TITAN A.E.

 

Publicity poster for Titan A.E. (© Don Bluth & Gary Goldman/Fox Animation Studio/David Kirschner Productions/20^th Century Fox – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

My movie watch on 31 January 2022 was the spectacular animated science fiction feature film Titan A.E.

Directed by veteran animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, and released by 20^th Century Fox in 2000, Titan A. E. is a space opera on a galactically grand scale.  A.E. stands for After Earth, because a dastardly race of pure-energy entities called the Drej have only gone and blown up our poor old planet!

Happily, some humans managed to escape in time, including leading scientist Prof. Sam Tucker (voiced by Ron Perlman) aboard a huge space vessel created by him named Titan that has the capacity to create a brand-new planet and populate it with all of the life-forms previously native to Earth, thanks to a genetic database onboard that stores every Terran species' DNA like a futuristic Noah's Ark. Sadly, however, Titan goes missing, and both the Drej and assorted humans-in-exile are seeking it, the Drej to destroy it, the humans to save it and enable it to achieve its original epic goals.

Chief among the latter is Cale (Matt Damon; Jean-Claude Van Damme, Christopher Reeve, and Matthew Broderick had all previously been considered for this voice role). Cale is Prof. Tucker's now-adult son, who has on his finger a golden ring given to him by his father, which turns out to contain a map that will track down Titan. However, only Cale can operate the map-encoded ring because it is linked genetically to him.

Assisted by Captain Joseph Korso (Bill Pullman) who was one of his father's friends, plus a young female spacecraft pilot (and Cale's eventual love interest) named Akima (Drew Barrymore), as well as a (very) odd assortment of aliens (voiced by the likes of Nathan Lane and John Leguizamo), Cale sets off in pursuit of Titan, but the Drej warcraft are in pursuit of him. Who will get there first, and how will Cale deal with the despicable double-crosses slickly engineered by two of his companions?

The background animation is spectacular throughout, and although I half-expected the characters to be yet another incarnation of the standard limited-animation variety constituting the staple ingredient of comparable space-themed Saturday morning cartoon shows from Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, and the like, I was pleasantly surprised that in this animated space movie they actually did a lot more than stand motionless while talking with only an eye-blink every so often, as was so typically the case with the latter genre in the past.

Then again, with Don Bluth and Gary Goldman at the helm, I should have expected that the animation would be of a far superior quality. Having said that, Titan A.E. had originally been conceived as a live-action movie before the project was passed to Fox Animation Studios. Sadly, however, it proved to be their final production before they closed down (their first movie, released in 1997, had been Anastasia, followed by its sequel, Bartok the Magnificent).

Also worth noting here is this movie's strong rock soundtrack, featuring a score composed by Graeme Revell as well as music by the diverse likes of Jamiroquai, Fun Lovin' Criminals, Texas, and The Wailing Souls. Oddly, cinema trailers for Titan A.E. often included Creed's song 'Higher', even though it does not appear in the movie itself. Nor does a song entitled 'Heart of Honey' that was written specially for it by Chris Cornell, Alain Johannes, and Natasha Shneider.

Titan A.E. is well worth watching if you're an animation fan, and especially if you're into space battles – lots of space battles! And if you'd like to experience a sample of its interstellar essence, be sure to click here watch an official Titan A.E. trailer on YouTube.

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