The Princess Doesn't Sing.
The Animals Don’t Dance.
Disney Artists Throw Out the Rule Book for Their New Feature
If you looked back at the last decade of American feature animation—focusing on traditional, cel animation—the concerted effort to push the medium past fairy tales and animal stories becomes readily evident. We've had films take on ambitious subjects and epic canvases, with nods to live-action directors from Lean to Spielberg. No longer does every cartoon feature need fluffy bunnies or anthropomorphized bluebirds, nor do they need good or bad fairies, child protagonists, or singing princesses. They don't need songs at all, as a matter of fact. What on Earth are things coming to? What they're coming to is ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE, the new animated feature from Walt Disney. A fantasy-adventure about the search for the mythic lost continent, the film promises to open new realms in animated entertainment. “The film feels different in terms of the story, the saturation of color, the size of the Cinemascope screen,” said producer Don Hahn, who previously produced LION KING, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, and executive produced THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE. “At the same time, we're standing on the shoulders of our Disney predecessors, passing what we learn from film to film. For example, ATLANTIS combines a tremendous number of modern digital effects with a hand-drawn tradition going back to SNOW WHITE and beyond.
“A lot of the time a medium can be mistaken for a genre. We wanted to explore the animation medium. Instead of going down Main Street and through the castle to Fantasyland, where we've been many times before (and thankfully so), we thought we'd make a turn left and go into Adventureland and have some fun there. We wanted to make a big, wide-screen epic in animation. If we only stick to making fairy-tales, eventually the animated form will wither and die.”
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