As usual, if you haven’t seen Atlantis: The Lost Empire, you should. Especially before reading this article, because this is a treasure trove of spoilers and really, it’s just a fun movie.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) is one of those underrated movies, and I never really understood why. The animation is expressive and nuanced. The voice acting is fantastic. The sound design and soundtrack are great; composer James Newton Howard has been a long time favorite and has definitely scored at least one movie you’ve seen (if you’ve seen Apollo 13, you have).
Atlantis’s animation is more expressive than the normal Disney. It postdates Aladdin by almost a decade, 1992. Between Aladdin and Atlantis, Disney tried to evolve their visual style, becoming more angular with Hercules and peaking with Atlantis. Immediately after Atlantis, Disney more or less returned to its more organic roots with the style of Treasure Planet (also underrated). If people were put off by the style in Atlantis, it would be understandable, but the animation was still Disney-class. The thing that Disney succeeds at, with immense consistency, is expression through face and hands, and there’s a loooot of hand-drawn animation that fails extraordinarily hard at this. Go watch even season 3 of The Simpsons. Yeah, TV shows get smaller budgets, but that’s the point. They couldn’t really afford the people who do it well, because there aren’t too many of them.
CG mixed with traditional animation is not sacrilege. Somehow it was kind of a deal in the animation industry back then that Atlantis had done that. Here at aM, we accept all kinds of animation. We don’t judge. Besides, Disney started that with Aladdin. Magic Carpet is full CG in most scenes.
Alright, so, nuanced animation. In the shot where Mr. Whitmore gives Milo the journal, watch how Milo handles both his glasses and the book at the same time. Kida has full lips and they take that into account. When Cookie says Helga “I got yer fawr basic food groups: beans, bacon, whiskey, and lard!” they drop a joke in the animation when he holds up not four fingers, but three. When Milo gets betrayed, Milo looks around to see the others holding guns as they shift slightly, say nothing and waiting for him to figure out that he’s being betrayed. See?
The voice acting is great. Pretty much the entire cast. Milo was built for Michael J. Fox, or is it the other way around? Vinnie has one of the best monologues in a Disney film recounting how he discovered demolition as his life’s calling. Leonard Nemoy was better here being the king than he ever was being Spock (the Internet has just put a hit out on me for saying that). Sweet, Kida, Audrey, Rourke. John Mahoney as Mr. Whitmore, Jim Varney as Cookie. Even Mole was great.
Let’s talk about the story. Overall, it’s pretty standard: artifact leads a group on an expedition with conflict with something unexpected at the big find. Every Indiana Jones movie (that’s right, all three of them) does this extraordinarily well. Which was actually the problem that Atlantis faced: it’s been done before.
Despite being done before, Atlantis eliminates a lot of potential plot twists. Given an artifact, an expert in said artifact, someone financing a big-budget expedition based on said artifact and following clues, those subjects could comprise up to the first two thirds of an Indiana Jones movie. They leave lots of room for twists on the way there, and IJ films take full advantage of that.
Atlantis passed on pretty much all of the standard plot twists in such movies, and they do it in about ten lines of dialogue.
For context, Milo, who works at a museum, failed to convince the heads of the museum to fund an expedition to find a cryptic map, the Shepherd’s Journal, that supposedly leads to Atlantis. In the scene where Mr. Whitmore gives Milo the journal, Mr. Whitmore tries to discourage Milo by pointing out all the potential obstacles in the way of getting to Atlantis itself.
Milo: It can’t be. It’s the Shepherd’s Journal. Mr. Whitemore, this journal is the key to finding the lost continent of Atlantis.
Whitmore: “HAH! Atlantis! Ahahaha! I wasn’t born yesterday, son.”
Milo: “No no, look at-look at- look at this. Coordinates. Clues. It’s all right here!”
Whitmore: “Eeehhh, looks like gibberish to me.”
Milo: “That-that’s only because it’s written in a dialect that no longer exists.”
Whitmore: “So it’s useless.”
Milo: “No no, just difficult. I’ve spent my whole life studying dead languages. It’s not gibberish to me.”
Whitmore: “Daahh, it’s probably a fake.”
Milo: “Mr. Whitmore, my grandfather would’ve known if this were a fake. I would know. I will stake everything I own, everything that I believe in, that this is the genuine Shepherd’s Journal.”
Whitmore: “Aright, alright. So whadda you wanna do with it?”
Milo: “Well- well- well-I’ll get funding. I mean, I’ll, ah, the museum-”
Whitmore: “They’ll never believe you.”
Milo: “I’ll show them! I will make them believe!”
Whitmore: “Like you did today?”
Milo: “YES!-well, no, ho-how’d you-forget about that. Nevermind! I will find Atlantis on my own! Ah, even if I have to rent a rowboat!”
Whitmore: “Congratulations, Milo. This is exactly what I wanted to hear. But forget the rowboat, son! We’ll travel in style!”
Whitmore had not only committed to funding the expedition, he had already put it all together.
So that’s tons of potential plot twists gone. It isn’t unreadable, it’s not useless, it’s not fake, Milo will get funding, and nothing is going to stop him from getting to Atlantis. The journey from submarine launch to meeting Atlanteans takes about 23 minutes, less than ⅓ of the movie (and that includes scenes that establish character backstories and group dynamics). In terms of harrowing action, there are only four scenes in the whole movie. With Indiana Jones movies, action comprises more of the movie than character building and plot advancement combined (no disrespect, I’ll likely write about what makes Indiana Jones awesome here at some point). Atlantis would rather talk about a ragtag team of explorers that find not just ruins, but a living, lost civilization, and indeed it does. By covering the usual twists, it could build a world and a plot with a less-commonly-used twist.
And that’s one of the big reasons this movie is underrated. It spends time on the mystery of the find and it’s supernatural capabilities, surrounded by a complete and unique civilization. A very similar movie is, believe it or not, Avatar. Avatar is shorter on the journey, which it then used the spare time to build an even more detailed world than Atlantis. The main character in Avatar is presented in a different context, military rather than academic, and it’s an established corporate venture instead of privately-funded expedition, but those are details that Atlantis covers in only 15 minutes.
…hmmm…. Avatar sure does have a lot in common with Atlantis…
If you haven’t seen it but enjoy the treasure-hunt genre of movies, sorry for the spoilers and be sure to give it a watch anyway. In Atlantis, there’s no boring spot to see or hear.