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Disney's annual summer animation extravaganza has the misfortune of opening less than 30 days after Shrek bowed to rave reviews and boffo box office. The DreamWorks film is certainly a hard act to follow, but Atlantis: The Lost Empire has one other thing working against it: It's simply nowhere near as entertaining. (This is the second year in a row that DreamWorks kicked Disney's ass in the Battle of Summer Animation - it was the wonderful Chicken Run versus the stupid Dinosaur in 2000.)
Sure, you could say Atlantis is being unfairly compared to Shrek (the former uses standard animation while the latter opted for cutting-edge computer animation). You could just as easily blame the whole thing on Disney, who hired the directors (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise) and writer (Tab Murphy) responsible for The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was arguably the Mouse House's biggest summer animation flop in years. But my finger points at comic book creator Mike Mignola. The author of Hellboy has to be the person responsible for filling a Disney cartoon with uncharacteristic violence, superhero dialogue, sci-fi fantasy scenarios and scantily clad women with, uh, positive attributes. They even unspooled early scenes of Atlantis at a comic book convention last summer.
It's not like Disney didn't exert the effort to make Atlantis into a decent film. They even went so far as to get the guy who developed phony dialects for Star Trek to make up an Atlantian language and also brought in hotter-than-hot writer Joss Whedon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (he, too, has connections to comic books) to punch up Murphy's script. This could explain why Atlantis seems so similar to the dud that permanently closed the doors of rival Fox's animation studios last year. That's right - Whedon also had a screenwriting credit on the dismal Titan AE. What's more, Atlantis shares more than a few similarities to Warner Brothers' critically acclaimed underachiever The Iron Giant, which, like Titan and Atlantis, strayed more toward dark drama than the lighthearted musicals we had been getting spoon-fed by Disney on an annual basis. Are the forefathers of animation scrambling to keep up with the times? It sure looks like it, but right now they seem to be running in place.
After a quick prologue that shows the advanced civilization of Atlantis (they had spaceships, even) being wiped out by a giant wave, the film flashes forward to 1914 Washington, D.C., where a nerdy Christopher Columbus wannabe named Milo Thatch (voiced by Michael J. Fox) is about to pitch a proposal to his stuffy museum colleagues (led by David Ogden Stiers). Milo, the wiry laughingstock of the museum, wants his superiors to finance an expedition to find the lost city of Atlantis, but they pooh-pooh him away, saying that he's just as silly as his dead grandfather.
But armed with Grandpa's lucky hat and fat journal, Milo finds an old, yoga-loving kook (John Mahoney) to bankroll his voyage into the briny deep. Before you know it, Milo is being whisked away in a state-of-the-art submarine, complete with a crew that must have been assembled by the Rainbow Coalition. There's a powerfully gentle black doctor (Phil Morris), a Latino mechanic (Jacqueline Obradors), a gravelly-voiced octogenarian (Florence Stanley), a hillbilly (the deceased Jim Varney), an Italian who sounds like a stereotypical Father Guido Sarducci-type (Don Novello, of course) and an unwashed Frenchman with flies constantly buzzing around him (Corey Burton). The sub is led by Commander Lyle T. Rourke (James Garner) and his icy sidekick, Helga Sinclair (Claudia Christian).
Their journey includes a Leviathan attack that reduces the crew from 200 men to just a couple dozen, but that all hardly matters when Milo and company finally find Atlantis, which is still a thriving metropolis full of folks with dark skin and white hair (in other words, a city crawling with Bob Barker clones). Milo meets King Kashekim Nedakh (Leonard Nimoy) and instantly falls in love with his daughter, Princess Kida (Cree Summer), whose mother was lost during the whole wave thing. There's a lot of talk about a special light, a mysterious power source and the "Heart of Atlantis," but not much makes sense until Rourke and Helga reveal themselves to be mercenaries who have come in search of Atlantis' energy supply so they can sell it to the Kaiser.
As if that wasn't dumb enough, there are a few subtitled scenes, loads of gunplay and a body count that rivals Pearl Harbor's. Atlantis is way too complicated for kids and just too dull for adults. There might be a very narrow age demographic that could enjoy it, like boys between the ages of 9.31 and 9.44 - and, of course, 13-year-old boys, who will probably get a funny feeling after gazing upon the women.
1:30 - PG for action violence
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