Animation Defenestration: The one that killed Don Bluth's career

 

 Title: Titan AE

What Year?: 2000

Classification: Runnerup/ Mashup

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

As I write this, I’m closing on another milestone for my review count, and I decided it was time for another animation review. As it happens, I had something on deck that definitely fit, though already close to the limit for the time I allow between a viewing and a review. It comes from the 1990s-2000s transition, a time when the industry was in turmoil. Inevitably, there were winners and losers, and there was one failure that was epic enough to leave a legend for generations to come, a movie that not only lost money on its own but shuttered a studio and ended the career of a famed animator. As scholars could guess even without the opening data, I speak of Titan AE, the final film from Don Bluth and Fox Animation, and after a good chunk of time to think about it, all I can say is… huh.

Our story begins, like all hip youth-oriented sci fi, with actual genocide as aliens called the Drej destroy the Earth, apparently to stop humans from attacking them with a new ship called the Titan. A boy named Cale joins an exodus of human refugees scattering into the wider galactic civilization, while his father sails off with the Titan. Skip forward, and our hero has grown into a headstrong youth who pushes back against being snubbed and mistreated by other spacefaring aliens. After a fight with a few spaceport toughs, he meets a human space adventurer named Korso, who realizes that an artifact from Cale’s father has the secret of the Titan’s location. With a lady and a few aliens for company, they set out to find the Titan. But the Drej are in pursuit, and not everyone aboard is who they seem!

Titan AE was a 2000 animated film by Fox Animation, directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. The project was reportedly conceived as a live-action feature, before being given to Bluth following the success of his first Fox animated feature film Anastasia. The role of CGI, which Bluth had no experience with, was apparently debated, with the final result being a mainly traditional/ 2D animated film with some CGI-animated elements and sequences. The final budget of the film was estimated at up to $90 million, including $30M in preproduction costs before Fox Animation took over production. The voice cast was led by Matt Damon as Cale and Bill Pullman as Korso, with Drew Barrymore as the lady Akima. Other cast included Janeane Garofalo (see Mystery Men) and Disney veteran Jim Cummings. The film earned a box office of $36.8M, less than half the lowest estimates of its budgets, and received mixed reviews. Fox Animation was shut down, possibly in part because of Fox’s acquisition of the Blue Sky CGI studio. Don Bluth withdrew from feature animation, though he has been credited for short films and other work as recently as 2019. Titan AE remains available on digital platforms.

For my experiences, this is one I’m sure I was aware of before, during and after its fateful debut, in part because the studio was based pretty close to where I live. My strongest frame of reference for this review, however, was giving Anastasia a look a little over a year previously. I went into that one with memories of it as equal to at least one of the “minor” films of the Disney renaissance. I came out of it disappointed and more than a little irritated, not because it was “bad” but simply because it was a slight, rather bland offering. That gave me plenty of foreboding going into the present film. This is a movie whose reputation alone creates certain expectations, on par with The Black Cauldron or Chicken Little. You can want it to be either a gem that proves audiences and critics are idiots, or else so horrible you can wish it to the flames of Hell. I went in, however, with no doubt that it would be neither of those things, which as I’ve regularly ranted is exactly the kind of movie that can be more frustrating than the ones I can hate.

With that in mind, it has to be admitted at the outset that this movie is disarmingly competent at face value, I would go so far as to say probably an improvement on Anastasia. The animation is as good as it should be, including still impressive CGI for the destruction of Earth and the crystal ice field of the finale. The voice work is also top notch, though that’s one thing that Fox certainly paid for up front. What I find most impressive on this front is that I didn’t immediately recognize any of the “celebrity” voice actors, or get distracted trying to figure them out; this is a film that truly uses the talent as a tool in a toolbox rather than a gimmick to draw or distract the audience. Most of the obvious problems that crop up come simply from a recurring sense of familiarity, and this is where things get admittedly tricky in hindsight. If this had come out in 1990 or even 1985, it would still have been easy to draw comparisons with Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and the like. On the other hand, there are undoubtedly some things here that hadn’t been seen before, at least from western animation, especially the malevolent horde of the Drej.

On a deeper level, the real problem isn’t that this isn’t anything new, but that it’s so thin. This is where one may wonder about the likely role of studio mismanagement. The preproduction work could very well have left Bluth with a bad hand. If the release date, run time or for that matter the rating were also dictated by Fox, then it’s easy to allow that the crew could have been hamstrung any number of ways. There are, however, plenty of things that feel all too typical for second-tier animation. The characters are only a little deeper than the archetypes they draw on, which becomes a particular problem when the whiplash changes of loyalties in the final act come in play. The same weaknesses show in the plot and world-building. The treasure-hunt setup simply doesn’t work with the posited stakes; if a ship as powerful as the Titan was already on Earth, rather than under development on some distant outpost, it would be fighting, not running. It also serves to push the viewer past the far more interesting work-a-day lives of the human diaspora. Finally, there is simply no motivation given for the Drej, who seem to have no reason to treat humanity as more than a minor nuisance. We do just fine without speeches from a posturing evil overlord, but it would be much easier go along with this if we knew something about how the conflict escalated all the way to preemptive genocide. It’s this lack of depth and backstory that make them feel far more generic than they really are.

That brings me to the “one scene” and it is indeed the one that shows the film’s potential. Just a little ways in, Cale is in the aliens’ cafeteria, where he gets into a confrontation with a server. Afterward, he fumes, “I’d just like them to kill my food before they serve it to me.” Listening of cold blood, I definitely recognize Damon, still being himself rather than playing himself. After a gravity malfunction, he walks away, only to run into a group of aliens he clearly knows. They deliver an ominous warning, complete with the pointed remark that he has been “uppity”. Before this gets any further, Korso intervenes, with the further warning, “If you hunt humans, we travel in packs.” It’s a fine scene with potent historical and racial overtones, which in a few minutes paints a chilling picture of a world where humans are treated every bit as badly as we have treated each other. But, like far too many things, it gets left behind for a story we’ve already seen done better.

In closing, what I come to is not simply the rating, but how this really compares with other animated films I reviewed. The two worst are definitely The Wild and the Gobots movie (about equally bad in very different ways), which didn’t even make it in here. Of those that did, the worst would still be Lily CAT (somehow, the real clunkers always turn up early), followed by Lord of the Rings as the most disappointing. With films like that as the bar, I think it will be clear why I have gone easy on so many others (see the other LOTR cartoon). The bottom line is that anything that at least tries to do something interesting can usually get up to 2 out of 4, and this particular film is the kind that sinks to the level of lesser entries that rise marginally above their limitations. The words on this one’s tombstone would have to be that the only people who were wrong about it were the suits who kept throwing money at it. If it comes to that, if it had actually been successful in its own time, it would probably have ended up even more forgotten than it is. And with that, I for one am done with it.