Treasure Planet may be no classic, yet it's one more bit of Classics Illustrated to be plundered by Michael Eisner's pirates, joining the likes of last year's Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas, among other famous tales and myths wrought big, bold, bright and deafening just in time for the holidays. From the press kit: "Treasure Planet games for PlayStation 2, GameBoy Advance and PC available from Disney Interactive." The movie, apparently, comes from Disney Hyperactive. The press notes, sent to reviewing media, read like a technical manual; Disney's eager to impress with its advances in animation, tossing out references to such things as the "Deep Canvas," "the CAPS system" and "virtual sets." This is in case a critic mistakes animation for live action -- like, say, George Lucas.
Without question, Treasure Planet dazzles and delights, like a billion bits of gold bullion strewn about the caves of a rampaging buccaneer. The movie makes tangible the imagination, even if it also serves to do all our thinking and dreaming and oohing and aahing for us. (It's very impressed with itself, and has every right.) This is why kids will never again read anything, save for Harry Potter doorstops; how can black words on a white page ever live up to their widescreen expectations (or larger -- the movie's simultaneously being released on IMAX screens)? Even Disney's aware of this, though we're not sure what to make of the opening scenes in which young Jim Hawkins (voiced by Austin Majors, then 3rd Rock From the Sun's Joseph Gordon-Levitt when he turns 15) is seen "reading" a three-dimensional pop-up book that looks just like the film we're about to see. It doesn't feel like a knowing joke, at least, nor does most of the movie, which takes its broad comic cues from Frasier's David Hyde Pierce, as the clumsy canine-featured Doctor Doppler, and Short's obnoxious B.E.N., a robot who appears to be the distant cousin to Futurama's wisecracking Bender. In an almost-great film, they merely grate.
Once more, in Disneyland, ours is a protagonist from a broken home: Jim's dad has disappeared, and his put-upon mother, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf), is stuck running a pitiful inn -- running it straight into the ground. (Apparently, someone at Disney is working out some abandonment issues; rare is a film from the studio in which a child comes from a stable, two-parent home.) Jim is as reckless as he is restless, piloting his airborne surfboard into endless trouble with robocops; he's not a little bit reminiscent of Luke Skywalker, hoping to pilot his bored behind off the miserable rock he calls home.
He gets his chance when a monstrous stranger deposits an orb that casts a magnificent treasure map, his golden ticket to endless riches. It also comes with a warning to beware the cyborg, who turns out to be one John Silver (Brian Murray), not merely a villain but also Jim's would-be surrogate father -- the Darth to his Luke, a not entirely inappropriate comparison in a film that gleams and glistens like the Star Wars prequels and comes with its own star port populated by intergalactic freakies. There's also a would-be mother, Captain Amelia (Emma Thompson), who's quite the pussy . . . cat, dolled up in thigh-high boots and an imperious wardrobe that suggests she's quite good at purring orders. You get the feeling when underground cartoonist Robert Crumb goes to sleep, this is what he dreams about.
Unlike, say, Atlantis, with its cobbled-together mythology, Treasure Planet offers no narrative surprise; it's a boy-seeks-treasure tale even older than Harrison Ford. But co-directors and writers John Musker and Ron Clements (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Hercules) doll it up so marvelously you're sucked into the screen and forced to confront the fact that at their best, these filmmakers can make the two-dimensional astonishingly warm and full-bodied (rare is the cartoon populated by characters you actually care about). It's Captain Blood by way of N.C. Wyeth (who illustrated one of the myriad versions of Treasure Island) by way of Nintendo, a ride at a theme park wrought grand and glorious by men who know how to dust off musty epics and render them spectactular-spectactular. If only someone would have pushed John Rzeznik, provider of bad alterna-ballads, and Martin Short off a very short plank; then you'd really have something.
