Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Movie & DVD Review (2001)

(Originally published 2001)

Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, written by Tab Murphy, 95 minutes, rated PG .

When compared to Disney’s best animated films, “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” doesn’t compare.

As directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, the team behind “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” their latest has a promising beginning and animation that effectively borrows from Japanese anime. But the moment the film dives 20,000 leagues under the sea in search of the mythic city Plato made famous, the plot starts to sputter, the characters begin to hiccup--and the movie itself begins to drown.

The opening, which features Atlantis and its people being swallowed whole by the sea, is stirring and well done, but it will likely be confusing to younger viewers. Indeed, its characters initially don’t speak English, but a faux Atlantis language translated in subtitles. Though “Atlantis” is meant for older viewers, my screening was packed with the 7-and-under crowd, a good deal of whom kept looking to their parents for some idea of what was happening during the film’s first few rousing moments.

What’s more unfortunate is that when “Atlantis” does switch to English, parents of older, more sensitive children might find themselves doing some further explaining: “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” follows Disney’s “Aladdin” in that it mines much of its humor not from its situations, but from its racial and ethnic stereotypes.

After the gripping opening sequence, the film cuts to 1914, where an expedition to the lost city is being bankrolled by the eccentric billionaire, Preston Whitmore (voice of John Mahony). The film’s hero, Milo Thatch (Michael J. Foxx), quits his day job as a museum cartographer to join the expedition’s gruff Commander Rourke (James Garner) and his melting pot of a crew: a stinky Frenchman (Corey Burton), a dimwitted Italian explosives expert “who ah-speeka like dees” (Don Novello), a tough Latina mechanic clearly modeled after the actress Rosie Perez (Jacqueline Obradors), and a muscular, kindly black doctor drawn to look like an athlete (Phil Morris).

When the crew finds Atlantis--too easily, I might add--a romance builds between Milo and a buxom Atlantean princess (Cree Summer) before the tide literally turns against them in several key plot twists that won’t be revealed here, but which are strangely wrapped around a story that feels more like “Star Wars” as written by Jules Verne than it does an underwater adventure based on the Atlantis myth.

With the twists too predictable and the characters among Disney’s flattest, “Atlantis: The Lost Empire” does have a few fun moments, but it ultimately generates no heat and has no emotional core. Its climatic scene, as beautifully drawn and as shrewdly edited as it is, is especially rote, a spectacle that never becomes the sort of heart-stopping event that satisfies audiences--or creates a sufficient box-office buzz.

Grade: C

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