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

Friday Flop: Adrian Lyne's 9&1/2 WEEKS

 Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke. Dir. Adrian Lyne, MGM, 1986 Style over sex, minus substance. That's a glib summation/dismissal of Adrian Lyne's 1986 blockbuster erotic drama, but it's not unfair or inaccurate. I took copious notes on this movie, most relating to some way Lyne and screenwriter Zalman King failed to make the film daring, dark, perverse, bold, or even a little erotic.  I noted, many times, that as an artifact of Hollywood's attempt to make sex-movies for an adult audience after home video made hardcore porn available to everyone, 9&1/2 WEEKS fascinates and depresses in equal measure. It's aesthetically fascinating, sociologically depressing. Lyne delivers a hyperstylized, superficial imagining of the US audience's "freaky" side and it's all pretty standard, you're-not-kinky-if-you-use-the-word-kinky kind of stuff.  Allegedly dom/sub-themed, both the film and the fantasies it trades in define predictable. A little gaslighting...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grasshoppers & Nazis: Bob Fosse's Cabaret

 Liza Minelli, Michael York, Joel Grey, Fritz Weppert. Dir. Bob Fosse, Warner Bros., 1972 Once upon a time in the '80s, I wrote a paper for a college English class deconstructing the fable of the ant and the grasshopper, coming down on the side of the grasshopper with both feet. The grasshopper, I argued, is humankind's wanderlust, its irrepressible need to go new places and meet people and have adventures with them (or at least drinks), to be in and of moments, to laugh and feel good and not worry, and that, I argued, is the best of us. We need the grasshoppers to remind us life is beautiful when it is lived.  Back then, I hung around with grasshoppers, though I'm not sure I was one. The real grasshoppers I knew took to the air and seldom, if ever, returned. Their adventures took them everywhere but back to Short Vine Street, Cincinnati, anytime between 1987 & 1993. I loved to hear their wild tales when they did alight there again for a few days, but I had to make su...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fill in the '80s: Peter Bogdonovich's Mask

 Cher, Eric Stoltz, Sam Elliott, Laura Dern. Dir. Peter Bogdonovich, Universal, 1985 As I've noted, my movie addiction starts with my parents taking me to see Disney's Bedknobs&Broomsticks when I was four years old. I spent the '70s seeing any movie I could, mostly Disney and other kid-friendly fare, peppered by notable exceptions like The Sting, Jaws, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. In the '80s, my teenage and young adult years, I began to see more adult-themed movies and started watching with a somewhat more critical eye. I have since compiled a list of every '80s movie I've seen.  It's a long list. All the usual suspects are on it. The classic '80s fare, the Purple Rains and Red Dawns and Top Guns and so forth predominate. Whenever I go out scavenging, I always keep an eye out for '80s titles I have not seen or have but do not own. I regard the unseen ones as pieces of a picture puzzle I've been filling in for 40 years. Last night, I fitted ...
Post a Comment
Read more