Walt Disney, part LX: All the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way

TREASURE PLANET

2002

Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker

Written by Rob Edwards, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Ron Clements, and John Musker (based on the novel Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Spoilers: high (though it's also, you know, Treasure Island)

Numerous times during this retrospective of Disney animation, and virtually every time that its directors, Ron Clements and John Musker have come up, I have implied that I don't like Treasure Planet.  I always meant it, basing that opinion on a single watch, and not even an especially stale one—like almost everybody else, as we'll find out, I did not take the opportunity to watch Treasure Planet in its year of release, 2002.  Nevertheless, I have also always endeavored to keep an open heart, and sometimes, albeit rarely, that actually pays off, even if in these circumstances "paying off" means aligning myself with a bunch of twenty-something cartoon adults who likewise praise the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy as generation-defining classics.  For does Treasure Planet not have some "now this is pod racing" vibes of its own?  It is therefore with some measure of embarrassment that I would like to amend your inferences from all those negative asides, if I can, and give them a somewhat more objective spin: Treasure Planet was a mistake.

I don't think that's even arguable, as a historical evaluation, rather than any artistic one: Treasure Planet cost $140 million, making it the most expensive traditionally animated film of all time—in no small part because it wasn't all that much "traditionally animated," even by the prevailing standards in 2002 of digital ink-and-paint systems, but you know what I mean, "most of the characters were originally drawn on sheets of paper"—and, clearly, that a 2002 movie even could still be "the most expensive" of anything, no matter what type of movie it was, should already be suggestive of its world-ending impact.  It made just $106 million on this budget (and only $38 million domestically, so even worse than it sounds).  It would eventually be surpassed as the biggest bath Disney ever took on any cartoon it produced—by Strange World, a film that occurs to me has much in common with Walt Disney Feature Animation's year-on-year diptych of failed sci-fi epics (though, as it is genuinely terrible, more with 2001's Atlantis: The Lost Empire than Treasure Planet*)—but that took many years and of course it could not have been much comfort to anyone at the time that somebody might still make an even less-successful animated feature for the company.  At this point, the outlook for WDFA was already a bleak one.  Even before Treasure Planet, Thomas Schumacher was grimly informing staff of the prospect of layoffs and paycuts, and Schumacher himself was soon to abandon the presidency of feature animation altogether, heading out east to oversee the stageplay division and never returning to the animation studio; Michael Eisner, for his part, was gazing jealously at Disney's fractious partner, Pixar, while glaring furiously at Jeffrey Katzenberg's success at DreamWorks.  He had already come to believe that their medium of fully-rendered CGI animation was WDFA's future, which, for many of its existing artists, was not any future; furthermore, Eisner's own death struggle for control of the company had begun in earnest.  But as bad as it undeniably was beforehand, after Treasure Planet, it got worse.  If a hit might've rescued WDFA, then a failure on the scale of Treasure Planet only sealed its doom.  Thus, given that people who have cultivated an interest in animation tend to hold that the demise of American traditional animation was a bad thing, it should come as no surprise that such people should afford Treasure Planet precious little mercy.

I'm not really aiming to talk anyone out of that, despite my own newfound affection for it.  Mass audiences, of course, are not animation aficionados, obsessively following industrial developments in the medium; and so the general disdain that Treasure Planet suffered until it was revived by people who may not have even been alive yet in 2002 cannot be sourced solely within the resentment of learned animation fans about how it basically dug the grave for its own medium.  (Likewise, while it wasn't feted critically in its time, neither was it particularly reviled.)  Most of its failure must be attributed to one simple fact: Treasure Planet, famously enough, looks stupid and lame; and indeed it is, at turns, stupid and lame.

So now we have to go way back: despite appearances, Treasure Planet wasn't just another Atlantis, an idea barfed out over a lunch and embraced by Disney as a sci-fi-powered reaction to the perceived fading fortunes of their Princess Musicals after Pocahontas.  It was as true an auteurist passion project as had ever been nurtured into life in the unforgiving soil of Disney animation, pursued by the greatest directorial talents Disney ever had, and conceived no later than 1985 by Clements (probably not inspired by 1982's Bulgarian Treasure Planet, a desperate agglomeration of junk that only vaguely resembles "an actual animated feature," though I suppose it's not entirely impossible).  Clements pitched the idea, "Treasure Island in space," to Katzenberg and Eisner at the same meeting that also saw Clements's other pitch, The Little Mermaid (this one made with Musker), get rejected and then immediately swept into development anyway, eventually to become, as we all know, the film that rang in the Disney Renaissance.  "Treasure Island in space" did not die then, however, and Musker thought it sounded cool, and, joined at the hip as they've always been since their first directorial collaboration on The Great Mouse Detective, together they used all their influence to get their Treasure Planet made, which was akin to banging their heads on a wall till one day the wall magically disappeared.  Though one of the architects of the Renaissance, Katzenberg was (and is) notoriously unlikeable; until Quibi, I'd never fully credited the anecdotes that I've described as "Katzenfacts" and which, in their accumulation, necessarily paint an unkind portrait of the executive as an unintelligent maniac (after Quibi, I have had to concede their plausibility).  But perhaps his response to the directors' efforts amounts to the ultimate anti-Katzenfact: Clements and Musker delivered hit after hit, and after The Little Mermaid, then after Aladdin, asked again and again to do Treasure Planet, and in each case Katzenberg said "no," nudging them onto something else, and it wasn't until he was gone that somebody (presumably Peter Schneider) said "sure, whatever," and they made something so consummately unmarketable that it resulted in a $74 million write-down before it was even finished playing in theaters.

We can agree that what Clements and Musker delivered was this: Treasure Island in space, yes, but only in the bluntest way anyone might have ever gone about adapting Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, Treasure Island, to a spacebound setting.  It is easy to imagine Clements and Musker as creative geniuses drunk on their own talent and, having spent two decades convincing themselves of their idea's appeal, they didn't just do "a science fiction adventure patterned upon the beloved classic, Treasure Island," but instead "tall ships in space, sailing through space, the vacuum of outer space."  This would come in conjunction with "they're aliens, mostly," plus "but they still dress like it's the 18th century, even if only one of them speaks or acts that way, and a lot of the rest of it shall be open pandering by middle-aged men to what they believe is considered cool in 1997 and hope shall remain cool in 2002, especially to teen boys."  And there's a problem there already: I don't know if "tall ships in space" was ever going to be cool—the attempts to solder contemporary coolness onto it were probably inevitable, if only likely to make it less cool—but it somewhat feels to me like 2002 is approaching the worst possible time to try to make the argument that it was, as Millennial geek nitpickery began to be a factor in the arbitration of culture, and the literalism that we're only just kind of, sort of starting to get over (maybe) was ascending to become one of the more important lenses through which narratives would be viewed and judged.

And if that's how it was, then that's basically it for Treasure Planet.  It's a conundrum from its foundation up: a world with computers and mechanization so advanced that the first thing we see is a paper book projecting holograms, while later we'll meet cyborgs and robots, that still uses every 18th century form that its technology can possibly take, kind of already a theme park ride of itself.  If we get further into it, it's somehow dumber than it first looks.  Discussing the film in their disc commentary (one that actively ignores almost all of their film's pre- or post-release history), Clements and Musker make it clear that they confused solar sails with solar power.  It suddenly explains why the sails have that cellular pattern and "zap" when the sun hits them—both things that I thought were visual flourishes, not "world-building"—but it's unfortunate that it explains this at the cost of even further un-explaining why they'd build these things to look like 18th century sailing vessels when they're not even sailing, and when any interruption of power means that the artificial gravity goes off and you float to your death because it's been built with an open deck for purely aesthetic reasons.

What is never remotely clear at all, meanwhile, is what the deal even is with "space" in this film, as a concept: the reason I assumed, all this time, that they were (at least partially) actually "sailing" through space is because, to belabor what's pretty obvious from any given image, there is no "vacuum of space" as I sarcastically indicated above, but instead our characters breathe something analogous to "air" whilst something analogous to "wind" does visibly fill those sails, despite also seeming to only intermittently offer either friction or reaction mass.  Now, I suppose this would not be something the characters in the movie would talk about, any more than you or I would have casual conversations about how the gravity of Earth draws down an atmosphere upon its surface, and its magnetic field keeps the sun from stripping it away, and so on, but it is a little aggravating not being able to really figure out how this universe operates, beyond a throwaway line of narration uttered in the first ten seconds, that you could readily miss because you're still parsing the visual incongruities already at work and which doesn't really explain anything anyway, that refers to this space being filled by some substance called "etherium."  H.P. Lovecraft would probably like this movie, even so—he'd be a little giddy at its occasional outright Dreamlands quality, and at the notion of tacking into ether winds; he would not have liked Atlantis—but I think he would be annoyed at all the science fiction that gets mixed into this, the most whimsical of fantasies, in some vain attempt to rationalize it.

But then, that it be both was very much the whim that Clements and Musker had long-since committed themselves to (and to which they had committed their co-writer, Rob Edwards, as well as their co-scenarists, Aladdin's own Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the latter about to make Disney a lot more money, viz. piracy, in a new old-fashioned way).  We can poke at it, we can be perplexed by it, we can identify it as a big-ass reason why lots of people do not like Treasure Planet and every attempt to call it "a good movie" must be pitched as a bold rebellion against a hostile consensus.  But Treasure Planet is so incomplete in its reimagination of an 18th century oceangoing adventure into a sci-fi epic precisely because its directors wanted it that way, and while no one can make anybody embrace such an odd and idiosyncratic vision, its combination of quaintness and fever-dream fancy can, it seems, sneak up on you.  I don't know when that happened for me this time—it was not early on, to be sure, for there is much to dislike here, even leaving the whole "dysfunctionality of this world" issue aside—though there's certainly a lot to be impressed by, positively or negatively.  Take, just for one emblematic example, what's probably the film's most complicated shot, which uses at least two and probably three different digital systems to take us through a window in a room, and up into a night sky dominated by a crescent moon, that shortly resolves into a satellite that actually, literally is shaped like a crescent, serving as an orbital spaceport bustling with activity.  (Even the hidden edit, doubtless effected in order to keep Disney's computers from melting, is, technically, a good one—actually contributing to our sense of that activity, as well as of falling headlong into the sky.)  But it's damnably irrational: "the crescent moon is a big crescent-shaped technological object" is the kind of an idea an actual child would come up with.  But I suppose that's Clements and Musker's whole bag here, and while this is the bravura moment where they want to blow your mind with it, the whole damned thing feels like an expression of this same deliberately-childlike sensibility.  Whatever it was that finally did it, this time around I was actually charmed by it.

As for the story that the visuals are in service to (unless it's the other way around), it's presumably familiar enough: on a lonely planet in the sticks lives fatherless Jim Hawkins, cared for by his abandoned, frankly distractingly-hot mother Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), where they nominally run the (spaceside?) Benbow Inn together, though in practice Sarah does most of that and Jim yearns while doing bitchin' stunts on his solar-powered flying skateboard and, in a deleted scene, the Bartman.  Adventure arrives in the form of the dying turtle man, Billy Bones (Patrick McGoohan), who bequeaths to Jim and Sarah a star map that describes the location of the legendary Treasure Planet, the hidden sanctuary and loot dump of the fearsome space pirate Nathaniel Flint (Peter Cullen; and it speaks well of the discipline at work here that the barely-glimpsed, long-dead Flint is the most intimidating "alien monstrosity" design in the whole movie).  Hot on Billy's heels are other pirates (it does not speak well of the discipline at work here that you'll have had to have read Treasure Island to make sense of the one line that barely implies that they conceive themselves to be Flint's rightful heirs), who burn down the inn looking for that map.  But Jim and Sarah escape, along with regular customer and friend, astrophysicist Delbert Doppler (David Hyde Pierce), who, upon learning of the map, is eager to finance an expedition to retrieve those pirate riches.  Jim, obviously, comes along; less obviously, Sarah doesn't, without any real explanation besides "this is a boy's own story, and Treasure Island besides," but it worked for Dune, right?  Oh well: so Delbert charters a ship and hires Captain Amelia (Emma Thompson) and her faithful first mate Arrow (Roscoe Lee Browne) to run it, along with (this is a problem in Treasure Island too) a clutch of random sailors none of them have bothered vetting, like the giant spider monster Scroot (Michael Wincott) or the upsetting composite creature Hedley and Torrance (John Cygan and Jim Ward) or the alien fartbag whose name eluded me (animator Adam Dykstra providing farts), but above all a certain John Silver (Brian Murray), the ship's cook, notable for his chummy, ingratiating manner, as well as his robotic arm and leg.  And it so happens that Billy Bones's dying words to Jim were to "beware the cyborg."

So Treasure Planet, you can see, is startlingly faithful for a Disney cartoon adapting, well, anything, with allowances made for getting things started much quicker (Billy Bones shows up and dies inside a window of time that may not hit two full minutes), offering some adventurous incident on the way to Skeleton Island/Treasure Planet (a hugely whimsical black hole, motivating a disaster setpiece), and cutting down on the number of moving parts (Delbert and Amelia are both new characters, sharing the function of three secondary characters from the novel).  I'll stake this much: I like it better than the novel, and you may lay to that, if for no other reason than because this screenplay does not use the construction "you may lay to that" as a verbal tic for Silver, let alone nineteen fucking times, as the book does (he does say "by thunder!", which is awesome); beyond that, Treasure Island is pretty damned slow to start, and it's not ideal that when it does, it's a novel mainly about superficial characters trotting back and forth across an island, and sometimes switching places, like "Bunker Hill Bunny."  Honestly, I don't really enjoy Stevenson's prose, though to what degree this involves the addling effect of nautical jargon and pirate brogue, which I expect are things many readers like about it, I couldn't say.  It has a good central conflict, and that's what Treasure Planet seizes upon; eventually, it even has some good action.  Jim killing Israel Hands is a pretty good passage, though give Clements and Musker some credit for managing their own, analogous scene in such a way that it's simultaneously a classic "Disney death" and a commentary on that (the villain falls to his death, but, with that neat gravity, he falls in the opposite direction one usually does), while simultaneously making it quite clear that our 15 year old hero ended his adversary on purpose, possibly with more malice aforethought than Stevenson's Jim did when he unloaded dual-wielded pistols into a man's face instinctually.  (Extra points, too, for having a nice horror-inflected—Alien-inflected, even—chase to preface this scene with.)  But none of that is the real improvement.

Still, I said there were serious problems, and even being very forgiving, they wreck large parts of the movie; the good news is that they're largely bunched up in the first third, which is also the bad news, because I expect they put the viewer in a bad mood before things ever have the chance to improve.  Essentially, this is a film with only one genuinely good character, its chief villain, John Silver, and our hero is appealing almost exclusively as a reflection of Silver; the second-best character, arguably, is Silver's parrot-analogue, Morph (Dane Davis), a comedy relief shapeshifter (it's worth noting here that the "Genie" function, perhaps not intentionally on Clements and Musker's part, is replicated here, and split between three separate characters), and this ambiguously-sapient being's comic relief shtick is to sassily repeat lines of dialogue it's heard with a slight twinge of sarcasm.  I'm not even really being that snarky: Morph is actually (mildly) funny, by virtue of not being insisted upon as hilarious (he's also a superb shortcut to hint at Silver's tenderer qualities).  Further, given that Morph is a shapeshifter whose basal form is a few ounces of viscous pink slime, I'd own the creature as the most un-Disney sidekick imaginable, in that it feels unusually resistant to Disney marketing it as a toy.  But I've done no research on this matter, and perhaps I underestimate them.

In any case, Jim's reasonably fine, if sort of annoyingly calculated in his turn-of-the-millennium complexion.  Still, one benefit of coming to Treasure Planet much later is that things that were embarrassing in 2002 can be appreciated as a time capsule in 2024.  So my least favorite thing about Jim isn't his sci-fi skateboarding, nor his awful bowlcut/ponytail hair, nor even the use of an album cast-off from a post-grunge act that could be any combination of personnel from the Gin Blossoms, Soul Asylum, Collective Soul, Better Than Ezra, or the Caulfields—oh, it's John Rzeznik, of the Goo Goo Dolls, but would you know?—to sell Jim's big feelings montage; no, it's that his character design for some reason includes these two little groove-like facial wrinkles, painted in CAPS, but very inconsistently, so that unless you're paying very close attention to his face, which I wasn't till running through the commentary, it looks like he's supposed to have a scar that keeps maddeningly shifting location.

Well, Jim gets much better, but he's unfocused until he arrives in Silver's orbit, and that's not till some ways in, so until our primary cast can find their way onto the stage—especially after Sarah exits (who has the benefit, under the supervision of Jared Beckstrand, of answering the odd question, "what would Ariel look like grown up, if she spent her entire life constantly frowning?")—the film is dominated, instead, by a deeply annoying secondary cast.  Delbert and Amelia are, at a minimum, egregious wastes of their voice actors: I love Pierce, but he's spending most of his time either hewing to an irritating script (often an extremely bogus "comic" gimmick of mixing up words, such as "astronomical" and "anatomical," in an exchange that also doubles as "flirting"), or coming up with new ways to improvise irritations of his own, and it's baffling how bad Delbert is, considering he's just Niles Crane; Thompson is worse, locked inside a rather unlikeable stereotype of prim, condescending aristocratic sea captaincy, though it's hard to disentangle her off-putting performance from the basic truth that Amelia boasts possibly the single most viscerally objectionable major female character design in any Disney movie.  She's a catgirl, if you described that concept to someone who'd never seen a cat, or perhaps a girl.  Like much else it's very deliberate so you can't say they're "failing," but it's hard not to perceive it as someone else's fetish being pursued, and either way, it repulses me, whether or not—even because—Ken Duncan is still applying his skill as an animator of women (Meg in Hercules, Jane in Tarzan) to this perversion thereof, a noodle-bodied thing with legs terminating in needlepoints and a skull that seems to have been flattened under a hydraulic press till her eyes partially popped out, that smashed face nonetheless armed with an endless parade of smug smirks to go along with the audible smug smirks that Thompson's providing on her behalf.  (For the record, I do not like Delbert's design, either, but his canid dork isn't so aggressive.)  Well, the secondary cast gets better mostly because they are obliged to recede, once the actual movie finally starts; maybe this happens exactly when Scroot secretly assassinates Arrow, which has the added bonus of blunting the excessive parts of Thompson's performance, so that I have to wonder how Amelia managed to aggravate me so much inside of only, like, ten minutes.

Or, honestly, it's just when Silver appears, and this where Treasure Planet begins using Treasure Island as a jumping off point rather than just presenting it in its solarpunk idiom, repurposing a dynamic that's rather more like two men saying "ha! well met!" to one another in the book (and itself still doesn't even kick off till the 216th page of 283 in my edition), and doing something much richer, emotionally.  It benefits from a really swell vocal turn from Murray, chewing over the film's most/only "Stevensonesque" dialogue, scaled back somewhat from the novel and, more importantly, delivered in ways that hearing it is is more pleasurable than reading it; the advent of Silver (and of Murray himself) also offer Levitt the opportunity to start doing something more than merely being sullen or briefly excited, as Jim initially seeks to reveal the traitor in their midst, then relaxes his guard as the old salt proves to be a friend and mentor, only for Jim to learn he was right the first time while hanging out in that old fruit barrel, which is intensely cruel in this iteration of Treasure Island since its story has placed Jim about ten seconds away from accidentally calling Silver "daddy."  And I'm being glib there, but this is great, great enough to blot out a sort of terrible first act, and sufficient to attach some huge emotional stakes to the zappy-zap space adventure (that has, in the bargain, been streamlined from Treasure Island, so it's whole lot less meandering), especially since Silver was, himself, also about ten seconds away from calling Jim "son."

This, more than anything, makes Treasure Planet; even its detractors tend to be kinder to this part of it, which just plain works, thanks especially to Glen Keane, whose supervision of Silver is the film's one unquestionable artistic triumph, while also serving as a swan song of sorts for Disney's greatest animator's traditional animation career.  (We'll see Keane once more, for an even more awe-inspiring swan song; but it shall not be sung in the same medium.)  Silver's likewise the one perfectly outstanding design, this very sloppy sack of fat and loose skin—he's sort of gross, but in a proper "old drunken pirate" register—that can shift from an affable, yammering blob to a cold solid mass of physical danger in an instant, while Keane is very willing to act towards the camera, showing the dark scheming mastermind behind Silver's exterior—still always having a great deal of pure fun with his blatant insincerity—as well as the constant evolution towards a conscience, or at least real paternal affection for Jim, that pains him with regret.  (And just as with Murray and Levitt, Keane gives Jim's supervisor, John Ripa, more to work with, too.)  And I've maybe even buried the lede, since Silver's an experiment, on top of everything, with Keane tasked with not only incorporating the complicated psychology of a sympathetic villain but also an entirely different technology, with Eric Daniels, a CGI man who'd worked closely with Keane on Tarzan, now working even more closely with him to integrate Silver's painted-CGI cybernetic leg, arm, eye, and ear, a combination that moves miraculously seamlessly, given its novelty, and gives the antagonist only the barest gloss—a productive one—of the weird and uncanny.  And while I guess that it's possible that Daniels could tell me, "no, no, it was rigorously worked out," his magic metal multitool of an arm certainly fits with Clements and Musker's "aren't science fiction and fantasy the same thing?" approach, though it is legitimately fun as source of gags as well as action-adventure peril.

Treasure Planet acquits itself well on those action-adventure merits (perhaps better than those merits deserve, thanks to the wonderfully swashbuckly, sometimes spacey and twinkingly-Horneresque James Newton Howard score undergirding it).  Yet, unfortunately, this requires us to swerve back, at the end, into "Treasure Planet is a mess of the good and the bad"; the basic skeleton of the adventure is fine, even if Flint's Forbidden Planet planet tricked out with Star Trek: TNG Iconian gateway technology almost feels too underbaked, an idea existing to mechanically motivate an exciting ending rather than an idea anyone thought had intrinsic value—not that that's necessarily awful—and also even if when this adaptation's Ben Gunn shows up, by way of the robotic B.E.N. (Martin Short), and we get the last aspect of Genie not covered by "shapeshifter" or "mentoring friend," namely "potentially-annoying celebrity comedian," Short largely lives up to that potential.

The big problem, which is a film-long one, is that Treasure Planet sort of looks... "like shit" is far too brusque, but maybe "not entirely finished" isn't.  Disney's short-lived Deep Canvas painted CGI background system, which had debuted to such intoxicating effect back in Tarzan, now gets its second and final real workout, after a ginger deployment in Atlantis, and next subtler, then cartoonier uses in the two films that closed out WDFA's brief "Deep Canvas" era, Brother Bear and Home On the Range.  Clements and Musker's excellent layout supervisor, Rasoul Azadani, is doing his usual strong job of keeping the movie's action swift-moving, yet clearly-expressed; but he is also exceeding, through overambition, what I guess Deep Canvas backgrounds were actually capable of, which seems wrong because we've seen what it was capable of on Tarzan, which is by any metric even more kinetic and in-your-face about camera movement.  I can only speculate that natural backdrops were better-suited to the technology than Treasure Planet's mostly artificial ones, but between some very gaudy camera movements that can look like a first-person video game, and painted CGI backdrops that frequently bely their construction inside a computer, there's a consistent impression of unlikeable fuzziness (and that's when it's not just bearing its naked CGI skin wantonly, through a translucent film of pixels that barely indicates "paint").  It sometimes keeps the character animation from gelling with it at all; it can drag down the backdrops that aren't invoking Deep Canvas's 3-D powers, apparently painted to conform to that undercooked aesthetic, and come off cheap and hasty—a couple dozen brushstrokes when somebody asked for "a ship's cabin."  (One last nitpick, too: why does Jim have to be a cabin boy?  He's your fucking employer.)  On the other hand, there's some lovely, lovely effects, that only digital animation made possible, even preciously subtle ones, like lighting bending accurately through the angles of a beveled glass window in tandem with a still-moving camera, or the subdued firelight dancing across a scene.

But that's ultimately what's dragging Treasure Planet down from any thoroughgoing claim to greatness: like I said, it looks stupid and lame until you agree to ignore that, and on top of that, frequently enough it's a significant burden, it looks bad, which you won't be able to ignore, nor should you have to.  Add in some tedious characters, and a first act that's more like a chore, and I still very well understand why I didn't like it, and why many people do not.  But despite the headwinds, the good in it has become, for me, pretty impossible to dismiss, even if it complicates the whole "WDFA goes to pot" narrative that's the easiest way to describe that incarnation of Disney animation's final years.

Score: 7/10

*In 2009, Mars Needs Moms did even worse than those, though Disney was only partially on the hook for that budget.