Atlantis: The Lost Empire

Atlantis: The Lost Empire

Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire, is a bravura animated adventure with a doozy of a climax. It’s also an experiment for the studio. Leaving behind song-and-dance numbers and cute sidekicks, Disney seems to be trying on anime the visual and story style of those action-jammed Japanese cartoons that fill shelves in every video store, meaning somebody must be renting them.

The movie is set in 1914 because this is the favorite period for stories like this, when technology was fairly advanced but people could still believe that a sunken continent or lost world or two might have slipped through the cracks. Just as the “Jurassic Park” movies owe something (a lot) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Lost World,” so “Atlantis” springs from the old Edgar Rice Burroughs novels about a world at the center of the Earth.

(There is also Web discussion about how it springs even more directly from a 1989 Japanese anime named “Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.”) All such stories require a rich reclusive billionaire who will finance an expedition to the lost corners of the Earth, and this one has Preston Whitmore (voice by John Mahoney), who lives Citizen Kane style behind vast iron gates in an ominous citadel and puts together a team to go bottom fishing.

Whitmore summons linguist Milo Thatch (voice by Michael J. Fox) to join his expedition; he knew Milo’s grandfather, and entrusts him with an ancient notebook in which grandpa might have recorded the secret of Atlantis. Milo himself has spent much time trying to convince Smithsonian scientists about the possibility of a sunken continent; he works there as a janitor.

The diving team, which uses a sub Captain Nemo would envy, is led by roughneck Rourke (James Garner) and includes mixed bag adventurers such as Vinny the explosives man (Don Novello), who has voluptuous ambitions about blowing stuff up real good; Moliere the mole (Corey Burton), the digging expert; Rourke’s first mate Helga (Claudia Christian), a scheming vamp; Audrey the mechanic (Jacqueline Obradors); Dr. Sweet (Phil Morris); Cookie the cook (the late Jim Varney), and Mrs. Packard (Florence Stanley), who chain-smokes while handling communications.

Note that among this crew there are no dancing teacups, even though the film was directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, who made Disney’s wonderful “Beauty and the Beast.” Perhaps that is because of the influence of a comic book artist named Mike Mignola, previously unknown to me but described by my colleague Elvis Mitchell as the creator of an underground comic character named Hellboy; his drawing style may have something to do with the movie’s clean, bright visual look, which does not yearn for the 3-D roundness of “Toy Story” or “Shrek” but embraces instead the classic energy of comic-book design. This is especially visible in one of those movies where you really can’t predict how it’s going to end.

Fearsome robot sea monsters guard Atlantis and nearly wipe out the party before Rourke, Milo, and company reach the ocean floor in their sub (which gets there via a volcano), where Cree Summer’s Princess Kida befriends Milo. Her father (Leonard Nimoy) is the King who wants to banish the outsiders but she’s got eyes for him in a subplot that owes more than a little to The Little Mermaid.

The lost continent itself seems to be crying out for new blood not so much for population reasons (the citizens are 1,000 years old and going strong) as for ideas; this place has fallen into disrepair and apathy. Kida is something of a reformist herself, nudging her father to get off his throne and organize some public works projects.

Now about that closing sequence. If you remember the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast, you’ll recall how directors Trousdale and Wise liberating their characters not only from gravity but from the usual rules of animation, so that they careened thrillingly through the air. Multiply that several times over, and you can approximate the kind of explosive energy we sense confined within those printed KA-BOOM!s, KERRR ASSHHHH!, and THUNK!s of full-page-drawing action comic books where superheroes clash mightily over control of our very universe.

The tale here is rousing enough in an old pulp science fiction sort of way; it’s just at this point that it starts transcending itself to stand as one of all-time great animated action sequences. So will Atlantis mark some new direction for Disney animation? Doubtful: The synergy offered by animated musical comedies is simply too irresistible not only do they make money on their own terms but they also allow all these hit songs & stage shows to be spun off like so many plates atop poles of spin-off potential.

What Atlantis does offer is an indication that Disney’s willing to toy around with the anime tradition maybe in an attempt to lure those teenage action fans who’d otherwise avoid a cartoon? It’s as if 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea were set loose by animation to look just the way it had always dreamed of looking.

Watch Atlantis: The Lost Empire For Free On Gomovies.