Hacker Cinema
Titan A.E.
2000 · Film · 95 min
Directed by Don Bluth, Gary Goldman
AnimationScience FictionAdventureFamilyAction
A young man finds out that he holds the key to restoring hope and ensuring survival for the human race, while an alien species called the Drej are bent on mankind's destruction.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I haven't seen these mentioned yet: Galaxy Quest, The Fifth Element, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Oblivion, Tron: Legacy, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, Bicentennial Man, Alita: Battle Angel (some of these may be PG-13)
Treasure Planet and Titan A.E. are also good animated movies, although Treasure Planet is more science-fantasy.
I'd also second Back to the Future, Contact, Interstellar, Gattaca, October Sky
I want to push back on this idea. Back in the heyday of JohnK's blog, "CalArts style" referred to a kind of post-Disney/Don Bluth character design language that typified theatrical animation in the 90s. If you look at the late 90s/early 2000s wave of films, things like Titan A.E., The Iron Giant (which was better than most), Atlantis: The Lost Empire, etc -- a lot of them have a Milt Kahl knockoff look because that's what was the gold standard at CalArts at the time. JohnK's complaint was that young animators were aping superficial Disney-isms and making derivative crap instead of creating original design systems.
Fast forward 20 years, and what people mean when they say "CalArts style" is completely different. They're talking about the geometric, flat graphical character designs of things like Gumball, Steven Universe, Clarence, and Gravity Falls (i.e., the "bean mouth" era). This is all TV animation (theatrical 2D animation is deader than disco), and it's partly driven by the mechanics of modern digital animation production. It's also same-y and safe, but for different reasons.
If you didn't grow up with Bluth's work and only know his studio's output from the later years (the unyielding torrent of direct to video Land Before Time sequels)...you really owe it to yourself to watch his studio's earlier stuff. It came at the moment where he had just struck off from Disney, disenfranchised by the output of the other major animation houses, and has his clearest vision.
The Secret of NIMH is, IMHO, one of the finest animated movies ever made, but An American Tail, the original Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven are all masterpieces in the own and couldn't really be matched in terms of narrative and animation excellence until the early Pixar movies. They definitely have a distinct aesthetic and a certain style of animation and storytelling unique to the production house.
They lost their way somewhere, I think it was Rock-a-Doodle, and the studio just started hemorrhaging money and losing connection with their audience. Their last two major gasps were Anastasia, a beautifully animated film with a poorly targeted audience demographic and Titan A.E., an ambition mixed-media project, which apparently ran out of money (among other problems) during production and resulted in some hilariously bad computer generated graphics at the end but I think stands up better than Disney's Treasure Planet response.
In the end, the studio floated themselves on cheaply produced, but child friendly, direct to video sequels of The Land Before Time, which is notable as being an unbroked series of sequels dating from 1988 to 2016 which at least has had the advantage of being a series of characters I can share with nieces and nephews who also grew up with the same characters...almost like Star Wars.