Remember him? The former Disney employee who brought us such Nutrasweet overloads as An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven. Bluth thinks classic Disney animation is the pinnacle of the genre; did you really believe he'd take it to the cutting edge? Sorry, folks. Whatever your opinion may be of the Japanese anime look of stylized, triangular-faced humans, it's certainly no worse or more generic than the wide-eyed cutesy-wannabe-Disney style employed by Bluth. Every alien in the film looks like a classic Disney talking animal, from Janeane Garofalo's gun-toting kangaroo to the turtle-with-glasses straight out of Robin Hood, here named Gune and voiced by John Leguizamo.
Still, the designs aren't quite congruent with the more teen-oriented story line: A wisecracking giant bug, for instance, is introduced early on, only to be splatted into goo by a Drej trooper, leaving just his dentures unscathed. Lead hero Cale (Matt Damon), meanwhile, envisions himself sustaining a gaping, bloody hole in his stomach at the hands of his enemies. Yet another character gets his neck aggressively broken. The fact that everyone looks like a Disney character makes these acts of violence seem doubly perverse. From a technical standpoint, however, it should be noted that the merging of three-dimensional CG animation with traditional hand-drawn works just fine.
The film's plot is classic hero's journey -- reluctant warrior seeks mysterious object that will save his people -- embellished with story elements previously seen in Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, the Star Trek films, and even Battlefield Earth: A key development calls for a spaceship that's been derelict for years -- and used as a house -- to function perfectly, explained away by the ludicrously expository line, "She's still got her ionic vacuum drive; those things never drain!"
Our hero Cale is a layabout with abandonment issues because his father never came back to find him after Earth was destroyed. Recruited by the mysterious renegade captain Korso (Bill Pullman), Cale discovers that his genetic code activates a map that will lead them to the Titan, a spaceship containing some kind of highly advanced secret that scared the Drej enough to provoke their preemptive attack on Earth. And thus the journey begins. Korso's ship, as is the norm in these animated movies, is crewed by a team of lovable misfits, all of them wacky aliens except for one who just happens to be the perfect love interest: a Goth-punk chick named Akima, voiced by Drew Barrymore and wholeheartedly ripped off from the character Freefall from the comic book Gen13. Since primary Titan A.E. scripter Ben Edlund is a big name in the comic world, it's unlikely he missed the resemblance.
Misgivings aside, Titan A.E. delivers some of the most well-thought-out and executed action sequences to hit the screen in quite some time. It's rare to find an action movie with one solid, memorable sequence these days, and Titan A.E. has at least four, all of which are truly impressive and should keep audiences sufficiently distracted from such minor details as character and script.
While plot is clearly secondary in a movie of this type, there are some story holes and stylistic choices that cannot be ignored. And let's not even begin to count nitpicky inconsistencies, the way Internet geeks undoubtedly will, because there are plenty of obvious, major ones to consider.
None of this ultimately matters, really. Folks will go to Titan A.E. looking for summer escapism, and most of them will be pleased. Is it worth the goofy characters and weak story for the effects and action sequences? Absolutely. Go, have fun. Just don't expect the American equivalent of Ghost in the Shell or Princess Mononoke. Titan A.E. is merely a baby step toward animation as a medium not just for kids, but hey, as the Chinese say, that's how the journey of a thousand miles begins.
