titan a.e.

Science fiction novels are basically books about the future. But sci-fi movies are different. They’re usually about some kind of threat: about invasions of Earth by alien life-forces - invasions of the minds of individual human beings, invasions of small towns, attempts to take over earth as a whole. Often, they end with the planet under threat or even, more recently - as in Independence Day and Deep Impact - partly destroyed. Titan A.E. is different: it starts with Earth being destroyed. Forever. Our planet is wiped off the face of the solar system. So Titan A.E. is starting where other films end, exploring how mankind fares as a race of refugees, drifting through space in search of a new homeworld. But it’s also - and above all - about how mankind bounces back. “Beneath the film’s sci-fi ‘skin’,” says producer/director Don Bluth, “there’s another story going on. The movie to me is about the indomitable human spirit and the search for an identity. It asks, ‘What are we about? Are we worth saving? Can we ever go home again?’” As many will realise from Bluth’s involvement, Titan A.E. is also an animated film. But again, it’s a lot more than that: it breaks new ground by combining the work of Hollywood’s top 2-D animators (Bluth, his regular partner Gary Goldman, and the team at Fox Animation Studios) with the 3-D world of computer animation as represented by Persistence of Vision Digital Enter-tainment (POVDE), whose recent work has included the first Mission: Impossible movie, Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace and Romeo + Juliet director Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming Moulin Rouge. In addition, the movie boasts characters created by such top Hollywood stars as Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman, Nathan Lane, John Leguizamo and Janeane Garofalo - characters who were developed as much by the actors as by the film-makers, so that the usual ‘Voice of...’ credit listing no longer really applies. Then, to round things off, there’s a cutting-edge soundtrack composed by Graeme Revell (Hand That Rocks the Cradle, The Crow, The Insider), with a CD-full of songs produced by Grammy winner Glen Ballard, who has worked with everyone from Alanis Morissette to Barbra Streisand. If none of the above gets your juices going, then you’re probably reading the wrong magazine. “This is by far the most challenging film we’ve ever done,” says Goldman, who helped Bluth set up the Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1996, and whose last collaboration with him was the worldwide hit Anastasia. “We thought Anastasia was tough,” he grins, “but this is Anastasia squared.” Bluth makes the same point, albeit in a more direct way. “Audiences are demanding,” he says, “so we keep having to reach higher.” US audiences will get a chance to see how far the film-making duo have reached when the movie opens there on June 16. But the creative team behind Titan A.E. want to make it quite plain from the outset that this is a film that breaks new ground in other respects, too. It has all the wizardry of computer animation, coupled with the excitement of a sci-fi tale for which the word ‘epic’ might have been coined, but peopled by characters on an altogether more human scale. “It isn’t really a ‘hardware’ film,” observes Goldman. “Yes, we give you as much ‘eye candy’ special effects and cutting-edge animation as we can - more than you’ve ever seen in an animated movie before. But I also hope our characters are endearing - that audiences like them, connect with them and want to see more of them.” “You don’t have to be a sci-fi fan to appreciate the story and characters,” adds Bluth. “On the human level, I think our movie can connect with anybody. And that’s what every film tries to do, whether it’s a western, a musical or whatever. If the audience doesn’t connect, then something important is missing. You have to feel something to make the experience complete.”