FTL technology, or why Silver's arm can do all that kickass neuro-integrated stuff but they have to drag in the solar sails by hand-- the furthest they take the explicit sci-fi infrastructure is artificial gravity, which is crucial to a plot point. Other than that, they simply don't worry about it-- they take old-world architecture and speech and dress for granted, and the result must have been very liberating for the animators.
That said, the story wasn't fantastic. I found myself silently predicting all the plot jinks before they happened; it wasn't the most convoluted thing I've ever seen, and parts of it were unbearably saccharine. There were some moments of brilliance in the dialogue (Doppler's crack about doctorates, incomprehensible to the younger audience, I found immensely gratifying), and there was genuine character development that sticks to your ribs after you leave the theater, unlike Atlantis. There's a lot to like.
But overall the impression I get is that someone in Disney has been living in the cave of the animation industry a bit too long, where actual feedback from the box office and the social currents about which way the pop-cultural winds are blowing have no effect; it seems like someone saw Titan A.E. and saw in it The Future of Animation, failing to notice that no matter how good it looked, that movie flopped. And-- surprise-- Treasure Planet appears to be doing just about as well in the box office, meaning that Disney has had to release an earnings warning for the current quarter.
Disney is thrashing these days, as is the whole animation industry; but Disney is the biggest bellwether, obviously, and they're not sure where to take things. The formulaic song-medleys of the 60s and 70s gave way suddenly in 1989 to The Little Mermaid, sending animated features into a new rarefied stratum of Broadway-musical structure, a genre with astounding new possibilities-- but they got stuck in another formula, which was only solidified by the unexpected gold vein of The Lion King, a success that Disney has been desperately trying to recapture. The subsequent few films were huge-budget mega-projects that met with limited meme penetration, and when things like The Iron Giant and Shrek (and Disney's own CG experimental branch, Pixar, with its series of mega-hits) started to do better than the big formulaic super-productions, they started to flounder.
First, Empire of the Sun-- another mega-production-- got slashed very late in the process from a big-budget but soulless behemoth into a light-hearted, edge-pushing, injokey romp, The Emperor's New Groove. Then, Lilo & Stitch took the NASA "smaller, cheaper, better" route still further and brought out a small-budget but big-scope breath of fresh air. But while both of these have been modest successes, they haven't been Lion King-like gold-mines; and DVD sales have been such as to reinforce Disney's core target market of parents with small children, who want bare-bones videos to pop into the player and entertain the little ones, not the big 2-disc Special Editions. Which is why Disney has just announced that they won't be releasing any more of the big 2-disc Special Editions, after The Lion King comes out next year. None after that, unless their fortunes change.
But anyway. Treasure Planet, like Atlantis, also betrays that Disney is terrified of the anime revolution, and they're desperately trying to integrate some of the appeal into their movies that will attract anime fans-- but it's not working very well. They still don't understand what it is about anime that anime fans like. (Hey, I'm not saying I understand that, myself-- this is hard stuff to get a handle on.) And besides, many anime fans refuse to watch Disney movies out of principle; anime, to them, is the "un-Disney"-- like using a Mac or Linux as a form of protest against Microsoft. Any attempt Disney makes to court these people will just breed more resentment. If Disney wants a slice of the anime pie, they may have to settle for distribution rights to things like Spirited Away. That works best for everybody, instead of trying to force both Miyazaki and Disney to try to be something they're not.
But Treasure Planet is a great style piece, if you like style pieces; it's a visual feast, and it does stimulate the imagination and spirit to about the same extent that Titan A.E. did, which (to me, at least) is not an insignificant amount. I think they may be getting a handle on this new genre of animated feature.
I just hope each baby step toward that understanding and expertise doesn't keep costing them an unrequited $140 million.
|
|
