Titan (below) Average Entertainment
Now Don Bluth and associates have brought Titan AE to the screen. Its story: the Earth is destroyed by the Dredj, a species which has it in for Homo Sapiens for no apparent reason. Those few humans who escape are scattered about the galaxy. The plot revolves around a nineteen year-old jerk who is Luke Skywalker suffering a severe case of asshole-itis. He's voiced by Matt Damon. Fifteen years previous he was seperated from his father, who was deeply involved in the "Titan" project. A cohort of jerk's father comes a-callin' and wants Jerk Boy to accompany him in finding the Titan. OK, fair enough.
The crew consists of a turtle-like nerd, a female kangaroo-ish PMS-to-the-max with the most bowlegged legs you can imagine, a Jar-Jar Binks without the Steppin Fetchit attitude, and the token babe who's voiced by Drew Barrymore. They engage in typical cliched crew member banter as they head off to see the Wizard, uh, find the Titan.
The animation is a combination of CGI backgrounds and objects combined with 2D drawn and painted characters. The effect is not as jarring as you'd think it'd might be. When the jerk zooms his Lobo-like rocket bike amongst debris as he twists, turns, and rolls, you're in for a static rollercoaster ride. On the other hand, the painted characters move in remarkably clumsy manner (were they rotoscoped from filmed actors? Dunno.) as they "dart" around. The lip synchronization is nothing to write home about either.
While the story is simplistic to no end, I do have to give Titan AE kudos for the "ice crystal" sequence. Two spaceships play cat and mouse with their ships being reflected off huge ice crystals. The scenario is vaguely like Kirk versus Khan in the nebula during the second Trek flick. You've never seen anything quite like this sequence.
More kudos for having the Dredj speak in their own gibberish and we get subtitles. I for one am way tired of every species in the galaxy conversant in English.
On the other hand, big nonkudos for the utterly simplistic and completely trivial story. Given how animation allows you to animate literally anything, I think it's fair to criticize the producers for settling on such a lame story. No big battles. No cast of thousands. Instead, Titan AE is basically a copy-and-paste of other SF movies. Plus Raiders of the Lost Ark supplying a key plot point.
When the movie reaches its climax, the first thought I had was, Gee, too bad God couldn't be that productive. I won't ruin what I'm alluding to, so you'll have to see the flick for what I'm reffing.
All in all, pretty poor. One
can only hope that this is not the end of straight-forward animated
stories. If not, I have two great candidates: The Forever
War by Joe Haldeman, a truly great SF novel and
movie
Nexus
, which while not currently being published, is certainly one
of the finest SF comic books to reach the market. Steve Rude,
the artist and co-creator has a style which just begs to be
animated. One can only hope that this misfire won't kill the
genre.