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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.

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