Disney Watch: Atlantis - The Lost Empire (2001)

Watched:  03/16/2025

Format:  Disney+

Viewing:  First

Directors:  Gary Trousdale, Kirk Wise

I vaguely remember this one coming out, but didn't see it.  No recollection of why.

I did get the feeling that this movie was not great, and over time it hasn't really had any kind of reconsideration.  Yeah, there's folks online who loved it as kids, and maintain that love now.  And, bully for them.

There's a lot going on in this movie.  It's also trying to fill a gap I was aware of from my days working at the Disney Store in summers from 1993-1995 - that Disney didn't know how to reach the audience they'd associated with young boys, something we struggled with as we were often asked to make recommendations to folks coming into the store shopping for boy's stuff for kids over, say, seven.  So why not make some movies that could spawn merch and serve those kids as much as the kids who wanted Princess dresses?

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) wasn't completely panned when it came out, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire - right now it's sitting at a 52 on Metacritic.  For comparison, Lilo & Stitch was a 74.  Beauty and the Beast from 1991 was a 95 and got a Best Picture nomination.  

The movie, as I said to Jamie, seems like it just can't get out of its own way.  It wants to be a rollicking adventure about discovering/ plundering other cultures, but then it can't stop making jokes about, like, bad cooking that just bring the pacing to a dead stop and muck with establishing tone.  Yet it seems like a clock was set by someone who felt they needed to drop a joke every 90 seconds or else the movie might explode.  Most awkward is that our lead, voiced by Michael J. Fox, is in full Michael J. Fox hapless whiner mode until the last twenty minutes or so, and if we're looking for a fun lead for our movie... this isn't it.  But we do learn that his character is an ass man in Disney's first on-screen booty ogling.

Don't blame me for a scene in a movie.  I'm just reporting facts.

There's simply too many characters shoved into the movie for the runtime, and so the film relies on "you know this stereotype/ boilerplate character" to get by, and yet none of the ragtag crew characters advance the plot.  They're just there for gags that don't really play.  Oh!  The digger guy is weird about dirt!  Oh, the bombs guy likes to blow things up! 

Why is there a giant lobster mechanical monster that destroys the cool-ass submarine we get for only five minutes?  We're never told.  Indeed, how did our villain think he was getting home without that submarine?  How was any of this supposed to work?  

And for a movie about a lost civilization, maybe we should have seen that civilization?  Instead, we meet just two characters with speaking lines and there's some hand-wavy "you know, ancient stuff" and we're told the culture is failing.  But why?  It's the same people who've been there alive for 9000 years.  How did they forget their own written language?  How did they forget how to drive their own cars?  Make it make sense.  Do some people know and are just refusing to say?  Is everyone 9000 years old, or just some people?  Are there children?

There's a really cool story somewhere in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, with a wide cast of characters and steampunk technology versus ancient mystic technology.  But instead we get gags about eating beans, falling down mile-deep crevasses in 1914-era autos and surviving.  It's very clear a much larger movie was scripted, and this was what they cut it down to because animation is costly, takes a long time and is very, very hard.

Having boilerplate characters and plot twists isn't a big deal if you're aiming at kids, but it feels like this movie is trying to punch above that weight class.  Yet, they've cut so much of the story, all that's left is the bullet-point form of storytelling, leaving the viewer with no particular feelings about anything they're watching.  It's a massive technical achievement that both borrows too much from Jules Verne without just being Jules Verne and borrows from every non-technological civilization clashing with a technological civilization story you ever saw or read, and it doesn't bring anything *new* or even have likable characters.  It desperately needs something other than to look cool.  It does not deliver on that.    

A lot of the animation if great, and some of it less so.   I'd forgotten at the time of its release that the buzz was around the movie borrowing the art style of Mike Mignola - sort of.  You can see it in the Leviathan crab monster.  A bit in some character design.  I feel like they sort of chose to animate different characters in different ways, which is admirable, but is it just me or is the teen mechanic girl animated like 70's-era Ralph Bakshi for reasons I could not begin to guess.

I think they overshot with the notion that Atlantis was some root culture for all cultures, because it just looks non-specific and a mishmash of world cultures.  I know it was well-intentioned, but going completely original might have served them better.  Or, you know, spending any time at all with the Atlanteans.

Ironically, I think this might have worked better as a live-action film than animation.  In live-action, there wouldn't have been the temptation to stop for, say, jokes with the cowboy cook, or all the business with the mole guy.  We might have followed up on what was going on with the blonde bad-ass who is definitely in the movie sometimes, but not all the time unless Bad Guy James Garner needs someone to talk to.  If we're hiring actors, we generally make sure they're there for a reason.

Apparently Disney was sure this was the next big thing and was planning a TV show, theme park stuff and, basically, Atlantis-mania.  The movie came out, stalled quickly, and people stopped talking about it.  

Anyway, I didn't *hate* it, but sometimes a swing and a miss is more frustrating to watch when you see all the potential of what they're doing, and then that potential is utterly squandered.  I love the idea of adventure in this era, before we'd filled in all the maps and cultures were still sorting each other out a bit more.  I love the idea of steampunk submarines and even discovering a mystic world beneath the waves.  But.  I would have also loved a story that wasn't just the trappings of all that, and worked a lot harder to give me a reason to care.