What would happen if you set Treasure Island in space? Well, that's a question that's been answered no less than three times in film, the latest being Disney's 2002 animated Treasure Planet. By far the most successful of all the films to use this concept, it was nonetheless a box office bomb and remains one of the least popular films in the Disney canon. Why do people keep coming back to this concept, then? The inherent postmodernism of it likely appeals more to college graduate filmmakers than to general audiences. Most people looking for a good movie don't go especially wild over the observation that sea adventure films are at heart the same kinds of stories as space operas. So all the correlation does, like postmodernism often does, is potentially frustrate attempts to suspend disbelief. It's a shame because the voice acting and the 2D animation are firing on all cylinders. The mix of cgi and hand drawn animation doesn't come off and seems dated, as you might expect, but the characters all have that classic Disney expressiveness. Glen Keane's animation for John Silver, along with Brian Murray's voice, create one of the best iterations of the famous character. The relationship between Silver and Jim Hawkins is slightly overdone but still very sweet. Yet, altogether, the film isn't the solid success of Lilo and Stitch and does nothing to eclipse Disney's own 1950 live action version of Treasure Island.
In some ways, Treasure Planet is more faithful to the novel than the 1950 film. The character of Jim's mother, voiced by Laurie Metcalf, is as prominent as she is in the book, though Treasure Planet makes her oddly sexy, looking almost about the same age as her son.
Jim's parents are totally absent from the 1950 film and Bobby Driscoll improbably seems to be running The Admiral Benbow by himself (though his mother is mentioned as being off in town). Both Jim's parents are present at the beginning of the book though his father dies a few chapters in, something which contributes to the lad's weakened nerves when Billy Bones dies almost immediately after. Treasure Planet hints that Jim's father abandoned Jim and his mother.
Jim's a decent, hardworking young man in the book and the 1950 film but Treasure Planet makes him a misfit who likes to ride a flying surf board at illegal speeds. Once again, Disney was evidently trying to capture the surfing or skate boarding crowd, as they did with Tarzan and Lilo and Stitch, but there's a healthy dose of Luke Skywalker here, too. Even with The Little Mermaid, Disney was imitating Star Wars a little, so it makes sense they would bring this character type finally to a male youth in a space opera. It's kind of funny that by the time Disney finally owned Star Wars they'd lost interest in rebellious youth, though of course Rey's parents also abandoned her.
Jim as a misfit instead of a straight arrow is one of the ways Treasure Planet redirects the focus of the original story, away from mystery and excitement, and toward irony and relationship drama.
So John Silver becomes Jim's surrogate father figure. This is something one can see in the 1950 film, more or less by default. Robert Newton as Long John Silver is so warm and charismatic, even as he's sinister and mysterious, all qualities that make his take definitive. The book really doesn't have that kind of relationship between the two characters, if anything the boy's father figure is Doctor Livesey. Treasure Planet gives an emasculated combination of Livesey and Trelawney called Doppler, voiced by David Hyde Pierce.
Jim is voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who's much better than Bobby Driscoll, and makes Jim the best male protagonist of a Disney film since Aladdin, being a more solidly established and developed character than Disney's Tarzan, Quasimodo, or Hercules. But it's really John Silver who steals the film. Keane's animation flows well with the character's cybernetic parts and the big and powerful frame of the man recalls Beast from Beauty and the Beast, animation also supervised by Glen Keane.
The film is less successful with its supporting characters, most of whom are either saddled with too much irony to support a sense of credibility in the events, or are outright annoying, like Morph. Morph is a shapshifting blob that replaces Silver's parrot. You can see the idea there--instead of just imitating voices, he imitates people's shapes. Morph appears to have animal level intelligence, which makes it creepy when he turns into tiny versions of the characters, something I don't think Disney intended.
And the film lacks the effective creepiness of the book and 1950 film. There's no Black Spot, there's nothing ominous about how the map's discovered, none of the phantasmagorical poetry of the book's dialogue and description. Instead the ironic jokes and the cgi undermine the atmosphere at every turn.
Somehow this formula worked much better in Lilo and Stitch. Maybe because there's something much subtler about the relationships between Lilo, Stitch, and Lilo's sister. It could be just that Treasure Planet has some god awful songs by John Rzeznik of The Goo Goo Dolls. Maybe it's that Lilo and Stitch was never really meant to be a story with a feeling of real stakes.
So concludes my coverage of Disney's sci-fi trilogy that consists of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Lilo and Stitch, and Treasure Planet.
Treasure Planet is available on Disney+.
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This is part of a series of posts I'm writing on the Disney animated canon.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio
Fantasia
Dumbo
Bambi
Saludos Amigos
The Three Caballeros
Make Mine Music
Fun and Fancy Free
Melody Time
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
Cinderella
Alice in Wonderland
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
Sleeping Beauty
101 Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Jungle Book
The Aristocats
Robin Hood
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Oliver & Company
The Little Mermaid
The Rescuers Down Under
Beauty and the Beast
Aladdin
The Lion King
Pocahontas
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hercules
Mulan
Tarzan
Fantasia 2000
Dinosaur
The Emperor's New Groove
Atlantis: The Lost Empire
Lilo and Stitch
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