The Long Road

05/13/2003 Archived Entry: "Treasure Planet"

Treasure Planet didn’t do very well in theaters; in fact, Disney blamed it for its poor fiscal performance that quarter. I don’t know why this movie did so poorly because its GOOD. Maybe it’s the fact that Treasure Planet is sci-fi (animated sci-fi hasn’t done very well lately, witness: Final Fantasy (Here’s a brackets-within-brackets thought: Final Fantasy. FANTASY. FAN-TA-SY. Why the hell was it science fiction?!), Titan A.E, Iron Giant) or maybe because the U.S. public has become more enamoured with CG animation so traditionally animated movies are going the way of the sprite-based side-scroller?

The best part of Treasure Planet is the animation. The movie is done using a combination of hand-drawn and computer-generated images. The blending is so well done, that it’s seamless in most instances. Captain Silver, for example, has a body that is half mechanical; the mechanical parts are done in CGI and the rest is hand-drawn. Each style compliments the other extremely well and the combination of the two is not intrusive at all. The CGI adds a lot of depth, complexity and texture to objects which would otherwise be flat looking. CGI also allows for shots that would have the artists go insane (or have their hands fall off) had they been done traditionally, shots like the incredibly long zoom-in of the moon/starport from the planet. The hand-drawn stuff is used mostly for the characters since it would be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to do convincing humans using computers.

What’s the movie about? Pirates in a flying ship looking for a planet full of treasure called…Treasure Planet. The story isn’t your typical Disney fare; our hero isn’t really…heroic and our villain isn’t really, well, villainous. And there’s got a good moral at the end.

Anyways, I didn’t have high expectations (because of its $-intake) for the movie but I was pleasantly surprised by it and ended up really enjoying it.

If I had to give this a rating, it'd be 8/10

Replies: 1 Comment

thai, i think it deserves a 10/10...although i haven't actually seen it so that's not fair...and i'm actually just writing this to be a pain and have a comment! so there!
gooo disney!

Posted by Leanne @ 05/13/2003 11:57 PM EST