Treasure Planet 2002

[6.3/10] Treasure Planet is basically “Daddy Issues: The Movie.” The movie subtly suggests (at times, not so subtly), that Jim Hawkins was a young man with a bright future and thirst for adventure until his dad left. Without that paternal support, he became a troublemaker and, as the robo-cops describe him, a loser. Then, John Silver entered his life and, despite his double-crossing nature and roughness around the edges, filled that fatherly need. That allows Jack to heal from his lingering scars from his dad’s abandonment and, with the right instruction and encouragement from his surrogate pirate papa, become his best and most capable self.

It’s a sweet idea and, ultimately, a sweet relationship. There’s just one problem with it -- half of it just doesn’t work. Long John Silver is a revelation of design, animation, character, and performance. Jim Hawkins stumbles and, in some places, outright fails on all the same measures.

Silver is the duplicitous pirate with a heart of gold, who ultimately chooses his friendship with the promising young lad over the heaps of treasure he’s chased his entire life. His cybernetic enhancements -- from his analyzing eye, swiss army knife arm, and pneumatic leg -- distinguish him immediately as a physical presence. The animators give him deliberate but fluid movements and gregarious but subtly menacing expressions. And Brian Murray spills out the high seas lingo, colorful exaggeration, and warm acceptance in a way that gives the old sea dog real life. Silver is the best part of the film, and it shows.

But Jim is a drip, and worse yet, he’s our protagonist. His bland design reeks of what a bunch of middle-aged dudes think “the kids” would find cool these days: floppy hair, a pony tail, an earring, a space-faring skateboard, and so on and so on. His moody teen affect is a bore from the jump. He grabs a few moments of memorable kinetic ness when he rides his skiff at the beginning and end of the film. But for the most part, he’s just a generic, vaguely action-y kid, with little to distinguish him in appearance, writing, or delivery to make him memorable, or really anything beyond a cinematic container for young boys to pour themselves into.

His look contributes to the way Treasure Planet seems dated in a way few entries in the Disney canon are. His quasi-Boy Band haircut and skater-y inclinations drip with passe nineties hipness. The one song with lyrics in the picture is a syrupy bit of turn-of-the-millennium alternative rock that scans as immediately out of place. Worse yet, the efforts to composite 2-D and 3-D animation play out as mistuned and occasionally even jarring.

That’s the most frustrating thing about this movie. At times it is utterly gorgeous to look at. The film’s animation team comes up with a host of neat designs for the motley miscreants who populate the RLS Legacy and other far-flung locales. A mid-movie action-packed escape from Black Hole utilizes the space-bound setting to create challenges and images that command the eye. The colors of the cosmos, the playful montaged misadventures of Hawkins and Silver, and the shape-shifting delights of the parrot equivalent, Morph, stun and delight, mainly when the 2D and 3D elements are kept separate.

But when Treasure Planet tries to combine them, the results are stiff and jarring. It’s ambitious to try to meld the hand-drawn world that Disney had all-but perfected with the digital one it was still dipping its toes into, but it’s an uneasy marriage. Two-dimensional characters often look like moving stickers plastered onto three dimensional scenes. Computer-generated backgrounds and traditionally animated figures don’t mesh well, detracting from the immersiveness of the images on screen. And B.E.N., apart from just being an annoying presence, is a visually distracting one, given how his cel-shaded state between the two modes of animation only relegates him to the Uncanny Valley.

Some of that might not loom so large if the story were better paced or more engaging. While the quintet of writers were somewhat boxed in by Stevenson’s original narrative, the movie has a hard time generating investment in Hawkins’s plight or mission, and then barrels through most of the adventure. Little of Treasure Planet feels streamlined, with us instead lingering on early extended character development for Hawkins that amounts to little, before it’s off to the races. What follows is a mad dash from arrival to near-catastrophe to mutiny to escape to discovery to....escape again, with little time for any of it to have real meaning or impact.

As an adventure, it’s just paper thin. The treasure map just falls into Hawkins’s lap and much of the ensuing excitement happens to him, almost at random, rather than because of him. The basic character motivations are clear, but not particularly deep. And it’s rare that Silver’s choices, as headstrong and raring to go as he’s supposed to be, actually drive the action beyond coincidence and contrivance.

Some of the characters buoy that plot of convenience. Dr. Doppler is basically just David Hyde Pierce playing Niles Crane again, but Niles Crane is funny and charming and so is Doppler. Emma Thompson instills dignity and a certain softness to the captain which helps paper over the way she’s nevertheless toppled by scallywags. And as annoying as Martin Short is in the now-traditional celebrity sidekick role, Morph more than makes up for it with his Looney Tunes-esque visual panache.

With those personalities in tow, Treasure Planet works best as a weightless adventure with some ambitious, if often wonky-looking animation. If all you want is a heap of players darting across the galaxy in a grand, intergalactic schooner, this film has you covered. The problem is that it can never quite muster that extra Disney magic, of an engrossing story or a worthy lead or a more unified visual presentation to wow or endear.

The closest it comes is in that central relationship. There’s a worthwhile story to be told of a young man growing up without a dad and finding his way with the help of a questionable but ultimately loving substitute father figure. There’s a worthwhile story to be told of a cutthroat pirate who recognizes greatness in a young man where no one else does, who cultivates it and preserves it at the cost of his own life’s work because he can’t help but love the kid.

Treasure Planet only really tells one of those stories, or at least only tells one of those stories well. So we’re left with a movie that seems as unbalanced between its would-be father and son, the past and the future, and its CGI and hand-drawn elements, as a teetering, wayward ship that can just barely stay afloat.