Titan A.E. Reviews

At the end of the 70’s, Don Bluth decided to leave Disney and, right away, he went to direct his own animated features. In the 80’s, he had some major success with ‘The Secret of NIMH’ and, above all, with ‘An American Tail’ and ‘The Land Before Time’. Unfortunately, after those movies, he kept making some underperforming features. He did make a slight come-back with ‘Anastasia’ at the end of the 90’s but this movie was a huge box-office flop and it pretty much ended his career which is a terrible shame. Since I always had a weak spot for Don Bluth’s work, I was really eager to check it out and, eventually, I thought it was actually pretty good. Indeed, as usual with Bluth, the animation was really nice but, I guess, with the rise of the CGI animation at the time, the audience didn’t care much for something like this. On top of that, I thought that the story was also fairly entertaining even if it was rather pedestrian and nothing really mind-blowing. To conclude, I think it is actually a decent SF animated feature and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

Don Bluth was one of the few animators who worked outside of Disney and had any kind of success with his various projects at different studios. But Bluth was also wildly inconsistent, often delivering films that had more unique parts and parts than they did complete and coherent wholes. Titan A.E. is no different, with a script coming from Ben Edlund, Joss Whedon and John August that somewhere took the best that each of those writers has to offer and shooting out hollow characters, hodgepodge story ideas and cliché beats, from the rest of Bluth’s body of work.

Having said that, while the story and characters are lacking, the visuals are stunning and there are moments of quite clever and unique creature/character/location designs. A thrilling sequence on a battle littered with large balloons filled with explosive gases is marvelous to look at, and the bat/bird hybrid creatures that populate the planet are very strange and original. Another stellar moment comes when the crew runs into a group of space whales, stingray-like animals that seem to leave a trail of stardust in their wake. The combination of CGI and hand-drawn animation throughout the film sometimes works cohesively and other times looks garishly slammed together. This sequence is a moment when the two merge together to create a truly beautiful, breathtaking piece of animation. It’s a pity that the rest of the movie couldn’t rise to the challenge of creating wittier, intelligent things to say or do throughout. But as a cult film, count me firmly in the category of people who think and look back at Titan A.E. with fondness.