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Emma Thompson
Joseph Gordon-Levitt
David Hyde Pierce
Treasure Planet
(2002)
At one point in Disney's animated revamp of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island—now dubbed Treasure Planet to fit its intergalactic milieu—one of the characters comments, "No tricks. Just a little palaver." Younger kids may wish for more of the former and less of the latter in this sometimes clever but all-too-often crushing enterprise.
Here, young adventurer Jim Hawkins (voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt) chafes against his grounded, fatherless existence, but resignedly cleans up around his mother's inn until he finds himself in possession of a much-sought-after treasure map. To chase the treasure, Jim's humorously double-talking family friend (David Hyde Pierce) hires a ship captained by feline Amelia (Emma Thompson) and manned by a suspiciously scurvy bunch. Chief among them is a cyborg Long John Silver (Brian Murray), a dark and imposing figure who's one montage away from a soft heart and a paternal gleam. The action alternates between amusing but talky banter destined to make kids restless and high-gear action that fails to generate rooting interest or suspense in seen-it-all-before adults.
In design and action, Treasure Planet comes too close to Fox's recent Titan A.E. for comfort. A space squall sequence meant to capture the windblown, dangerous fury of an ocean voyage plays more like a digital animation demo reel. Screenwriters shorthand Hawkins even more sketchily than usual, suggesting that his teen age might have been a fatal blow to a genuine sense of wonder. Atlantis, though similarly clunky, at least endowed its hero with a sturdier emotional investment.
Not a bad movie, Treasure Planet earns the faint praise of the damned, along with the assured approval of plenty of indiscriminate kids. The film meets the generally high standard of Disney's feature animation, but suffers from a clash of visual elements, some dingy and some hotly colorful. The liveliest voice work belongs to Emma Thompson, Pierce, and latecoming Martin Short, whose manic robot B.E.N. occasionally evokes his fatuous Jiminy Glick. Unfortunately, no one character or sequence stands out as endearing or indelible enough to qualify Treasure Planet for the timeless Disney pantheon.
In the end, animated science fiction fails to enhance Stevenson's story; rather, the awkward trappings of this Disney adventure mechanize and blunt the tale's humanity. It pops and squeaks and rumbles, but Treasure Planet lacks the strength to transport audiences, wholly, from the confines of Earthly mundanity.
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