Walt Disney, part LVIII: Why Kida can't read—and what you can do about it

ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE

2001

Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise

Written by Joss Whedon, Bryce Zabel, Jackie Zabel, Tab Murphy, Gary Trousdale, and Kirk Wise

Spoilers: high

I wish I liked Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and until rewatching it today, it had been a small mystery to me why I never did.  It's the kind of thing that, on the outside looking in, seems like it ought to be absolutely tailor-made for certain tastes: it's neck-deep in Victorian and early 20th century fantasy tropes regarding pseudo-archaeology and mysticism and the kind of speculative technology that captures the imagination regardless of whether it could possibly work; it has a stylized look that, if you didn't examine it too closely, or maybe just didn't watch it while it was moving, could be easily interpreted as "cool"; it even has a interesting cast, such as should bring all sorts of unusual personality to the story, from Michael J. Fox to John Mahoney to Jim Varney to Leonard Nimoy to the James Garner, what the hell is he doing here, on top of it being one of the disagreeably few Disney cartoons of its day that actually gave a professional cartoon voice actor, Cree Summer, a leading role for once, though the assumption that "the female lead" actually has "a leading role" is, of course, something of a category error.  But more than merely clarifying why I don't like Atlantis: The Lost Empire, until this rewatch I clearly didn't realize how much I didn't like it, verging on despising it.  I talked a big game back with The Emperor's New Groove about how the thing people call "the Disney Renaissance" is just a critical construct, one that's largely subjective and hence possibly not the best way of understanding the industrial history of Walt Disney Feature Animation; but yeah, I'm pretty sure it's dead now.

I will not grieve the diverging goals of Atlantis too much, because, in 2001, I'm certain that it must've felt like a bold and invigorating experiment for everyone making it; now, it was, it's true, a further repudiation of the Renaissance mode of storytelling, and this was likely latched onto by WDFA chief Thomas Schumacher as a bid for attention from the teenage boys that were outside of Disney's core audience, and which I'm sure Schumacher and Michael Eisner found quite amenable, given their evident adherence to the cold-blooded, functionally-sexist conventional wisdom—which Peter Schneider and Jeffrey Katzenberg had sworn allegiance to as well, so let's not let them off the hook—that girls will watch boy shit, but not vice versa, so if WDFA was aiming for all four quadrants, well, you do the math.  But at the same time, I get it: it's no sin to get tired of making emotionally resonant musical romances, and sometimes you want to make rollicking action-adventure science fiction—and I guess you never really know if you're going to be good at that until you try.  Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, making their third feature, undeniably found out: Atlantis has always been widely disliked, and it not only lost money but it got trounced by DreamWorks' Shrek, which pursued the more cynical avenue, of parodying Disney, towards its own signal four-quadrant success; I shall note here that it was Trousdale and Wise's third and final feature, together or separately.*  Nevertheless, they did try, and I would respect that exponentially more if they were even slightly good at it.  It was, in fact, their idea: presumably afflicted with a yen to shift gears after Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, over a lunch one day soon after Hunchback had finished with Hunchback's screenwriter Tab Murphy and its producer Don Hahn, Trousdale and Wise found themselves inspired to do something with an "Adventureland" kind of complexion.  They soon arrived at the prospect of a steampunk, early 20th century quest to find Plato's fabled Atlantis, ribboned with ideas reflecting those of the legion of sci-fi writers and occultists who, I assume, deliberately misunderstood that fable.

Or, honestly, what I'm almost sure really happened is they'd all just watched 1994's Stargate on VHS the night before and thought it was totally rad.  It is, I admit, at least slightly possible that the extremely specific similarities—they border on just outright plagiarism—were only the result of Disney storytelling tendencies still being in play, such as having put-upon losers for heroes and heroines, so that when running Allan Quatermain (or Indiana Jones) through the Disneyfication machine, what they naturally got was a twerpy academic with glasses and yearnings rather than a badass plunderer-scholar.  But I obviously refuse to believe it wasn't an "influence," and one so big that that's plainly not the right word for it.  So it's Stargate, so much so that I presume Stargate: Atlantis was named thus as a deliberate nod, and it's Stargate pretty much the entire time.  It only stops being exactly Stargate in the third act, which is where it twists out a revelation that was always pretty obvious, thanks to how the movie's completely neglected to do the cool thing Stargate did and establish any other possible source of antagonism (or any other source of narrative, period).  But, fair's fair, at this point it becomes Avatar eight years before its time (so FernGully, or Pocahontas), and no matter how many similar films I name I'll be making it sound better than it is, because for the first 75 of its 96 minutes, it's only ever "yeah, but what if Stargate were wet and colored blue?", and then it's only "what if Avatar weren't good at spectacular action staging?", whereas at all times it's "what if either of those were more-or-less front-to-back annoying and devoid of pleasure?"

So: hearkening back some 8000 years before present, we witness the destruction—or at least the submersion—of the great city of Atlantis ("empire" is flagrantly overselling it); the precise form of its final fate is unknown, for something happened, not as yet explained, involving a woman floating up into the sky and exploding in light, even as enormous tidal waves swallow the city whole.  But now it's many millennia later, in 1914 (an odd year to pick to do basically nothing with it), and we arrive upon our philologist-janitor hero, Milo Thatch (Fox).  Milo is dashing around and bothering his employers at the museum he works at to fund an ambitious expedition to find an artifact that could lead him to eons-lost Atlantis.  As his enthusiasm for the task borders on an obsession, however, born out of a desire to redeem the work of his archaeologist grandfather, who died looking for Atlantis with everyone believing he'd simply cracked, he obviously gets nowhere with his superiors.  But he has acquired the attention of Gilded Age plutocrat Preston B. Whitmore (Mahoney), who sends a shady underling, Helga Sinclair (Claudia Christian), to ominously fetch him.  Happily, it turns out Whitmore's very much on Milo's side, as a close friend of his grandfather's, and all he wants to do is help him fulfill his grandfather's dream.  It must be that, because Whitmore simply hands him the ancient tome Milo had hoped to find, replete with the secrets of Atlantis and written in the Atlantean language, and as Whitmore has no linguist in mind but he, he foists Milo upon the expeditionary team he's already assembled.  By "team" I mean an unwieldily huge number of supporting players led by the adventurer Rourke (Garner), and comprising, besides Sinclair, Sweet the friendly but overbearing doctor (Phil Morris); Santorini the laconically pyromaniacal demolitions expert (Don Novello); Ramirez the spunky engineer (Jacqueline Obradors); Cookie the southern-fried cook (Varney); Packard the detached chain-smoking radio operator (Florence Stanley); and Moliere the disgusting and dirt-obsessed excavator.  They are dispatched to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean near Iceland, where Milo believes Atlantis to lie, and Whitmore wishes them a fortunate voyage as they embark aboard the enormous submarine that he's had built, I suppose in preparation for Milo's epiphany, or 21st birthday, or whatever it is.

Over the course of the journey, the submarine is destroyed by a giant Atlantean monster-machine, leaving only the effete linguist, his rough-and-tumble cohorts, and a large-but-not-too-large-number of non-player characters in dehumanizing, easier-to-animate gas masks, such that will be sufficient to motivate a large-scale third act dust-up.  The explorer-mercenaries grow fonder of Milo than they expected as they trudge towards Atlantis through the tunnels beneath the ocean crust, and they're shocked to discover, when they find it, that Atlantis is not some bleak long-dead ruin.  It's a living society, albeit, unfortunately, a declining one—a fantastic and remarkably persistent mechanism at the core of the city, which we will learn is described as "the Heart of Atlantis," keeps the lights shining and the air flowing, but the warrior-princess of Atlantis, Kida (Summer), and her kingly father (Nimoy) preside over a civilization that has lost their written word along with all but their simplest or most automatic technologies, like their healing crystals.  Milo, by now fluent in their script, is eager to help reimpart their lost knowledge; but the only difference this makes to Rourke is that they'll be more vulnerable, and now Milo's heart breaks to learn that his new friends' only real goal was to seize the Heart of Atlantis for themselves, for sale to the highest bidder.

There is not very much wrong with any of that, except, you know, for the vast majority of the details that constitute it.  There are genuine foundational problems beyond mere details, of course, like this being more of a predictable series of events than a story, or our hero being milquetoast and unengaging, or his supporting cast being a gaggle of even less well-developed stereotypes.  And these problems, being foundational, would remain in any configuration of a movie that was still, recognizably, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, yet in my heart I'm not convinced that they're problems that an action-adventure movie should worry unduly about.  For, in the watching, it's never the foundations of the thing, but the moment-by-moment textures of it that are so overwhelmingly unpleasant.  That ensemble?  I don't care that they're flat.  I care that they're deeply annoying company, on top of the way "being annoying company" is effectively one of the structural components of the screenplay, since for almost half the movie (this being how long it takes to enter Atlantis) it's going to turn out to be an exercise in hurrying up, then waiting for something interesting to actually happen, and a lot of that waiting around during this lumpy-ass first half, going on ten minutes of screentime, will turn out to be stopping the movie cold over and over, so that the larger number of that ensemble can barf out their character sheets out in Milo's direction.  The simpler way to put it, and maybe it's what's so viscerally off-putting about them, is that they yammer, just so much, and I suppose I really can't feign too much surprise that they're annoying: my estimation of  Trousdale and Wise was never that high in the first place (I'm entirely off-consensus on this, but BatB and Hunchback are, besides Fantasia 2000, my least-favorite Renaissance films), and both their previous features and especially Hunchback also demonstrated pretty much the same manner of desperate clumsiness in integrating their comedy into their drama.

Yet even then, with those two films they still managed to sort of switch back-and-forth between modes, not with any great sensitivity (let alone Clements and Musker-like grace), but at least in such a way that somewhat limited the harm that undisciplined comedy can pose to a story and without turning those stories into completely noxious slurries.  Hell, even with the Gargoyles, bêtes noires of all who've ever wished to love Hunchback, there's something like an honest attempt to wall them off into their own part of the screenplay.  In Atlantis, those walls come down hard.  The number of scenes that do not have some deflating comedy routine shoved into them—often doubling as an enforced character interaction between non-characters, which makes it worse—is almost undoubtedly down in the single digits.  Even single shots going by without some attempt at a quip or "funny" reaction are somewhat rare, especially early on.  (Writer Joss Whedon denies that any of his material wound up in the film, but you know, he also disowned Alien Resurrection; maybe I believe him, but for whatever reason Whedon seemed to have been very adept at setting up screenplays and trapping his successors into pursuing his brand of glib smugness despite any successors, almost by definition, being worse at it.  It's not like Tab Murphy is some idiot, Tab Murphy had just written Tarzan, but I wouldn't expect him to be good at writing Serenity.)  It probably wouldn't be much more successful even if it were funny, but it's frequently anti-funny on top of being an undramatic distraction—you could pick anything, but I think the emblematic moment finds Packard being reluctant to end her gossipy girltalk (with, I would have to assume, someone on the surface!) while the submarine sinks.  Possibly the sole surface-worlder who ever feels like a functional part of an action-comedy is Santorini, thanks to Novello's underplayed performance; at least when he's yammering (and yammer he does, on and on about explosives), it doesn't always feel like he's doing a bit—whereas even our protagonist always feels like he's doing a bit—so I'm not entirely shocked to hear it reported that Novello's whole performance was improvised and off-script.

The good news is that it kind of gets better once we arrive at Atlantis: at a minimum, the first half's extremely strange "racing through nothing, especially any sensation of unwholesome antiquity except when James Newton Howard's score forces it upon you" pace slows down; and Kida, once we get her, is fine—comparatively, she's great, because she speaks arch fantasy princess, rather than boilerplate action-comedy jibber-jabber—though, by the same token, she's not exactly brimming with personality herself.  Of course, it couldn't possibly help that the deuteragonist of the film, who only shows up halfway through, also gets turned into an automaton two-thirds of the way through, when she absorbs the Heart of Atlantis and becomes a non-speaking effects animation, and essentially just a maguffin for the rapacious "adventure capitalist[s]" (if God is good, why does He allow evil?) and Milo's belatedly-redeemed good guy faction to fight over.  Still, while it's not any special enigma why this Disney princess is not a Disney Princess, at least she's likeable, in no small part because her supervising animator, Randy Haycock, isn't drawing her like she's just snorted a giant pile of meth.  However, as this concerns the worst category of "major problem" in Atlantis, I'd like to make it the last, and kick that can down the road another couple of paragraphs.

The second big bucket of problems, though, is potentially worse than the first I've already described, since it arguably cuts closer to the heart of this thing's goals: it is, after all, supposed to be an action-adventure flick with plenty of breezy comedy, like an Indiana Jones, so if it's failing to be that for me, it's not impossible that it could perhaps succeed for somebody else; but it's also an action-adventure that is, expressly, about conveying the feeling of discovering a thrilling and awe-inspiring fantasy world, and if Atlantis struggles in its details, it's going to struggle with that above all, because world-building is always at least as much about details as the grand sweep.  The thing is this: this movie's world-building is objectively fucking stupid, nothing about it makes any sense, and I don't think anyone actually cared.  There are the two main facts of Atlantis's Atlantis that I glided over because I didn't know how to summarize this part of the plot without sounding like a sarcastic asshole: 1)the Heart of Atlantis, besides its other properties, grants the inhabitants of Atlantis a longevity that might as well be immortality, and, indeed, that little girl and the old man we saw back in the prologue are actually Kida and her father, now fully 8000 years old or more; 2)in the present, Atlantis has succumbed to such a pronounced cultural degeneration that they have lost the ability to decipher their own written language, a contemptible state which 8000 year-old Kida bitterly bemoans.  I think either of these things could be interesting, especially the second—why, as an allegory, it's only becoming more relevant every day—but I don't think you can have both of them, and you really, really can't if you don't actually notice that what you did was tell us your heroine and her father the king have spent the last eight millennia forgetting how to fucking read.**

I mentioned that one of the things that really ought to be much more charming is that Atlantis tacks into early 20th century sci-fantasy, which was ever interested in the subterranean expanses of the Earth, where all those lost continents might have still turned up.  Sometimes they posited glorious eutopias; sometimes cruel and evil dystopias; sometimes it was just an evil empire for a hero to punch.  But in many cases, they were absolutely fizzing with ideas about how an underground society wholly alien to our own might work.  Jesus, Atlantis doesn't even have a great idea just about how its action movie mechanics work, insofar as when they loot the Heart of Atlantis, the device again recognizes this as a crisis, and does what it did back in the prologue, bonding with the first Atlantean of royal blood it can find and empowering her with all its infinite might.  So, obviously, now the newly-godlike princess just fucking stands there, insensate, to be rendered in a cage back to the surface.  Later, like her mother before her, she shall awaken enormous robot guardians and cast a giant spell of protection over her city; but for now, even though we've clearly accidentally tripped straight into the ending of the movie, we still need a third act, soooo...

It's like this throughout, just utterly careless about everything it doesn't absolutely need to care about, in addition to everything it does, from the huge film-breaking deficiencies in its plotting and world-building, on down to the most annoyingly piddly shit you could imagine, like the grade school history error of a character backstory involving being drafted into the Spanish-American War, or a dialogue exchange where the ancient languages expert, who can speak Sumerian, declares the utter impossibility of remembering Kida's full name, which is only "Kidagakash." Oh, and for that matter, I would even like the mystic woo at the center of the notion that the explorers can understand the Atlantean language, for is it not proto-human itself, the language of our souls, unpolluted by the accumulations of time?  Except they do the exact opposite of that, and have the Atlanteans be able to understand our subsequently-developed languages, which is somehow even stupider, and also meaningless.  Astoundingly, the pseudo-inciting incident of the movie—it actually doesn't incite anything, but Milo had discovered that the single-letter transcription error in some Anglo-Saxon runes pointed everyone towards Ireland, but it was intended to be Iceland—isn't even as unsustainably dumb as it sounds; but one becomes convinced that if this movie ever fails to be dumb, it must have been by accident.

The third, worst problem I alluded to is just that Atlantis looks wretched.  It does not look cheap, and it wasn't (there is some deliberately-pixelated effects animation with the Atlantean forcefield that does look cheap, and I assume it wasn't); but a startling majority of its aesthetic decisions, distributed across dozens of individual artistic decision-makers, and all signed off on by Trousdale and Wise, simply turned out pretty bad, or actively terrible.  Some of this interfaces with the world-building, too: for example, it's even harder to take this dumbass story seriously when the vehicle for that story is a submarine the size of the Titanic, this unruly riot of superscience inflicted upon a group that we're supposed to treat like hardscrabble pioneers, on behalf of a quest to salvage the secrets of an inconceivably advanced civilization that, even if its shit actually worked, wouldn't come off too much more advanced than the one that could build an abomination like this on a lark.  The enormity of the expedition permits that battle with the robotic sea monster, and it's lousy, too; it doesn't even appear to be trying to feel like it's taking place underwater and not in the vacuum of space somewhere in George Lucas's Old Republic, or a Z-axis oriented version of a side-scrolling shooter (given the emphasis on sea life, maybe Darius Twin).  Meanwhile, the airborne finale, representing one of the few deployments of Deep Canvas that I even managed to notice, is at least as bad as the giant mid-film tokusatsu battle.  And for a movie sold on action, it's kind of telling that that's pretty much it; I do like it when Rourke uses martial arts to beat the shit out of Milo, I suppose.

But mostly it's going for scale but it consistently loses all sense of it.  Let's be nice: there's sometimes some very neat things here, like the technologically insane pull-out of the final shot, or the legitimately good trick of mixing up existing cultural signifiers (principally "what if Mesoamerica, but in southern Africa?") in ways that Atlantis feels like it's the source of them, or the not-ill-considered employment of a 'Scope aspect ratio to sell its epic pretensions.  But everything is either colossal, cyclopean, incomprehensible—or it's empty and featureless, and a lot of times it's both.  (It never feels like so much as a sketch of a culture, but there's at least a slowed-down minute or so spent amongst Atlantean society with Kida and Milo; it's really only slightly imaginative, mainly by virtue of their Flintstones houses and a terrifying "pet dog," but it might be my favorite part of the film.)  At all times, all it feels like is that everything in the entire movie is just an excuse to use every concept that the small army of production designers, especially beloved comic book artist and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, had come up with, regardless of whether the concept was useful, and between the four of them, it feels like they were in a competition to see who could make the most garish steampunkery and run up the biggest line item in the CGI budget.  (Indeed, the character of Moliere potentially exists solely because they wanted a subterrene.)  I know there must be, for Atlantis is proof of it, somebody in this world who thinks that it's cool when biplanes get into choppily-edited dogfights in a cave with Atlantean flying machines that are supposed to be awesome but look more like the coin-operated children's rides you might have once found at your local grocery store; that somebody is not me.

Mignola is both one of the best things about the movie and one of the most ruinous, unfortunately, and while I realize I must be stepping on somebody's toes with that, I would rather draw your attention to fingers—all these horrible, freakish fingers permutating out of all these horrible, freakish hands.  Mignola was responsible for a lot of the character design, too, and despite acquitting himself just fine on Batman: The Animated Series years before, Mignola was not experienced in animation and, I might surmise, not necessarily a man you wanted experimenting with animation.  Either way, that's what Trousdale and Wise were into, and so something that may well have come off excitingly stylized on the page, but was never meant to move—like fingers resembling steak fries—moves nevertheless, and it looks monstrous.  WDFA's increasing intoxication with the possibility of blocky, angular design reaches and breaches its failure point here, and the attempts at Disney fluidity start backfiring, and I really don't know if I can blame Mignola and the general design mentality for all of it.

Perhaps it's fitting that John Pomeroy leads the supervising animators with Milo, given that Pomeroy's claim to fame was being the third most important animator at Don Bluth's outfits, and does it ever feel like the worst aspects of Bluth's studios have been transplanted right back into Disney: it's so busy.  For the first half, every character is just constantly engaged in some kind of perpetual fidget, all this pointless secondary movement that sometimes you can discern the expressive purpose of even if it's clumsy, and not infrequently looks like the character having some kind of event in their central nervous system as the animators attempt to wring Disney-style movement out of characters stuck in an inhuman zone between stylization and realism.  Russ Edmonds and Anthony de Rosa are having the best of it on Santorini and Moliere, respectively, for different reasons: Edmonds because Novello's performance is demanding that he rein in the anxious overacting—and with most every other VA going as broad as possible, that's not a mode available to any of the other animators—and de Rosa just because Moliere's rotund form isn't locked into being a bunch of rectangles, and his telescoping goggles are, I admit, a fun little visual gag (shame that everything else about him, like his collection of international dirts, is obnoxious and, in that case, staged in a way that doesn't bother not seeming incredibly contrived).

None of the surface-worlders are completely immune to it, however: Pomeroy's Milo is the most thoroughgoingly tiresome, since he's in every third frame of the film and he's spending most of them either swatting at imaginary flies with those horrible hands with "Vs" for fingernails or making cloying, irritating emotional appeals to us (often both); but Yoshimichi Tamura is giving us the most enervating time on a minute-by-minute basis with Helga, possibly because Helga is supposed to be striking poses that read as "hot" and he and his assistants, doing what they can with a design not even remotely meant for motion, are barely keeping her crazy darting eyes in the right place on her head.  The only main character who escapes is Kida, because Haycock is mostly just able to "do Keanesque Disney" with her, giving her something approaching a Disney princess's expressive treatment, plus she's the principal vector for the one part of the world-building I really, genuinely like, the design of a phenotype (brown but also somewhat grayish skin, blue eyes, and platinum hair; in Kida's case a hairstyle that I shall describe as "halfway-finished bob") that has never existed in humanity, but feels like it could have, in some corner of the world before the dawn of time.

That leaves, for final thoughts, the very large gulf between how Atlantis: The Lost Empire "feels" and what it was intended to accomplish: an oft-repeated critical refrain on the film is that it saw Disney aiming for a more "grown-up" storytelling mode, a bit grimmer and grittier, and I think that was a salutary thing for the studio to shoot for.  But it indicates where the studio's competencies lay in 2001 if it was aiming at "teen boy," because it actually hit "little kid," indeed more juvenile than the Renaissance-that-was had ever been: it's more simplistic in its morality and characterization than a Disney film had been in over a decade—Milo's entire arc, anyway, is "realizes Rourke is evil," and there's not a single moral quandary that ever enters our hero's head, unlike Ariel, or Aladdin, or Tarzan, and so on—and, curiously, probably because it resembles smashing unsuccessfully-toyetic concepts around more than "an action movie," but also because it doesn't really establish keen emotional stakes, the first Disney PG movie since The Black Cauldron (and that's one ill omen there) is actually less violent than its predecessors where octopus women got impaled and gorilla hunters got strangled, never coming close to earning an MPAA labeling that effectively declares it to be more thrilling than the Disney features you grew up on. (Coming on the heels of Tarzan, it feels extravagantly childish: Tarzan is palpably erotic, but even The Little Mermaid and Aladdin are noticeably horny movies; Atlantis has the vaguest idea that it's succeeded in being "sexy" by having the heroine walk around in beach clothes, and doesn't realize that between "boys don't like mushy stuff" and "this is still a Disney movie" they've narrowed themselves down to options for "sexy" where the heroes don't even kiss.  Well, ain't the future now.)

There's always this sense of cluelessness to it, that they always had more of a stereotyped, condescending idea of what their target audience didn't like—it's just a production anecdote, but I think it sums up Atlantis to a grotesquely perfect degree that Trousedale and Wise made-up a batch of T-shirts for the crew that read "ATLANTIS: LESS SINGING, MORE EXPLOSIONS."  But, to everyone's surprise, it turns out that the movie that's almost literally nothing besides bad action, incessant trivializing jokes, uncool protagonists, sexless and possibly nonexistent romances, and (here's where I say "you had to know they didn't want that") constant logical errors in its plotting didn't actually do that well with 14-20 year old males.  Nor, just as surprisingly, I'm sure, with anyone else.

Score: 4/10

*Theatrical feature, at least.  Wise apparently directed Bobbleheads: The Movie, a film which has no Wikipedia article and if I hadn't seen a part of it, I'd question if it existed.  I would not like to watch any more, as it made me very sad.

**H.P. Lovecraft and Zelia Bishop's The Mound posits a hollow earth civilization broadly similar enough to Atlantis's that it does have something like both these things; but it also expends a lot of effort to harmonize them and make its society credible.