If the average person was asked to name some of Disney’s most influential animated classics, you’d probably hear names like Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, or The Lion King. Far less likely would be Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which was released 25 years ago this month on June 15, 2001. Coming off what is widely considered one of the studio’s strongest eras with the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s, Atlantis was an attempt by the team behind The Hunchback of Notre Dame — directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, producer Don Hahn, and screenwriter Tab Murphy — to chart a new course for Disney theatrical animation, one styled after Adventureland at Disney’s theme parks.
Sadly, that attempt didn’t fare so well. Atlantis flopped at the box office, and was met with mixed to negative reviews. You might think that would be the end of the story, but sometimes, movies have longer shelf lives than their initial reception would suggest. Atlantis developed a strong cult following after making its way to home video, and has been far better received now than it was on its original release. But more than that, the film has arguably helped shape the entire direction of North American theatrical animation by essentially being the road not taken for animated features. How did this happen? Let’s take a look…
Atlantis Is Waiting
When it comes to the eras of Disney animation history, the period after the much-lauded Disney Renaissance — generally considered to have ended with Tarzan in 1999 — has rarely been placed in the same conversation. Yes, there were some not-great movies released during that period, but Atlantis has always gotten the short end of the stick given the pedigree of talent involved. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise directed Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, two of the most artistically resonant animated movies of the 1990s, and Tab Murphy had penned the screenplays for both Hunchback and Tarzan. The film has a strong cast, sharply directed action sequences, a beautiful musical score by James Newton Howard, and a gorgeous art style based on the work of famed Hellboy comic artist Mike Mignola. This was not some low-rent production lacking in major talent, and the strength of those artists and their vision is why the film maintains a fanbase to this day.
I spoke to Trousdale and Murphy about the film, and asked them what they think has kept Atlantis alive in the popular imagination.
“I like to think that it’s a decent film,” said Trousdale. “That it’s entertaining and fun, and the characters are fun. I mean, we kind of patterned it after the live-action Disney films from the late ’50s and early ’60s, the Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, that kind of action adventure film… it didn’t do as well with the adults who were expecting talking lions and singing mice and all that. And there was gunfire and there were no songs. We found out that the kids really enjoyed it, but they didn’t really have a voice.”
Murphy agreed, saying that “a lot of kids watched it on home video and wore out VHS tapes. So there was this growing fanbase [that] I think myself and a lot of the filmmakers were unaware of, because there’s no way to track home video, how the fanbase grows out of sharing a VHS or ultimately the DVD and all that stuff.”
The sense of adventure and exploration with a vivid group of characters that the film manages to convey in a tight 90-minute runtime is one of its best aspects. Trousdale elaborated on how the creative team convinced the studio to move away from the Broadway musicals that had defined the last decade of Disney films.
“I think it might’ve been Kirk or maybe it was Don that came up with the notion that when you go to Disneyland and you’re headed straight for Cinderella’s Castle, you go through it and you’re in Fantasyland. And that’s the movies that we’re doing for the last 70 years. But if you hang a left, you’re in Adventureland. It’s still a Disney land. And that’s what got the executives to go, ‘Oh yeah, you’re right.’”
Add in evocative location, vehicle, and creature design — the Leviathan is still one of the best monsters to ever appear in a Disney film — and you have a movie that has continued to charm both older audiences revisiting it and newcomers who discover it. But the timing of its release caused a lot of problems; Atlantis was a 2D animated adventure at a time when 3D animated comedies were becoming the new model for theatrical animation… and that’s where everything started to fall apart.
Nothing Personal
Atlantis is a flashpoint in film history because it sits right on the dividing line between 20th century and 21st century theatrical animation. It’s a 2D animated adventure film with some 3D elements — a blend of two styles that would largely become segregated in the years to follow. It’s not quite akin to the films of the Disney Renaissance, yet it’s also not quite what feature animation would become after the turn of the millennium with the rise of Pixar and Dreamworks’ 3D movies that would change the industry forever. Atlantis is fascinating because it was part of a small wave of 2D/3D hybrid adventure features — Atlantis in 2001, Treasure Planet in 2002, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas in 2003. These movies, all of which bombed at the box office, ran in parallel to the mode of storytelling popularized by the likes of Toy Story and Shrek.
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