Titan A.E. (2000)

****/****
screenplay by Ben Edlund and John August and Joss Whedon
directed by Don Bluth & Gary Goldman

by Jarrod Chambers 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 20-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 hangs in 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 90 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.