Treasure Planet is a 2002 American animated science fantasy action-adventure film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released by Walt Disney Pictures on November 27, 2002. The 43rd Disney animated feature film, it is a science fiction adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island and was the first film to be released simultaneously in regular and IMAX theaters. It is at least the second retelling of the story in an outer space setting, following the 1987 Italian miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space. It employs a novel technique of hand-drawn 2D traditional animation set atop 3D computer animation. With a budget of $140 million, it is currently the most expensive traditionally animated film ever made.
The film was co-written, co-produced and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, who had pitched the concept for the film at the same time that they pitched another Disney animated feature, The Little Mermaid (1989). Treasure Planet features the voices of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brian Murray, David Hyde Pierce, Martin Short, Roscoe Lee Browne, Emma Thompson, Michael Wincott, Laurie Metcalf, and Patrick McGoohan (in his final film role). The musical score was composed by James Newton Howard, while a couple of songs were written and performed by John Rzeznik. The film performed poorly at the box office, costing $140 million to create while earning $38 million in the United States and Canada and just shy of $110 million worldwide, but received generally positive reviews from critics and audiences. It was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards. It is the third Disney adaptation of the novel, following Treasure Island (1950) and Muppet Treasure Island (1996). In addition, Treasure Planet is Clement's and Musker's first non-musical film since The Great Mouse Detective (1986).
Plot:
On the planet Montressor, young Jim Hawkins is enchanted by stories of the legendary pirate Captain Nathaniel Flint and his ability to appear from out of nowhere, raid passing ships, and disappear in order to hide the loot on the mysterious "Treasure Planet". 12 years later, Jim has grown into an aloof and isolated troublemaker due to his father abandoning him. He reluctantly helps his mother Sarah run the family's Benbow Inn, and derives amusement from "Alponian solar cruising": skysurfing atop a rocket-powered sailboard.
One day, a spaceship crashes near the inn. The dying pilot, Billy Bones, gives Jim a sphere and tells him to "beware the cyborg". Suddenly, a gang of pirates raid and burn the inn to the ground while Jim, his mother, and their dog-like friend Dr. Delbert Doppler flee. At Doppler's study, Jim discovers that the sphere is a holographic projector containing a star map, leading to the location of Treasure Planet. Despite Sarah's reluctance, Jim and Doppler decide to travel to Treasure Planet in order to gain the funds to rebuild the inn.
Doppler commissions the ship RLS Legacy on a mission to find Treasure Planet. The ship is commanded by the feline Captain Amelia along with her stone-skinned and disciplined first mate, Mr. Arrow. The crew is a motley bunch, secretly led by the half-robot cook John Silver, whom Jim suspects is the cyborg he was warned about. Jim is sent down to work in the galley, where he is supervised by Silver and his shape-shifting pet, Morph, to prevent Jim discovering the crew's mutinous intentions. Despite Jim's mistrust of Silver, they soon form a tenuous father-son relationship.
During the voyage, the ship encounters a supernova and Jim secures the lifelines of all the crew members. As a black hole forms from the supernova, the ruthless and aggressive insectoid crew member Scroop secretly cuts Mr. Arrow's lifeline, who falls to his death in the black hole. The ship manages to ride the shock waves to safety, and the crew mourns the loss of Arrow while Jim is framed for not securing Arrow's lifeline properly. Jim is later comforted by Silver, who knows that Scroop is responsible for Arrow's death.
As the ship reaches Treasure Planet, Jim overhears the crew and soon discovers they are indeed pirates led by Silver, and a mutiny erupts. Jim, Doppler, Amelia and Morph prepare to abandon the ship. Jim retrieves the map and Silver targets him, but cannot bring himself to shoot Jim and allows him to escape with the others. The group are shot down during their escape, injuring Amelia, and they discover that the map was actually Morph in disguise, the map being left on the ship in a coil of rope Morph had taken the map to.
While exploring Treasure Planet's forests, they soon meet B.E.N., an abandoned navigational robot who has lost his primary memory and invites them to his home for shelter. B.E.N. knew Flint personally and happens to have some knowledge about his treasure, which he can't fully remember on account of his memory being stripped off him. The pirates corner the group there. Using a secret passage, Jim, Morph, and B.E.N. hijack a longboat to fly back to the Legacy in an attempt to retrieve the map. Scroop, who is guarding the ship, becomes aware of their presence and attacks. When the artificial gravity is disabled during the struggle, Scroop attempts to cut Jim loose of the ship, but Jim succeeds in kicking him overboard to float to his death in deep space. They obtain the map, but upon returning they are caught by Silver and his crew, who have already captured Doppler and Amelia.
Silver forces Jim to use the map, directing them to a portal that opens to any location in the universe, which Jim realizes is how Flint conducted his raids. They open the portal to the center of Treasure Planet, discovering that the planet is really an ancient machine that Flint commandeered to stow his treasure, but trip a hidden sensor as they enter the core of the planet. As the pirates prepare to collect the loot, Jim finds the skeletal remains of Flint, holding the missing component to B.E.N.'s cognitive computer. He reinserts it, and B.E.N. immediately recalls that Flint had rigged the planet to explode upon the treasure's discovery. The planet soon begins to fall apart. Not wanting to go empty-handed, Silver attempts to escape on Flint's ship loaded with a fraction of the treasure, but eventually lets it go to save Jim's life. The survivors escape back to the Legacy, but it gets damaged and is unable to escape the planet's atmosphere in time. Jim rigs a makeshift rocket-powered sailboard, and rides ahead of the ship towards the portal. At the last moment, Jim sets the portal to the Montressor Spaceport, and both he and the crew safely clear the planet's explosion just in time.
Jim finds Silver below decks about to escape his impending judgment. He allows him to go, and Silver asks him to keep Morph, as well as providing him a handful of the treasure he managed to save to rebuild the Benbow Inn, believing Jim will "rattle the stars". Sometime later, a party is hosted at the rebuilt inn; Doppler and Amelia have married and had children of their own, and Jim, having matured under Silver's mentorship, has become an interstellar cadet. Jim looks into the skies and sees an image of Silver in the clouds.
Production:
Treasure Planet took roughly four and a half years to create, but the concept for Treasure Planet (which was called Treasure Island in Space at the time) was originally pitched by Ron Clements in 1985 at the "Gong Show" meeting wherein he and John Musker also pitched The Little Mermaid. The pitch was rejected by Michael Eisner, who knew Paramount Pictures was developing a Star Trek sequel with a Treasure Island angle (which eventually went unproduced). The idea was pitched again in 1989 following the release of The Little Mermaid, but the studio still expressed disinterest. Following the release of Aladdin, the idea was pitched for a third time, but Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was the chief of Walt Disney Studios at the time, "just wasn't interested" in the idea. Angered at the rejection, Clements and Musker approached Feature Animation chairman Roy E. Disney who backed the filmmakers and made his wishes known to Eisner, who in turn agreed that the studio should produce the movie. In 1995, their contract was re-negotiated to allow them to commence development on Treasure Planet when Hercules reached completion.
Since Musker and Clements wanted to be able to move "the camera around a lot like Steven Spielberg or James Cameron," the delay in production was beneficial since "the technology had time to develop in terms of really moving the camera." Principal animation for the film began in 2000 with roughly 350 crew members working on it. In 2002, Roy Conli estimated that there were around 1,027 crew members listed in the screen credits with "about four hundred artists and computer artists, about a hundred and fifty musicians and another two hundred technologists". According to Conli, Clements wanted to create a space world that was "warm and had more life to it than you would normally think of in a science fiction film", as opposed to the "stainless steel, blue, smoke coming from the bowels of heavily pipe laden" treatment of science fiction. In order to make the film "fun" by creating more exciting action sequences and because they believed that having the characters wear space suits and helmets "would take all the romance out of it", the crew created the concept of the "Etherium," an "outer space filled with atmosphere".
Several changes were made late in the production to the film. The prologue of the film originally featured an adult Jim Hawkins narrating the story of Captain Flint in first person, but the crew considered this to be too "dark" and felt that it lacked character involvement. The crew also intended for the film to include a sequence showing Jim working on his solar surfer and interacting with an alien child, which was intended to show Jim's more sensitive side and as homage to The Catcher in the Rye. Because of the intention to begin the film with a scene of Jim solar surfing, the sequence had to be cut.
One of the film's goals was to blend different mediums of animation into one film to have such a seamless finish to the point you could not tell the difference between what was two-dimensional hand drawing or computer-generated 3D animations and environments. For the animation of the Treasure Planet, there are three main elements that were essential to the production of this film. The traditional 2D character animation that Disney is known for, three-dimensional character animation, and the computer-generated or CG environments.
Writing:
Writer Rob Edwards stated that "it was extremely challenging" to take a classic novel and set it in outer space, and that they did away with some of the science fiction elements ("things like the metal space ships and the coldness") early on. Edwards goes on to say that they "did a lot of things to make the film more modern" and that the idea behind setting the film in outer space was to "make the story as exciting for kids now as the book was for kids then".
With regard to adapting the characters from the book to film, Ron Clements mentioned that the Jim Hawkins in the book is "a very smart, very capable kid", but they wanted to make Jim start out as "a little troubled kid" who "doesn't really know who he is" while retaining the aforementioned characteristics from the original character. The "mentor figures" for Jim Hawkins in the novel were Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey, whom John Musker described as "one is more comic and the other's very straight"; these two characters were fused into Dr. Doppler. Clements also mentions that though the father-son relationship between Jim Hawkins and John Silver was present "to some degree" in the book, they wanted to emphasize it more in the film.
Terry Rossio, who worked on the script, later argued the filmmakers made a crucial mistake turning Jim Hawkins into an adolescent. "Treasure Island, the book, is a boy's adventure, about a young cabin boy who matches wits with a crew of bloodthirsty pirates. All of the key scenes are made more dramatic by the fact that it's a young kid who is in danger... Treasure Planet made the kid into a young man. Which dilutes the drama of all the situations, start to finish... Instead of being an amazing and impressive kid, he became a petulant unimpressive teen."
Casting:
Casting director Ruth Lambert held a series of casting auditions for the film in New York, Los Angeles, and London, but the crew already had some actors in mind for two of the major characters. The character of Dr. Doppler was written with David Hyde Pierce in mind, and Pierce was given a copy of the Treasure Planet script along with preliminary sketches of the character and the film's scenic elements while he was working on Pixar's A Bug's Life (1998). He stated that "the script was fantastic, the look was so compelling" that he accepted the role. Likewise, the character of Captain Amelia was developed with the idea that Emma Thompson would be providing her voice. "We offered it to her and she was really excited," Clements said. Musker said, "This is the first action adventure character that Emma has ever played and she was pregnant during several of the sessions. She was happy that she could do all this action and not have to train for the part". There were no actors initially in mind for the characters of John Silver and Jim Hawkins; Brian Murray (John Silver) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jim Hawkins) were signed after months of auditions. Gordon-Levitt stated that he was attracted to the role because "it's a Disney animated movie and Disney animated movies are in a class by themselves," and that "to be part of that tradition is unbelievable to me". Musker mentioned that Gordon-Levitt "combined enough vulnerability and intelligence and a combination of youthfulness but incompleteness" and that they liked his approach.
Among the lead actors, only Pierce had experience with voice acting prior to the making of Treasure Planet. Conli explained that they were looking for "really the natural voice of the actor", and that sometimes it was better to have an actor with no experience with voice work as he utilizes his natural voice instead of "affecting a voice". The voice sessions were mostly done without any interaction with the other actors, but Gordon-Levitt expressed a desire to interact with Murray because he found it difficult to act out most of the scenes between Jim Hawkins and John Silver alone.
Box Office:
Treasure Planet grossed over $12 million on its debut weekend, ranking at fourth place behind Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Die Another Day, and Disney's own The Santa Clause 2. The film ended up grossing $38.1 million domestically and $71.4 million internationally for a $109.5 million worldwide gross. Its failure became apparent early on, as Disney's Buena Vista Distribution arm reduced its fourth-quarter earnings by $47 million within a few days of the film's release. In 2014, the Los Angeles Times listed the film as one of the most expensive box office flops of all time.
The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, but lost to Spirited Away (2001). It was also nominated for a number of Annie Awards.
My Review:
I absolutely loved this movie as a kid and it still holds up. I'm very glad they added this on Disney+ and that is the exact reason I have an account in the first place. The characters are amazing and have such great designs. I live for Jim's outfit. There is clear character growth and a personality arch. I love how the movie show special connections/relationships with the characters and also doesn't force a cheesy love story on you. It's such a great adaptation of the book but in space and amazing and I loved how they stayed true to the book as well (wish I could say the same for other movies). The movie manages to stick with the original story but also take so many creative liberties. The color tones in the movie and the blend of coppery tans make the movie so special in its scenes and the main thing that was memorable to me. Of course the background animation is a little rough around the edges like you see with many older movies but this movie helped lay the foundation of today's Disney animations and it only affects your viewing if you really focus on it. On the other hand, the animators made some really cool animations that tips the balance. In the end, I don't see why this was such a flop and I would watch it all day (you should too). A HIGHLY underrated, classic gem.
Truly a work of art. I’ve read the original classic, Treasure Island, and it’s amazing what people can do with certain concepts. Treasure Planet has a memorable set of characters, with a sense of real-world issues (such as Jim and his lack of father figure in his life) that affect people to this day. Would love to see a remastered version of this movie with the new animation equipment we have nowadays, or even a live action. “I’m Still Here” and “Always Know Where You Are” will forever be a part of my playlist, along with Ben’s unique soundtrack. Jim is relatable, far more relatable than most Disney princesses I’ve watched. It’s also not so heavily focused on the main character’s love life, which was a factor I greatly enjoyed. It was action packed, and Amelia did a phenomenal job as captain. The voice acting was splendid, and the storyline is intriguing and thrilling. Please, give this movie a chance. It’s worth every minute of your time; 9/10.
{One of the best things about thus movie is the song by John Rzeznik from Goo Goo Dolls - I'm Still Here, also known as 'Jim's Theme}
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