Treasure Planet (Ron Clements & John Musker), 2010
The failure of Disney’s Treasure Planet to attract a theatrical audience has been much discussed: it brought into focus a lot of criticism of the studio that had been quietly bubbling away for some time. The studio suddenly seems a long way from the halcyon days of its early nineties revival, when films like Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King built on the success of 1989’s The Little Mermaid. Back then people were talking of a new golden age in animation, and while that talk hasn’t gone away, they aren’t talking about Disney anymore. They’re talking about computer animation or even television work. Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Treasure Planet don’t look like a golden age. (Copper at best).
To some extent this is unfair. Beyond the occasional breakout success, feature animation has always struggled to achieve attractive theatrical returns. Hence in its first “golden age” Disney made a fortune on Snow White but then either struggled to break even or made outright losses with Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi. Studio bosses don’t like to admit it (particularly with Pixar somehow making hit after hit), but the production of animated films generally must be seen as a long term investment. When Disney make a new feature cartoon, they’re really investing in a roster of back-catalogue titles that they can pull from the vaults and re-release theatrically or on home formats in the future. So while Disney might have been disappointed by Atlantis in 2001, in the same year they released Snow White on DVD for a nice big return on virtually no present-day investment. With such a huge backlist, the really important thing is that the films will be attractive prospects for future revival and not damage the Disney brand name. This is why the seventies and eighties were such a dark age for the company. The Fox and the Hound did okay at the box office in 1981, but how many will be looking forward to buying the DVD?
I don’t think, therefore, that the last few years have been the disaster for the company that some have made out. The Emperor’s New Groove is a brisk, funny film, and given its troubled production history counts as a victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. Fantasia 2000 has weak portions, but also long stretches of sustained brilliance: the “Rhapsody in Blue” segment is arguably the best thing to emerge from the studio since the 1940s. The plot of Atlantis is too rickety for it to really take off, but you can see what they were trying for, and taken sequence by sequence it’s terrific. By contrast, the film everyone points to as their most successful of recent years, Lilo and Stitch, struck me as unsatisfying and misguided, a pale reworking of the far superior Warner Brothers release The Iron Giant. All four, however, took the studio in interesting new directions, and they needed to be tried if the studio was to maintain its creative momentum. I mean, Beauty and the Beast was great as a nostalgic return to the Snow White / Cinderella / Sleeping Beauty fairytale formula, but how many times could they get us to line up for that routine again? Even if not all of the recent films came off completely, they avoided the studio sinking into repetition and will, I think, perform well in years to come.
Treasure Planet might do the same: it did much better on its DVD release than it did in cinemas, for example. The question is, though, how many people enjoyed it? How many, like me, skipped the film in cinemas, picked it up on DVD, but then were disappointed? I fear Treasure Planet will not be a film anyone will want to return to in twenty years.
My purchase of the DVD was a calculated gamble. The directors, Ron Clements & John Musker, made The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Hercules, and are the most consistent teaming in the Disney ranks. No other regular Disney directors pile as many gags into their films, and while this sometimes results in a grating overkill, generally I find their films funny and entertaining. I also knew that this film had been their dream project for years: since Aladdin, they had been pitching the concept of “Treasure Island in space.” It’s a fundamentally sound idea: shifting the sea vessels into space leaves the story intact, but gives it an interesting new spin. The story even has a sound Disney pedigree: Robert Louis Stevenson’s story had been the basis for the studio’s first ever wholly live-action feature in 1950. The concept provides ample opportunity for action and adventure, and at the very least you’d expect it to be visually spectacular. It surprises me that the studio took so long to agree to make it: I’d have greenlit it in a second. It’s puzzling, then, that the final film is so unrewarding.
Musker and Clements have succumbed to the same temptation that seduced the studio’s other top directing team, Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, after they had directed Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The latter pair’s attempt to do an adventure movie resulted in Atlantis, and the two films have much in common: the emphasis in both is on special effects and action sequences, and both hark back to Disney’s live action adventures of the 1950s. The action sequences are the highlights of Treasure Planet: a sequence near the start involving the rebellious hero, Jim Hawkins, flying through canyons on a windsurfer-like device is particularly breathtaking and bodes well for what follows. (Just as Atlantis showed what the underwater monster sequences of The Phantom Menace should have been like, this sequence shows the elation that Lucas’s podrace sequences should have achieved.) Yet after a bright opening quarter hour Treasure Planet falls apart completely.
The reason lies at the film’s core. It centres on rebellious teenager Jim Hawkins, who embarks on a spacebound search for treasure with a crew comprised largely of mutinous thugs. There was apparently concern during production that Jim was too surly and unsympathetic for audiences to relate to, which resulted in the addition of the prologue in which Jim is depicted as a standard-issue cute, wide-eyed Disney child. While the character may indeed be underwritten, as he is depicted in the final film I have no issues with him: there is in fact a long tradition of limp central characters in Disney films (Snow White and Pinocchio leap to mind). What really sinks the film is the depiction of John Silver. Silver is the leader of the mutineers and an all-around rogue out to steal the treasure, but he also serves as a surrogate father figure for Jim. The plot is obviously supposed to turn on Jim’s growing sense of self-worth under Silver’s tutelage, and Silver’s parallel return to an honest life. Musker and Clements, however, have never been masters of character and the subtleties of Silver’s nature defeat them. Too broadly villainous at the start, his redemption seems totally contrived. When Jim helps him to escape at the conclusion of the film, it just feels as if Silver has hoodwinked him.
This is much more fatal to Treasure Planet than it would have been to the previous Musker / Clements efforts, as this relationship is firmly at centre stage. Rather than cluttering their films with extraneous supporting characters, they have diminished this movie’s reliance on them. Only a marooned robot named Ben, voiced by Martin Short, is obviously there to provide comic relief: the attempt is disastrous, since the character is immensely irritating (he recalls the characters of Pain and Panic, easily the worst things in their last film, Hercules). Apart from him, we have a stereotyped upper-class English captain voiced by Emma Thompson, a foppish professor voiced by David Hyde Pierce, and not a lot else. The absence of sympathetic or amusing characters in the movie leaves it leaden and dispiriting.
Even the usual visual touches that provide some additional enjoyment in other Disney movies are disappointing. The action scenes are well staged, and the background design effectively combines nautical and science fiction elements, but otherwise, the film is surprisingly dull at a visual level. Musker and Clements have tried for a painterly, illustrative look, but it’s too neutral a design approach: the bold comic book style Trousdale and Wise used for Atlantis worked much better. The animation is slick and of an excellent standard (I never had the feeling I was watching television animation, as I did at times in Lilo and Stitch). Even that, however, is burdened by misguided experiments, such as the merging of traditional and 3-D animation in the character of John Silver. Glen Keane, one of Disney’s best animators, led the animation for this character and it’s been brought off tremendously. Yet it’s so seamless that it becomes pointless: a simpler, conventionally animated character would have been just as effective. I love seeing Disney use their technology to show me something new, but there is little pleasure to be gained from seeing them use computers to achieve something that could have been done with a pencil.