Skip to main content

Anatomy of a flop: Walt Disney's Treasure Planet

 Voices of David Gordon Levitt, Emma Thompson, David Hyde Pierce, Brian Murray, Michael Wincott. Dir. John Musker & Ron Clements, Disney, 2002

I experience a perverse temptation, upon viewing a famous flop, to perform an exhaustive post mortem, drilling down to the minutia to explore why something which must have looked so promising in development failed so totally to deliver. It's overkill, though, and the flop, already a study in said, fails to merit that much effort. In the case of Disney's 43rd animated feature, the most expensive traditionally-animated picture in history (budgeted at $140M it took in $38M in the US, making it one of the most expensive flops ever), Treasure Planet's failure proves almost too easy to explain. 

Utilizing traditional 2D animation over top of 3D digital, Treasure Planet's visuals and set pieces showcase Disney at near-top form. It's a breathtaking, beautiful film. Emma Thompson, South African voice actor Brian Murray (as John Silver), and Roscoe Lee Brown transcend the mundane screenplay and flat performances of most of the cast. A musical montage featuring a song written and composed by Goo Goo Dolls's Jonny Rzeznick works better than I could possibly have expected. These spell the sum total of the movie's attributes.

Its debits encompass everything else. Beauty without a point, spectacle lacking a compelling context or story grows gradually less arresting. Treasure Planet's thrilling animation fails to lift the disinterested performances of most of the cast to a height where its flaws stop mattering. All this useless beauty. 

Joseph Gordon Levitt (as Jim Hawkins) sounds like a bored actor not a sullen teenager. David Hyde Pierce does what he does in all of his voice work, playing amorous, tongue-tied, klutzy Dr. Niles Crane. Martin Short as B.E.N., a hyperactive, manic robot, repurposes his Ed Grimley shtik in a shrill, manic performance more annoying than imaginative. Michael Wincott, a usually-reliable villain (he played the main baddie in The Crow) sneers and snarls but never evinces a second of menace. 

Hollywood has a vile tradition of killing off a film's sole black character as soon as possible, and Disney does it, too, throwing Roscoe Lee Brown's First Officer, Mr. Arrow, overboard in the second act. C'mon Disney. You're better than that. 

Not that the above ends up mattering. Following Treasure Island's narrative slavishly, Treasure Planet adds nothing new to a story most know well. As Roger Ebert opined in 2002, setting Treasure Island in space amounts to no more than gimmickry. Sumptuous, eye-popping gimmickry remains gimmicky. All the direction team's visual flourishes fail to elevate Treasure Planet to its place in the Disney pantheon. Treasure Planet looks fantastic, but a viewer would do much better to order a copy of the studio's 1950 live-action version than suffer through this uninspired mess. A state of the art, sumptuous action film turns out to be a boring, one dimensional failure. That's the kiss of death in action-filmland. (And in my house, too.) 

The movie succeeds only in failing to make good its considerable promise. Disney's animated movies seldom disappoint, but when they do they do it big. 

X marks the spot where moviegoers gave up and walked out on this fiasco, and where I decided making a cheese sandwich mattered more than muddling through Treasure Planet. Continue missing it if you can.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No Return:Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

 IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caesar. Dir. Stanley Kramer, MGM, 1963 I do not generally write about films I stop watching halfway. What's the point? I either have nothing positive to say about it or was in the wrong mood. In both cases I'm ignorant of its full length to perhaps do it justice. In the case of Stanley Kramer's 1963 comedy smash, however, I feel compelled to make an exception.  My problem with the movie is not my mood, nor disappointment because it's not the movie I once heard. In fact, my biggest problem is that I haven't heard it described in glowing terms, or any, since I was about 9. See, IAMMMMW used to air anually on one or another of the networks, often in December. My parents didn't care for it and never watched it, but my friends watched anytime it aired and talked about it in rapturous terms. Until about 9-10 years old, when it seemed to drop out of conversation, or conv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Junkie-fatigue: Taylor Hackford's Ray

 Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Terence Howard, Warwick Davis, Curtis Armstrong. Dir. Taylor Hackford, Bristol Bay/Universal, 2004 Jamie Foxx, nominated for both Supporting Actor and Best Actor at the 2004 Academy Awards, won Best Actor for Ray and, watching Ray tonight for the first time in about 15 years, I'm glad it went down that way. Tom Cruise gave a career-best performance in Collateral, for which Foxx received his Supporting Actor nod. It's a great performance, too, but no moreso than Cruise, ignored by the Academy, so it feels right to me that Foxx got his statuette for the movie where he didn't share the spotlight with a star of Cruise's magnitude. Not that it would make much difference if Foxx had some high-voltage costar in Ray, because the movie simply doesn't exist without Foxx and his essay of Ray Charles. Not unlike Coal Miner's Daughter, the other music biopic whose star picked up a Best Actor, Ray occurs from Ray's point of view, so ther...
Post a Comment
Read more

Obligatory TL;DR Statement of Purpose

 A not-so-brief explanatory note as to how this blog works: I can't recall a time when movies weren't my passion, my compulsion, my addiction. Ever since my parents took me to see Disney's Bedknobs&Broomsticks, I've been hopeless. Born in 1967, I grew up with free range parents. They took my brother and me to all kinds of movies, often using Hollywood as a babysitter. We saw movies about which many parents today would cluck their tongues (though nothing R-rated until I was 12. My first R-rated movie was MONTY PYTHON'S LIFE OF BRIAN.) Though my parents were professionals and we grew up affluent, our home saw its share of dysfunction. Dad was in the house, but not often present. Mom, stressed and disappointed at discovering her marriage wasn't an equal partnership, took out her frustrations on me.  Without getting too far into the weeds, let me just say my adult life has been far from typical middle class stability. I've never had a career. Never finished ...
3 comments
Read more