The true test of an animated film is whether it can make you forget that it is animated. Pixar has had great success in this regard: both Toy Story and A Bug's Life are so engrossing that I completely forgot that I was watching state-of-the-art computer animation. This was also the case with last year's The Iron Giant, and now we can add Titan A.E. to the list.
This film, a space opera whose plot owes a debt to Robert Heinlein's juvenile novel Between Planets, pushes the limits of present-day animation. It combines hand-drawn characters (human and alien) with some fantastic computer-generated backgrounds, so seamlessly that it's hard to tell sometimes where one technique ends and the other begins. More importantly, the animation effort is in service of an excellent story.
Cale (Matt Damon) is a five-year old boy when the Earth is destroyed by the evil Drej, glowing blue aliens whose faces are black voids and who fear the potential of the human race and therefore plan to wipe them out. Cale's father is the chief scientist of something called Project Titan, which is both the reason the Drej are attacking and the last hope for humanity. After being entrusted with a ring that somehow holds the key to the Titan project, Cale is whisked away by his father's assistant Tek (voiced by Tone-Loc, of all people) onto one of the escaping Earth ships.
Years pass and Cale has become a cynical twenty-year old maintenance technician in a space salvage operation, while the human race has been hunted almost to extinction, with the exception of a few "drifter colonies" and loners like Cale. This state of affairs cannot last, of course, and a dashing space captain named Corso (Bill Pullman) arrives with a fast ship and a ragtag crew to fetch Cale and take him on a hunt for the Titan. The Drej show up and drive them out of the station and into space, and the chase is on.
This is essentially a coming-of-age story; as Cale and his companions cross the galaxy in search of the Titan, always one step ahead of the Drej, Cale himself comes to terms with his abandonment as a child, and begins to see the promise inherent in the human race. The character development never slows things down, and our heroes scrape through one close call after another until the final ultimate showdown with Drej, as the fate of humanity hangsin the balance.
As my nine year old son said, "Some parts are funny, some parts are tragic, and most of it is cool". It's a fun movie for kids, only ninety minutes long, and spine-tingling without being truly frightening. My only criticism, and it's a mild one, is that the rock songs on the soundtrack were a bit distracting; after all, this is 3144 A.D. and one hopes that music will have, if not advanced, at least changed in a thousand years.
All in all, Titan A.E. is good fun, with a few moments that have you biting your nails and forgetting that you are watching a cartoon.-Jarrod Chambers
I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with a family member here by contradicting Jarrod's opinion of Titan A.E.. While the movie's more scenic visuals took me back to blissfully naive times--I wondered not only how they were achieved, but also what it took to conceive of them--its script and general milieu bring to mind Heavy Metal with the dirty parts cut out, and I'm no fan of that puerile 1981 cartoon fantasy to begin with, let alone recycled would-be blockbusters. (More than anything, I wish Titan A.E.'s central irony, that white humans suddenly find themselves the most oppressed beings in the universe, had been considered, even in passing, on screen.)
Unlike Heavy Metal, Titan A.E. aims for a younger demographic, and apparently scores: according to Jarrod, my ecstatic nephew high-fived him at story's end. Watch for it to gain the momentum on home video it never picked up in theatres--pity, since it begs to be seen projected.
On DVD, and I'm sure you guessed these would be the next words out of my keyboard, is the best alternative to seeing Titan A.E. in a cinema. The THX-approved transfer (replete with Optimode calibration tests) is just another in an increasingly long line of top-drawer presentations from Fox Video. Casting a big shadow over nearly the entire Disney Gold Collection, this lightly supplemented Special Edition sports 16x9-enhanced, 2.35:1 letterboxed video that I would deem perfect were it not for occasionally oversaturated reds. (They are of such intense shades that instability was all but inevitable in the realm of NTSC.) Pay no attention to the blown-out logo that starts the film, it's not indicative of the remainder.
Titan A.E. marks Fox's first dual Dolby Digital-DTS disc; I'm not yet equipped to compare the latter with the former, but if it's a given that DTS will sound stronger than its DD counterpart, prepare to be amazed--the Dolby Digital 5.1 (called simply "English 5.1") mix is as good as, if not better, than any sci-fi track I've ever heard at home, up to and including the new Terminator 2: Ultimate Edition. Whatever you do, don't be foolish enough to crank the volume because of hushed opening narration, for within seconds, you'll risk damaging your speakers. This is a boisterous, full-range sonic orgy that rumbles, at times, at ultimate lows. Split-surround effects had me looking over my shoulder as I haven't in a while, especially during the nightmarish siege on Earth. Whiz-bang engineering redeems even the atrocious songs, although, along with dialogue, they're about the only thing, to my ears, that are consigned to the mains.
The bonus material isn't much to get excited about, though I did enjoy the commentary provided by directors Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. They speak openly about, among other topics, the interfering hands on the project, what 3-D rendering entails, and how subtle changes in colour can modulate the mood of an audience. The two also reveal, injuriously to their joint credibility (this is their eleventh feature together), that they have no concrete idea why the Drej want to obliterate humanity, which is, of course, the very thrust of the action. Next up, four deleted scenes--extensions of existing scenes, actually, with wireframe and pencil outlines comprising the bulk of additional footage. Too bad that Bluth and Goldman didn't offer optional exposition in this section as well, as many of the trims seem arbitrary.
While the Fox Kids Special "The Quest for Titan" has its informative moments, its attention-deficit editing style and promotional inserts for the soundtrack album are sure to try the patience of post-MTV viewers; where's (Fox-affiliated DVD producer extraordinaire) David Prior when you need him? Finally, we have a clip of Lit performing "Over My Head" (can't say it's up my alley), a still gallery of unidentified concept art, two TV spots, and (non-anamorphic, 2.0) trailers curiously labelled "B" and "C". Was "A" too busy fraternizing with "E"?-Bill Chambers
© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.
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DVD GRADES:
Image A
Sound A+
Extras B+
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DVD VITALS:
RunningTime
95 minutes
MPAA
PG
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.35:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English DTS 5.1,
English Dolby Surround,
French Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
Fox
the critic
Titan A.E.
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