Resurrecting Treasure Planet

   Wherever any given cinephile falls on the totem pole, they are certainly familiar with the idea of the film canon, this idea of an elect selection of films that signal the height of the artform's cultural value, touchstones for all who consider themselves good and true lovers of cinema. Films that belong to "the canon" are secure in continued cultural relevance even decades after their premiere.

   Any person's chosen reference for the canon will certainly vary between which list they believe carries the most authority (AFI Top 100, IMDb Top 250, The Academy Awards), or just as likely will synthesize a number of sources, but however any one person defines it, the canon is real, and it demands to be recognized.

          It will surprise some, baffle others, and offend others still, to think that Walt Disney Animation has its own film canon of sorts. Belonging to this selective society come with some very specific benefits: prominent display in advertisements for the company as a whole, commemorative anniversary panels at the biannual D23 expos, and increased coverage in the Disney parks including parade appearances and sometimes entire rides or lands. You used to have a strong sense of which films Disney itself believed to be higher-ranking among the list in what films were promoted as part of its Diamond Edition/Platinum Edition/Whatever Edition of home media releases. Again, in this particular case, the canon is decided basically exclusively by Disney itself--whatever movies it sees as the most profitable entries to promote--but the larger public tends to take their lead from Disney and center most of their discussion on these same films. I don't see that many Collider articles about The Aristocats.

            There’s a lot of debate among Disney enthusiasts as to which of these (as of this writing) 58 movies ought to be promoted to this club. Maybe you don’t care for Disney’s Cinderella adaptation but can’t see why the company doesn’t do more with its take on Robin Hood. As for what that deciding factor actually is, it feels a little reductive to point to “money” as the answer, but we also can’t ignore the dollar’s power in determining which movies are shoved to the front of the line (your Frozens and Lion Kings) and which are relegated to the bottom of the vault (your Fox and the Hounds and your Emperor’s New Grooves.)

            Take for example the 2002 Disney film, Treasure Planet. 

    Despite amassing a loyal following in the decades after its release, and despite being helmed by veteran Disney filmmakers, the movie is basically unrecognized by its parent company. In this case, money is the beginning and end of the conversation: Treasure Planet was not only the most expensive hand-drawn animated film, but also the biggest financial loss for Walt Disney Animation Studios, grossing only $110 M worldwide on a $140 M budget.

Disney will literally recognize Chicken Little, Song of the South
and the nameless lady rabbit from Bambi before they'll talk about Treasure Planet

           The thing about movies like Treasure Planet is that not only are there no theme park rides for said movies, but there isn’t a lot of discourse, critical or casual, around said movies. We’ve all read a million essays about why Beauty and the Beast isn’t about Stockholm syndrome, but who talks about Treasure Planet? Who cares about what Disney was trying to accomplish with this film? Who bothers trying to ask whether or not it actually succeeded from an artistic sense? Who talks about why this film that had so much going for it actually flopped as hard as it did? Who talks about Treasure Planet?

            Well . . . I would like to try.

    Something else to keep in mind is that no film canon is fixed, and while money tends to be ultimate determinant of what gets renewed conversation and what does not, the honor roll is full of films that did not find success in their initial run and rose to prominence later on, and I don't just mean the Disney canon. Mainstays of film culture like It's a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz, and even The Shawshank Redemption were essentially ignored upon release and found acclaim later on. If there were a specific ritual a film had to undergo in order to earn this redemption, we'd all probably sleep a lot more soundly, but I think that the genesis of this process is simply conversation, and that's what I'd like to start here today.

    So, let's figure out: what was Disney trying to pull off with Treasure Planet, did it succeed, and why did it still fail?

What Was Disney Trying to Do?

     First, some context.

     Many of Disney’s golden children came out during the period that Disney enthusiasts refer to as “The Disney Renaissance,” lasting from 1989 with The Little Mermaid to 1999 with Tarzan. Though Disney as a whole is probably enjoying the most financial success it’s ever known today, Walt Disney Animation Studios was living its best life in the 90s when movies like Aladdin and The Lion King went on to be the highest grossing films of their respective years and Disney songwriter Alan Menken collected his annual Oscars for best song and best score.

            By the late 90’s and early 00’s, Disney fatigue had set in with the masses just in time for studio Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to be evicted from the studio, rattling the company’s corporate structure. Katzenberg went on to form Dreamworks Animation while Pixar started to rise to prominence, and suddenly Disney no longer had the field all to itself. With increased competition and behind the scenes drama straining the studio, Disney films were garnering fewer awards and lower grosses. The real kick in the teeth was the financial and critical success of Dreamwork’s parodic Shrek in 2001 which claimed the first ever Oscar for best animated film. (Kaztenberg was probably living his best life in the 00’s watching his new empire bulldoze the company that let him go.) The studio had to innovate. Thus, Disney started looking beyond the realm of fairy-tale musicals for material to adapt. Why not a sci-fi remix of a famous adventure novel?

    Directors John Musker and Ron Clements had actually wanted to make Treasure Planet very early on in their directing careers at Disney. It was one of their original pitches in the same meeting that would launch them into production of The Little Mermaid. “Treasure Island in Space,” as it was called then, was a passion project that Ron and John wanted to move into production for years, a passion project that kept getting buried under more prioritized projects Aladdin and Hercules. It wasn't until after the release of the latter in 1997 that they were finally permitted to actively work on this project. 

    Why did they get the greenlight after all that time? Possibly because they had been patient and finally received their dues. But we can’t ignore that the project did fill a need for Disney’s new business strategy.

2000's Disney really wanted boys to think they were cool

        That this film stars a rebellious teenage boy with a rad ponytail and an awesome flying surfboard is no coincidence. Treasure Planet also came about during that time when Disney was desperately trying to earn favor with the boys under 8 demographic, in an age when the concept of The Disney Princess© was in its freshmen run. I don’t mean to play into the rhetoric of “the first time Disney ever made anything for boys,” because outside the princess posse there is actually an ample number of Disney films with male protagonists, but Disney did not have this market cornered they way they did with 8-year-old girls. This movie gave the company a swing at the pinata. 

            According to John Musker:

"In creating our version of the story, Jim was the hardest character to flesh out. We wanted him to be sort of introverted and have the typical problems of a teenage boy but not have that be off-putting in any way. We always pictured him as being at a crossroads in his life. He's a kid who has the potential to do great things with his life. But the potential also exists that he could go in the wrong direction and end up in a lot of trouble.”

            The science fiction playground was likewise new territory for the studio. Producer Roy Conli explains that this alchemy of sci-fi and classicalism is what made the film so primed for the medium of animation.

“If we’re going to do this film as a straightforward Treasure Island, it would be better to do it in live action. We all know what an 18th century galleon looks like. We all know what pirates would've looked like. We know what the rigging is and what not. If we were to do it as a straight forward futuristic, or what we envision as the "Alien" (1979) approach, or a "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) approach, we all know what stainless steel looks like, and we all know what pipes with steam jetting from them look like. You are then encumbered by certain visual images that have already been ensconced in our culture. And by taking this into a fantasy world, it gave us complete freedom in terms of visually of what we could do.”

Conli further explains more about the design methodology:

“There's the whole conceit of the design of what we call our 70/30 Law. Seventy percent of this film was going to be somehow old and steeped in the 18th century, while 30 percent of it would be new and fantastic. The art direction of the film is neither the past nor the present, nor the future, but its own world. It's almost as if Robert Lewis Stevenson had pulled an old dusty manuscript out of his drawer and had written ‘Treasure Island’ as a space fantasy from an 18th century standpoint.”

            Then there was also the innovation of computer animation which was radically changing the animation industry. Pixar was changing the game as a studio built entirely on computer animation, and while Dreamworks wouldn’t commit exclusively to computer animation for another year or so, they were still doing laps around the company with their CGI features. This film tried to make up the difference by employing “deep-canvas,” an animation method developed for Tarzan (1999) that integrated hand-drawn animation with the advantages of computer animation.

            Said art director Andy Gaskill: "Other films have used digital backgrounds before, what makes 'Treasure Planet' unique is the way we combined digital painting technology with 3-D modeling techniques. Our backgrounds became really fluid and we could move through them but still make them feel like they were paintings. In the case of virtual sets, we actually constructed 3-D sets in the computer and the camera could move freely within that set. It opened up all kinds of avenues for staging shots."

In this way, I'd say it actually ended up playing to the movie's advantage that Treasure Planet kept getting delayed. Hand-drawn animation took a massive leap in the ten-ish years after "Mermaid," such that by the time this thing was finally ready to ship out, the technology was there to bring this thing to life in all the depth and vividness required for a story this sweeping. 

Usually in flops as crippling as this, it’s easy to drop the blame at the feet of filmmakers not understanding the genre or medium (e.g. Cats) or waffling out something directionless and uninspired (e.g. Fantastic 4). Neither appears to be the case here. Everything suggests the creative team was genuinely trying to accomplish something creative visually, narratively, and emotionally. The question then becomes did this film succeed at what it was trying to do? Short answer: mostly. Long answer . . . 

 

Did Disney Succeed?

            The concept of writing a space epic as seen from a 1700’s perspective is a genuinely clever one, and the genre blending services the film very well. This opens the door to sequences like the ship escaping a black hole where a traditional pirates’ film might instead have the crew facing a storm. It’s in this sci-fi/fantasy world where a peg-leg pirate would become a cyborg. The result is familiar but novel.

            The sci-fi aspect permeates other facets of the film as well. Featuring an alien cast allows the team to code Doppler and Amelia as dog and cat while also letting them retain their humanoid characteristics. The concept of the “etherium,” the interstellar atmosphere that lets humans breathe in space, is kind of a cheat, but I also agree with Conli that having the characters swing from the mast wearing a metal balloon would have killed the mood. This is what animation does best: imagining stories across exciting new locales, especially those that aren’t easily rendered in live-action.

            And what of Jim Hawkins? The new face for hardcore Disney male leads?

    Much as I poke fun at Disney for trying to convince young boys to put down the Power Rangers and play with these toys instead, I recognize the significance of an animated movie depicting an adolescent boy struggling with feelings of insecurity and restlessness. This is a demographic that is most likely to dismiss animated films (especially Disney animated films) as “just for kids,” and as a result this crowd often denies itself the chance to see itself in the spectacular visual and emotional landscapes that animation can create. Funny enough, this is the demographic where this film would later find its most enthusiastic fans. The film is thoughtful in its presentation of a James Dean angsty teenage kid, letting Jim be genuinely rough around the edges while not forgetting to let him be human.

While Disney is no stranger to single-parent setups, Jim’s situation is different than your standard Disney protagonist. Jim’s dad wasn’t removed from the picture through an unspecified calamity or illness—he left. Jim watched his dad walk out on him and his mother. Musker further says of Jim, “Like all the characters in the film, Jim has a missing piece. He's incomplete in a sense because he is missing a relationship with his father.” Which brings us to the real treasure chest of this movie, Jim and Silver’s relationship.

This wasn’t Disney’s first depiction of a male-male mentorship, we’d seen them pull it off before with Mowgli and Baloo or Aladdin and Genie, but there's a unique texture to this relationship. Dr. Amy M Davis of the University of Hull says of this relationship:

“Though initially suspicious of Jim, Silver begins to feel sorry for the boy, and takes Jim under his wing: this combination of hard work and love—coming as it does in the form of a father figure of sorts—is just what Jim needs, and he begins to thrive, enjoying the responsibility and excitement of the voyage, as well as the chance to bond with someone whose dreams and enjoyments are similar to his.”

 

            Animating this character took on special significance for Glen Keane, lead animator of Silver. Keane describes an experience he had with his high school football assistant coach after he had a rough game:

“Afterwards in the parking lot, the assistant coach, Mickey Ryan, a great guy who spoke with his heart and always had a twinkle in his eye, put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'Glen, you're gonna do great things. You're gonna get that starting position. That wasn't right what happened.' And I could see that he really cared. There were tears in his eyes and I started to cry too. I lived that scene with Jim and Silver on the boat when Silver encourages Jim after a big setback. It was one of those things where you try to animate what you lived through and hope you can even get close to it." 

    Silver ought to be the perfect stand-in for Jim's father, except that he is far from perfect. In fact he is a bad guy with a villainous agenda to steal the treasure for himself. Silver's greed for the treasure drives him to vicious means including a violent mutiny and renouncing his fondness for Jim (who overhears his declaration) in order to save face with his fellow pirates.

This taps into a familiar reality where real-life role models carry heavy baggage. In Silver’s case, some potentially murderous baggage. In this way, Silver lets Jim down just as much as the father who abandoned him, and that is something Jim has to come to terms with. An underappreciated aspect of Jim’s maturation comes with him learning to reconcile the contradictions he sees in Silver and accept that he is still deserving of admiration, even love, a love that eventually becomes Silver’s redeeming feature. This movie manages to have its cake and eat it, presenting a rather raw picture masculinity--masculinity that likes to charge its solar surfer through government property because it can and shoot alien pirates with laser guns--while also permitting a lot of tenderness. Here’s a film that shows boys that even tough guys can cry and ask another man for a hug.

For all its strengths, the movie isn’t beyond reproach. While I very much enjoy the film, the movie carries too many small but noticeable flaws that are worth reflecting on.

The movie commitment to scoring points with 8 year old boys sometimes carries too far. The film for example goes out of its way to let us know that “flatula,” a language consisting entirely of farting noises, a language a main character studied for two years in high school, is a language in this film’s universe, one that at least one of the characters is fluent in. That is an idea that somehow made through scripting, storyboarding, and animation into the finished film without anyone saying, “. . . that’s quite stupid.”

           Doctor Doppler and Captain Amelia remain untapped potential throughout the entire experience. They have a nice dynamic, but as both characters are nearly invisible for most of the voyage, they feel underdeveloped by the film’s end. (Disney would get a second chance to waste Thompson when they cast her in Pixar’s lackluster Brave ten years down the road.) 

    This is a common problem Disney ran into during this phase of telling epic adventures with hefty casts in less than 90 minutes. Atlantis: The Lost Empire has a good eight or nine characters like this. Disney would eventually address this issue by letting their films run longer than 1 hr 30 min, and it really would have only taken an extra five or ten minutes of screentime with these characters to make them feel properly developed.

            Doppler in particular is one of the most confused elements of this film’s writing. There’s an interaction with a small girl at Sarah’s inn, as well as a few lines of dialogue with or about Jim, that demonstrates his incompatibility with kids. This suggests that maybe his arc will have him unearth some latent nurturing instincts a la Dr. Grant in Jurassic Park, maybe being the father figure that Jim needs, but Silver beats him to the punch and so that arc goes nowhere. There’s a parallel plotline about Doppler trying to discover if his abounding intellect has any practical application, and this plot line is much more developed, but it still amounts to nothing. Doppler’s culminating moment comes not finding out his knowledge is a valuable asset to obtaining the treasure but from discovering that he has “abnormally thin wrists.” This isn't to say he's not an entertaining character—with a voice actor like David Hyde Pierce, how can he be anything else—but he’s not given the opportunity to self-actualize organically and so feels wasted.

            The movie also sometimes backs itself into a corner and tries to give itself a backdoor out, like when the robot B.E.N. reveals that he literally has a back door that leads to anywhere the plot wants the main characters to go. Or Jim breaking the map’s encryption just by fidgeting around with it. 

    See, moments when your character is at the end of his or her rope is usually when you want to demonstrate the character’s hidden strengths, usually by allowing one of his or her established skill sets pay off. (Think Harry resorting to his flying skills to get past the dragon in The Goblet of Fire.) Had it been established, for example, that Jim knows this code from reading all his Treasure Planet books as a kid, then him activating the map would have been a pay-off for his reverence for the treasure’s mythology. The film chooses instead to resolve the sequence with a gag about Doppler’s ineptitude. This isn’t a problem with every setback or obstacle, the black hole escape is one example of a scene that plays out organically to great effect, but there are a few too many get-out-of-jail-for-free cards in circulation here.

The film’s promotional poster beckons viewers to “Find Your Place in the Universe” as Jim hangs from the net staring out into the cosmos. The film works best when it leans into that.

            Take for example the “I’m Still Here,” sequence midway through the film. This is where the film’s strengths really shine through, and I think that when people lament this movie’s unappreciated accomplishments, they’re thinking largely of the emotional beats represented in this sequence. They’re thinking of the shots of young Jim waiting for his dad dissolving to shots of teenage Jim staring into the cosmos, implying that deep down he’s still just a kid looking for an anchor. They’re thinking of Jim reaching for his father just as his ship pulls away into white oblivion, and of Silver in his boat bursting out from the light as if in belated response to young Jim’s plea.

    This can be a really good movie when it wants to be.

            The film’s reviews were mixed but leaned positive. Most critics praised the animation, but they were left divided on the story. While most critics (correctly, in my opinion) felt the foundations of the story were genuinely thoughtful, many also pointed out (again, correctly, in my opinion) that elements of the plot were slapped together with narrative duct tape. But these reviews were not deplorable. Why was the box office devastating if the critical reception was, at worst, middling?

    Underdeveloped side characters didn't sink this movie. The most tragic part of the story is that the real reason Treasure Planet crashed has little to do with the movie itself. 

So Why Did it Crash?

            By far the most common explanation I hear is that Disney deliberately sabotaged this film’s box office by opening it only two weeks after Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. As the conspiracy goes, Disney was dying to give itself an excuse to throw the old 2D animation equipment out and make way for 3D animation, so they sabotaged their own hand-drawn projects including Treasure Planet to “prove” that there just wasn’t a market for hand-drawn animation anymore. 

    I’m not one to say what Disney is or isn’t above, but I have a hard time buying into the conspiratorial narrative surrounding the film’s failure. Disney animation wouldn’t even release its first fully CG rendered film, Chicken Little, for another three years. Could they have been plotting a grand CG takeover that early? Maybe, but I still think commentators overestimate how eager any studio is to deliberately sink one of their own projects, whatever the ulterior motive. 

    Remember also that 1. Disney had committed to this release date likely before the overwhelming success of the first Harry Potter film 2. There are only so many available release dates in a year, and this window had proven reliable for Disney in years past, and 3. Disney hadn’t yet tethered itself to the Star Wars and Marvel lifeboats. Not only was Disney Animation their cash cow at the time, it was one of the only cows in the barn at all.

           That's not to say that the public perception of hand-drawn animation wasn't changing. Between Pixar and Dreamworks exploding onto the scene, by 2002 full-on computer animation was becoming the standard. While, yes, Treasure Planet was actually quite innovative with its animation, this was a nuance that would not be appreciated by civilians. To them the Disney hand-drawn style was starting to just look dated. And I don't think clinging onto traditional animation would have been such a strike against the movie if not for the other hand-drawn animated films being chugged out by the Disney machine ... 

Actual footage of CEO Michael Eisner wrangling Ariel into an underfunded circus production

In addition to their hand-drawn theatrical releases, Disney in the early 00’s was also chugging out their direct-to-video sequels, also hand-drawn. Though these projects used Disney properties, they were in fact produced by subsidiary Disney Toons, a different studio than Walt Disney Feature Animation and one with far fewer resources. (In comparison to Treasure Planet's $140 M budget, these direct to video sequels often cost less than $15 M to produce.) 

    Again, Disney loyalists may know this, but your mom who still thinks that Shrek is a Pixar movie just knows that the DVD for The Little Mermaid 2 has Ariel on the front, so it must be from the same guys who made the first Ariel movie. Disney is Disney is Disney, right? If the guys who made The Lion King 1 ½ were also making this new Treasure Island in Space movie, was it really worth the cash when Pixar was dropping its next Oscar winner in a couple of months? 

Competition never bothered her anyway

    Facing off against Harry Potter shouldn’t have been an issue. We’ve seen Disney animation go head-to-head with other headliner movies before and come out just fine. Big Hero 6 came out the same day as Interstellar and both went on to tremendous success. Frozen opened the weekend after The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and we all know how that turned out. Tangled came out in the wake of the seventh Harry Potter film and lived to tell the tale. But these films had the benefit of coming after movies like The Princess and the Frog and Wreck-it Ralph accrued some good PR for the studio. Treasure Planet’s opening act was 101 Dalmatians 2: Patch's London Adventure. 

The unchallenged power Disney enjoyed during its Renaissance went to its head, to say the least, paving the way for a number of questionable dollar-driven decisions that left repercussions on the company's business model. From Disney's theme park division, this era also saw the launch of Disney California Adventure and the Walt Disney Studios parks, and both have spent their entire lifetimes trying to distance themselves from the overwhelming apathy they received upon their premieres. The population at large wants to see Disney as a house of creative ideas, but forgive them if it's sometimes hard for them to glimpse the island of artistry drowning in the tempestuous ocean of corporate cynicism. 

This of course begs the question, in this day of abounding lucrativeness that even the Disney Renaissance couldn’t have dreamed of, how long before history repeats itself? How much corporate infection can the studio take before it reaches DTV sequel level desperate—some say we’re already there—and the Roman Empire collapses again? Worse, would the crash be proportionally more catastrophic? And could the company ever recover from such a fall? It’s no exaggeration to say I have lost sleep over these questions.

 

The Wreckage

The LA Times reported in the weeks following Treasure Planet’s crash:

“. . . studio Chairman Richard Cook said the film’s failure had forced the studio to look inward.

 

“‘In our own self-criticism,’ he said, ‘maybe we didn’t do a good enough job to entice an audience to want to come. Maybe we were too serious and earnest in the marketing -- that’s what we’re questioning.’

 

 

    From an outsider’s perspective, it looked like the defeat sent the company into something of a post-traumatic depression where the studio could only resignedly generate imitations of what the Dreamworks machine was producing. I could write several essays about how Disney did eventually bounce back from the bruising the new millennium wrought on them, but for now let it suffice to say that Walt Disney Animation was able to get its creative act back together. 

    But they seemed to get the idea that they would never really get the attentions of boys under 8. While Disney animation has launched some films with male protagonists in the last twenty years, their needle does tend to deflect toward female characters, princess or not. More female representation is not a bad thing, but it is certainly worth considering what the modern film landscape would look like if The Walt Disney Company hadn't decided that they would have to find some other avenue of attracting the young male audience. 

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

    It is, after all, partly for this reason that Disney invested so much in launching this thing called the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a property that would not only hook the attention of young boys, but also hold it as they moved through adolescence and adulthood, and the world has never been the same since.

We can take some consolation in the fact that however devastating the crash and burn of this movie was, the executives didn’t seem to hold Musker and Clements responsible. The two of them have directed two additional projects for the mouse, 2009’s The Princess and the Frog and 2016’s Moana, both of which yielded profit for the company. Whether or not they ever truly recovered from their pet project of 17 years sinking so abysmally at the box office . . . who knows?

Ron Clements and John Musker

    This all to say . . . movies that make a splash at the box office aren’t the only movies with stories to tell. There's heart woven into this film with its directors wanting to remake their favorite story as a kid into something fresh. It's there with Glen Keane reenacting his heart-to-heart with his old coach on pencil and paper. It's there with the six-year-old boys who saw themselves in Jim and learned to chart their own course just like he did.

    The LA Times further reported “For his part, Roy Conli, who served as a producer on the movie, is holding out hope that audiences will discover it: ‘This has always been a movie driven by the passion of the artists, the directors and myself, and the team is hoping it has legs.’”

    The encouraging thing to me is that Conli's prophecy is starting to come true. Kids who saw this movie when it released on home video in 2003 are now grown and parading their love through film with cosplay, deviant art, or any other means of remixing media.

   Again, the halls of cinema are lined with movies that did not find appreciation in their time owing to really dumb external factors. There is a potential future in which Treasure Planet, and others like it, are recognized and celebrated in a way that mirrors the earnestness with which they were made. Heaven knows if any of us will live to see a day where the path to recognition isn't so convoluted, but while we're waiting, there is some comfort to be taken in allowing oneself to look ahead of the curve and scout out those underseen masterworks for ourselves.

    Charting our own course, if you will. 

                            --The Professor