to appeal to a young adult male demographic, citing Star Wars as a reference point. Neither Goldman or Bluth had ever worked on a science-fiction movie before, but they took on the project regardless. Joss Whedon finalized the script further. Goldman and Bluth joined the project sometime after August departed. I wasn’t thinking about the animation on a daily basis.” “It was like I was doing a rewrite on a live-action feature. “I was writing that script in a vacuum,” says August. While animated features tend to have a lot of back-and-forth between screenwriters and storyboarders, live-action movies tend to be more linear: write the script, shoot the scene, edit the movie. The development process felt more like he was working on a live-action project than an animated one, particularly because the studio had no idea how the final film would look. August can’t recall the director on board at the time, but he says he met with Ice Age director Chris Wedge to discuss the movie. As a writer, that didn’t affect his work much, but he recounts an interesting tidbit about the process: “I would get these notes saying, ‘Oh, okay, so characters can be underwater, but they can’t be wet.’”īluth and Goldman had yet to come on the project at that point. “Even over the four to six weeks that I was on board the project, we went from being all traditional animation to completely CG, sort of like Ice Age animation, to the hybrid that it became,” August told Polygon in a recent interview about the film. Though the project had already transitioned to an animated feature, he says, the studio was still trying to figure out what type of animation it would be. Screenwriter John August ( Go, Big Fish) came aboard the project in February 1998, hired to polish the dialogue, but he ended up sticking around for a few weeks longer to work on the story. After finishing up work on the direct-to-video Anastasia spinoff Bartok the Magnificent, the burgeoning Fox Animation department had no current project in the works, so Titan A.E. According to Gary Goldman in an interview with Animation World, Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman and CEO Bill Mechanic thought the film might look good in CG. A few screenwriters and directors tried to make it work, including The Tick creator Ben Edlund, but it never took off. While floating around development at 20th Century Fox, the film was originally conceived as a live-action feature. Here’s the thing about Titan A.E.: it wasn’t supposed to be an animated movie, let alone an animated Don Bluth movie. Cale joins Korso and his team to find Project Titan, the Drej hot on their trail. Salvage-yard worker Cale (Matt Damon) learns from spaceship pilot Korso (Bill Pullman) that the ring Cale inherited from his late father reveals the location of a mysterious project designed to save humanity. In the distant future, Earth has been destroyed by a mysterious alien race called the Drej, and humans are dispersed across the galaxy. was much maligned for leaning too hard on overused science-fiction tropes, it was the first taste of grandiose space adventure for younger audiences, and it earned a special place in a lot of childhood memories. Just a few weeks after the film hit theaters to middling reviews and poor box-office returns, Fox Animation shuttered its operations. While Fox Animation’s first theatrical feature, Anastasia, paralleled the Disney formula with its big show-stopping musical numbers and coming-of-age story centered around a plucky heroine, its next film, the hard sci-fi action story Titan A.E., spun in the complete opposite direction. Back in the mid-’80s, Bluth and Goldman’s Sullivan Bluth Studios had given Disney a run for its money with movies like An American Tail and The Land Before Time. After distributing a few animated films produced by outside studios, Fox partnered with former Disney animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. Unfortunately, the studio started bringing feature animation to theaters too late, right at the point where Disney itself was facing diminishing returns from its animated musicals. Like so many other studios in the 1990s, 20th Century Fox wanted in on the box-office gold rush around the Disney Renaissance. What went wrong along the way? And why did they gain such love after the fact? The Beloved Animated Failures series is out to dust off those old VHS tapes (or, more accurately, find the movies on streaming) and examine some of these films. The animated movies that defined the late ‘90s and early 2000s are beloved by a generation that grew up watching them on VHS, but many of these nostalgic favorites were critical failures, box-office disappointments, or both. Your favorite childhood movie might’ve been a total box-office dud.
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