Dear
audiences,
You will now be forever doomed to Disney cookie cutter animated movies. Although you'll try to convince yourself that the annual kiddie fare
this studio churns out isn't too bad, you'll know in your heart that actually, yes, it is. You'll be forever doomed to watching the emaciation of literary classics (Tarzan,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame). Or a full-scale history revisionism (Pocahontas,
The Road to El Dorado) that are close in scale to the sort of rewriting of history that the Soviets got up to when Stalin was still alive.
The Road to El Dorado? But that's not a Disney movie I can hear you protest. That's the problem: animated movies make big bucks at the US box office. Make that Disney animated movies, and the other movie studios anxiously want a slice of that lucrative pie. The Road to El Dorado is a Disney movie in all but name (it was made by Spielberg's DreamWorks outfit). It features the wholesale rewriting of history, is populated by obnoxiously cure furry animal sidekicks and the soundtrack is wall-to-wall Elton John songs.
Yes, musically the 'Eighties will never die. Hacks like Elton John, Tim Rice and Phil Collins will forever find work churning out sappy pop songs for vomit-o-rama epics like this because, yes, America, you didn't go to see
The Iron Giant and Titan A.E.
|
"An effort to bring audiences something different to the usual
Disney animated fare . . ." |
Now don't get me wrong:
Titan A.E. isn't a minor classic like Warner's Iron Giant (go rent this now!), but it is an effort to bring audiences something DIFFERENT to the usual Disney animated fare. In fact the movie isn't particularly original (it reminded one a lot of
Star Wars, The Phantom
Menace, Battlestar Galactica and other similar space operas) or technically revolutionary (at times the 2-D characters look out of place next to 3-D computer generated figures).
Also, to be honest I recently saw Ghost in the
Shell, a Japanese animated movie (made in the mid-1990s) in which the animation is a lot more impressive than
Titan A.E. - without a single computer generated figure in it! Despite this I enjoyed
Titan A.E. a lot more than I did any of the past few years of annual Disney offerings (this excludes the Pixar offerings like Antz and Toy Story).
You see, Titan A.E. did so poorly at the box office that they had to close down the studio division at Fox that made it. Now considering that that division's previous offering was the historically revisionist and vile Anastasia, one shouldn't maybe shed too many tears at its passing, but the lesson has probably been learnt by the rest of Hollywood: America wants Disney!
And Disney you will no doubt get. So, America, I don't ever want to hear you complain about how the annual Disney fare seems to be churned out by a computer, so formulaic it seems. And when they drag out yet another inappropriate topic for the Disney treatment (how about a musical set in Auschwitz?) and you have to explain what really happened to your kids, don't come running to me. I'll simply tell you that you should have shelled out your hard-earned bucks to go see
Titan A.E. In return you would have had an entertaining matinee fare munching away at your popcorn instead of heaving away into a a barf bag.
