Review: Titan AE (2000)

The time has coming that we can start waxing about the turn of the millennium. Back then, every other singer had dreads, George Bush was expected to have a rather sleepy term in office, and the internet was starting to become more than just funny noises on the phone. This also marks the point where the heyday of big name traditionally animated films started by the Disney Renaissance was coming to a close--and this film, Titan AE, was one of the last gasps of that trend.

I definitely remember this one being fairly commonly marketed back then, and it looked darn cool to my younger eyes, fresh out of the likes of Phantom Menace and the Star Trek films of the day. What I didn't know back then was that this was one of the last projects of noted animation director Don Bluth--once a worker for Disney, he made his mark in the eighties with classics like 'An American Tail' and 'Land Before Time'. Bluth was known for his...certainly much darker style than Disney, which while sometimes yielding uneven results, also gave his films a nice freaky edge at times. The one of his I remember from my childhood was 'All Dogs Go To Heaven', which veered from nice and cutesy to downright demonically nightmarish. 

And while Bluth's career slumped in the nineties somewhat, his tenure with 20th Century Fox in the late nineties gave us Anastasia, which while comically cuted up in terms of its depiction of Russian history, still did fairly well. His next project was a scifi outing aimed at more of a teenage boy crowd, a Star Wars for the new millennium if you will. And with the actual Star Wars making a comeback, what better time?

Unfortunately, production proved abortive. Fox was already priming itself for the inbound wave of CG animated films, with Toy Story 2 already making its mark, and Bluth's animated unit would be closed down before Titan AE was even released. Production had to be started over halfway through, and by all accounts, Bluth and co-director Gary Goldman did not have the best time with making it. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, how does it actually hold up?

Well, first things first...I really like the opening of the film. It's the 31st century, and humanity has developed the Titan, a revolutionary new ship that can supposedly create entire planets. Unfortunately, a bunch of creepy specter-like energy aliens known as the Drej taken umbrage to this, and descend upon Earth to literally break the planet apart. We get introduced to our protagonist Cale, a young boy who's the son of the Titan's inventor, through a harrowing sequence where he's forced to witness the Drej mothership destroy his homeworld, with no detail spared. It's full of rising dread, tension, and it's an appropriate opening gut-punch that even many an 'adult' scifi flick probably wouldn't attempt.

Pictured: the latest in climate policy. Can't have climate change if there's no climate or planet at all, right?

The rest of the film is a bit more uneven. Fifteen years later, Cale is a young adult, working at a backwater space station, who's your typical somewhat mopey male lead, until he gets recruited by Han Solo-like ex-military captain Korso (Bill Pullman). Korso commands a motley crew that includes Cale's inevitable love interest Akima (Drew Barrymore), and a few aliens like the weird comic relief Gune (John Leguizamo), moody gunner Stith (Janeane Garofalo), and the rather unpleasant Preed (Nathan Lane). Storywise it's a fairly straightforward hero's journey, with Cale being the Special through a map to the Titan encoded into his DNA or something--though what makes it a little more interesting are the script contributions by a certain Joss Whedon. You will most definitely spot his touches if you've ever watched Firefly, particularly one scene in this one with a humorously perceptive guard.

"That's odd, why aren't we talking entirely in sarcasm and rhetorical questions *all* the time?"
"Joss only has partial writing credit, remember?"

Animation-wise, it's also a bit mixed. The medium allows for some cool action scenes in zero-gravity, which you couldn't really do live, and there's some nice painted backdrops of space stations made out of debris and the like. The film uses quite a large amount of CG, which...while dated, does at least get the job done for the most part. Some of it can be a little rough on the eyes, but then there's also some rather creative sequences like a pursuit near the end through a space field of ice, which is nice and impressive visually, and tensely directed, with false reflections abounding.

But what definitely hasn't aged well? The soundtrack! Most of it is, well, rock music that was popular around this time, including that most fondly remembered genre, nu-metal! What's that, younger readers might ask? Well, imagine your older brother making wailing noises or tryhard rap lyrics to an electronic guitar they're desperately clutching to not get too much spit on their ill-advised tattoos or awful facial hair, and you might just have the idea. Most of this music in the early 2000s of this nature also seemed to mandate that it was sung while the artists' tongue was numb. Well, okay, there's a couple okay songs on offer and the orchestral score is fine, but you get the point.

The story also somewhat shows the abortive production; there's a couple of scenes where the writers basically just cheat to get characters from point A to point B, and a couple character arcs are rather noticeably truncated. Still, for the most part it's at least consistent, and while it's nothing too spectacular, it at least gets across what it's intending. There are definitely some solid scenes, like a look into a Bangkok-themed space colony, or the very end--so while it's a mixed bag, it's a bag with enough worthwhile chunks.

Overall, Titan AE is...alright. It's aged in some respects, and while uneven, I can think of...considerably worse films in this vein. For regular viewers, while I wouldn't say you have to rush to see it immediately, it can be worth checking out if you stumble upon it one day, though its main appeal would be to fans of assorted scifi curios like myself. There hasn't really been anything like it in this format since, and, well, we gotta talk why.

Titan AE was unfortunately a flop, with somewhat confused marketing, and of course the usual stigma against animation that's not Disney or Disney-styled. The extra nails in the coffin for non-cutsey animated flicks would come soon thereafter, with, ironically, two actual Disney films, albeit ones straying also into adventure genre realms--pulp throwback Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and pirate-themed Treasure Planet.

The latter in particular you can draw very strong similarities with Titan, also being set in space with a young protagonist carrying a special map--it was basically a redo of Treasure Island in space, with solar-powered galleons and everything. Treasure Planet, while having some very slick and gorgeous animation in places, also had a somewhat indecisive tone and some jarring CG; Atlantis I appreciate partly for having the balls to be open about hundreds of people dying on screen to underwater monsters and the like, and while I have a soft spot for it, it was a bit rushed pacing-wise, also suffering from script oddities borne of a meddled production.

But none of these films were really bad per se, or at the very least, certainly not cack-handed as other big flicks being spat out around this time. People, I guess, were already moving onto the shiny new realms of CG with Shrek and Ice Age also coming out, and many audiences were likely not receptive to animation venturing into slightly older territories. Even now, with the likes of anime slowly becoming more mainstream among younger types, you'll be hard pressed to find older folks who could accept such things. However, this has changed somewhat with the successful release of the splendorously animated Into The Spider-Verse, which perhaps balanced a cartoony comic nature and slick action just right, while of course riding the superhero hype train. I certainly hope we can see more of that vein to come--there's a lot still they can do with non-CG styled animated adventure flicks, and titles like Titan AE at least managed to scratch the surface of that potential...