Hacker Cinema
Treasure Planet
2002 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Ron Clements, John Musker
Science FictionAdventureAnimationFamilyFantasy
When space galleon cabin boy Jim Hawkins discovers a map to an intergalactic "loot of a thousand worlds," a cyborg cook named John Silver teaches him to battle supernovas and space storms on their journey to find treasure.
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11 comments on Hacker News
I played them in and around the California Bay Area but I guess similar games were set up all over the US. They were free too. Every time I watch the movie Treasure Planet (2002) the narrator for the holographic bedtime story reminds me of the phone games.
I'm not sure of the veracity of this, but apparently the Disney set the film Treasure Planet up to fail specifically so it could wash its hands of the very cool but expensive hybrid technology the film used where traditional animation and CGI were combined.
Personally I'm really sad this kind of technique never caught on more in Western films, Treasure Planet was panned at the time but I think it's actually a bit of an overlooked classic. The art style works really well, take Long John Silver for example whose body is traditionally animated but his cybernetic limbs are CGI - this looked fantastic in 2002 so imagine what could be done now.
The best book recommendation I have in mind is "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers. It's a small book, but it truly embraces the Solarpunk aesthetic in many cool ways.
When friends ask me for fictional works with a Solarpunk vibe, here's my short list.
Movies: Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky" and "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind," Cameron's "Avatar," Disney's "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" and "Treasure Planet".
Video games: The Zelda series (especially the latest ones: TP, SS, Breath of the Wild), "Horizon Zero Dawn", "Nier: Automata".
Full disclosure, I own a significant share of Disney, not significant in the sense from the perspective of the company, but significant from the perspective of my portfolio. Against the advice of my broker I own Disney and Microsoft as individual stocks while the rest is indexed.
I love Disney, we go once a year to a disney property and I love their animation and stories. While I am neither here nor there about Marvel and have not seen a single Marvel movie, I also live Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I have been on stage at the Indiana Jones special effects show thanks to my kids volunteering me.
I also consider myself to the politically left of center.
So when I say this, it is from a position of love and real financial commitment to Disney.
Disney needs to get the hell out of identity politics. They need to return to great story telling not look for ways/excuses to inject diversity at the expense of story. Tarzan did not need a gay ape. Treasure Planet did not need a Chineese character and Mulan did not need white characters or a hero who had no journey.
This last point I find very frustrating. For some reason, Disney has seemingly abandoned the hero's journey as a plot element for many of its newer releases. Failings are what makes characters relatable and I feel Disney has lost sight of that.
All this ti say, Disney just does not seem to tell good stories any more.
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
> They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
Probably the most objective way to view this is to actually look at the list of films from any given decade and see how many flops they had [1]. There's a bias at play here: the only movies we remember Disney making a decade+ ago are the hits. We don't often remember the misses.
Apparently Disney's "Renaissance" ended with Tarzan in 1999; but here are a list of movies that have come out since the end of this golden era:
- Monsters, Inc.
- Lilo and Stitch
- Treasure Planet (a personal favorite)
- Finding Nemo
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- The Incredibles
- Ratatouille
- WALL-E
- Up
- Tangled
- Brave
- Wreck-It Ralph
- Frozen
- Inside Out
- Encanto
I'm sure there's many great ones that you might love that I'm missing. But I'd say this lineup is potentially better than the list of movies spanning The Little Mermaid to Tarzan. To the author's credit, I will say there's part of me that's nostalgic for the traditional style of 2d character animation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures_films
> there's no attempts at making something special, they're just the McDonalds of entertainment.
They used to be much more experimental as an animation studio but some of those projects didn't do as well. It'd be great if they could alternate between telling "safe" stories and passion projects like Fantasia or even films like Tron but I guess it's hard to pitch something risky when you can get a guaranteed hit by doing it by the numbers. The last movie I think they really took a chance with was Treasure Planet and that movie was pitched over and over for more than a decade before they agreed to make it.
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.
> I don't know what you think a Disney story is, but all of Disney's major works are based on existing folk stories and other works already in the public domain.
False. Here's some of their animated features based on copyrighted works (as best as I can tell):
Dumbo
Bambi
Peter Pan
Lady and the Tramp
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
The Sword in the Stone
The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh
The Rescuers
The Fox and the Hound
The Black Cauldron
The Great Mouse Detective
Treasure Planet (partially based on the 1987 TV miniseries Treasure Island in Outer Space)
Meet the Robinsons
The Princess and the Frog
Big Hero 6
(I'm using the list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_Studios_films, and picking out the “based on” or ”inspired by” credits that look recent enough.)
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
Why the Treasure Planet hate? I really liked that film when it came out. It was just torpedoed by interdepartmental politics that hurt theatrical sales, like Emperor's New Groove. IIRC, they weren't allowed to make a trailer for it until the last minute, so the boring and uninformative one that aired in theaters came to be.