It is a time of Mom jeans, grunge, and Bo Jackson. It is also a time when Disney animation is seeing an artistic renaissance, leading to the studio's movies dominating the box office around the world. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, the big hits just kept on coming and, inevitably, that meant imitators were bound to crop up. 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros., and newcomers DreamWorks were especially keen on mimicking the success of Disney with their own animated fairy tale musicals which meant, by the end of the 1990's, the American animation scene was almost entirely populated by movies about fantasy characters engaging in musical numbers. With worries about repetition in the air as well as the dwindling box office of even Disney animated features (to say nothing about the middling box office numbers put up by their competitors), something was bound to change in what kind of movies the various American animation studio made.
As 2000 got underway, the animated movies for that year were decidedly different from what had been the norm in the 1990's. Suddenly, action movies were on everyone's mind, particularly science-fiction action that owed more than a tip of the hat to the highly influential Star Wars movies. Such films would also try to lure in older audiences in addition to the family audiences that would always come out for something animated, a mission reflected in the MPAA ratings of these early 21st century animated movies. Whereas previously even the silhouette of your main villain being hung by a noose was still A-OK to be seen in a G-rated animated movie, now there was enough intense action in the likes of Titan A.E. and Dinosaur to warrant a PG rating, something Disney, for instance, hadn't seen one of its animated movies receive since The Black Cauldron in 1985. American animation was about to kick into a whole new explosion-filled gear, but what had suddenly spurred this desire for action animation among the American animation studios?
Well, for some filmmakers, it was just a matter of preference that their films went into an action route. For instance, directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise were assigned to direct Atlantis: The Lost Empire, and considering the duo were responsible for directing the animated movie where Tony Jay belts out a tune about Hellfire, it's no surprise that they would try to further push boundaries by making Disney's first out-and-out action movie, one that was such a departure from their 1990's work that T-shirts were made for the crew that said "Fewer Songs, More Explosions". While individual artistic desires to branch out certainly influenced this trend, I also personally wonder if the cult popularity of 1990's Japanese action-packed animated films Akira and Ghost In The Shell made American studio executives open their eyes to the possibilities of what animation could do. It certainly feels interesting that only a few years after these two features debuted and blew down the door on what action-centric animation could be that American animation houses started to toss in all their chips on similarly action-packed American fare.
From the get-go, these action-packed hand-drawn animated movies faced dismal box office that would plague similar movies in the years to come. The action-comedy The Road to El Dorado only made $50.8 million on a $95 million budget in March 2000, a tepid gross, but even worse was that summer's Titan A.E.. Currently the last film directed by animation legend Don Bluth, the feature was created by 20th Century Fox Animation, who had high ambitions for the film, as seen by how the first teaser trailer for it went out on screenings of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Such high-level promotion didn't pay off as Titan A.E. grossed a disastrous $22.7 million on a $75 million budget, leading to the closure of 20th Century Fox Animation and casting immediate doubt over whether other similar science-fiction animated movies could work.
Looking back on it nearly two decades later, Titan A.E. is one of those messy movies that's still mostly easy to enjoy. It suffers from celebrity casting that doesn't work (Matt Damon doesn't have much personality in his performance as the lead character) while the CGI alien villains are generically designed and the technology used to bring them to life has aged dismally. On the other hand, there's plenty of well-done animation to be found throughout the film and it's thrilling how it fully embraces being a cosmic chase movie, this is certainly not a film ashamed to be a science-fiction movie. One problem it does have though is something many of the features from this era suffered from, specifically the issue of constantly being dragged between being a conventional family movie and something more adult-oriented. We get near nudity from both of our main human characters and there's intense gunfire a-plenty, but we also get John Leguizamo as a cutesy alien sidekick who looks like the shaved cosmic version of Gurgi from The Black Cauldron, though at least this is the rare animated family movie to not feel like the action gets neutered due to the PG rating (is this the only PG-rated movie in history to have an on-screen neck snap?)
Being more adult wouldn't solve the numerous story problems of Titan A.E. but a more consistent tone couldn't have hurt a movie that does suffer from a sense of messiness, which would end up being a common element throughout a number of these action animated offerings. More pressing on the minds of studio executives than artistic shortcomings was how much money these attempts to shake up American animation were losing. Even Disney's first foray into darker action fare with Dinosaur managed to come in under expectations despite grossing a decent $137.7 million domestically thanks to a gargantuan budget and the fact that audiences and critics alike dismissed it with mixed marks that were not the norm in terms of reception for animated Disney features.
The following summer brought out Disney's second attempt to break into the action animation game in the form of the aforementioned Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Though carrying a striking art style evoking the look of Mike Mignola drawings, it got lost in the marketplace and, exempting The Rescuers Down Under, scored the lowest domestic box office gross for a Disney Animation title since Oliver & Company. This transpired despite a massive marketing push from Disney towards kids and adults and a prime June release date that had worked like gangbusters for so many of the studio's past features, including The Lion King. All of those elements supposedly working in its favor were capsized by the presence of an animated family movie that was shaking things up for American animation just like studio executives had hoped their action-oriented animated fare like Atlantis would.
What was this animated family movie?
Well...I'll give you a hint.
It has layers.
Like an onion, you might say....
Come back next Wednesday for the second and final part of this story, which will detail the arrival of the first ever PG-13 CGI animated movie, the success of one All-Star of an Ogre and how one animated movie coud lose so much money for Disney Animation.
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