 Don Bluth Explores Humanity's Future
by Brad Cook Unless one counts last year's The Iron Giant, there hasn't been an animated science-fiction feature film since 1981's Heavy Metal. Interestingly, it took 20th Century Fox, a studio with a young animation division, and Don Bluth, a director who had never worked in the genre before, to bring Titan A.E., the first in what could be a rebirth of animated science-fiction movies, to the silver screen. The film had two directors before Fox Chairman Bill Mechanic offered the job to Bluth and producer Gary Goldman. The script passed through the hands of Ben Edlund (The Tick), John August (the movie Go) and Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) along the way, and Bluth tried to have some input into that process as well. "You never can tell [what writers are doing]," he says, "because they're very private. They have a tendency to go their own way. I kept insisting as loud as I could that we needed Cale to be very likable because we needed to identify with him." Cale is the protagonist of the film, a bitter guy who's still angry that his father left him when an alien race called the Drej, who are composed of pure energy, destroyed the Earth in the year 3013 (the film takes place in 3028). What he doesn't know is that his father left him with the map to finding a ship called the Titan, which he escaped in by himself and which supposedly holds the key to mankind's salvation. Like Bluth's last feature, Anastasia, Titan A.E. is part traditional 2D animation and part 3D CGI. He estimates that 65 per cent of this film is CGI, a much higher proportion of the animation than in his previous effort. The characters and many of the backgrounds are 2D while the ships, the Drej and many of the exotic environments are CGI. "It's really a scheduling process," the director says of the difficulties inherent in creating a hybrid film. "A scene has to go back and forth and be tweaked because each person does his job and you have to adjust [to what he does]. It's not like you're free to animate what the character is doing and what he's carrying and what he's pursuing because the other elements at the other levels are being done by a different department." Unlike Anastasia, the use of CGI in Titan A.E. fits the subject matter better. For instance, early in the film Cale, who does salvage work at the space station Tau 14, zigs and zags on a scooter through a field of space junk in a frantic sequence in which the viewer sees everything from Cale's point-of-view. You really feel like you're there with him, narrowly avoiding debris as you fly at breakneck speeds with the starry expanse of infinity before you. Later, a tense standoff among the Ice Rings of Tigrin is a wonder to watch. Deadly giant ice crystals, their surfaces reflecting the stars and ships around them in multitude, float gently through space until they violently crash into each other, unleashing glistening showers of shards. Two ships play a cat-and-mouse game with each other among them, neither captain sure which of the ships he sees is real and which is a reflection. It's a set piece that couldn't have been created during the old days of traditional 2D animation.
"We added a few things where you have motion blue, which is hard to get with cell-painted art," he explains. "Any time you photograph anything there's a blur, so we managed to add the blur back in because things don't come with a blur with computers. It makes it feel more natural to the human eye." Vocal Talent The other important element in any animated feature is the voice work. Matt Damon recorded the voice of Cale while Bill Pullman played the part of Korso, an old pal of Cale's father whom shows up with a mission to find the Titan. Korso's crew includes the beautiful human pilot Akima (Drew Barrymore), the nutty turtle-like alien navigator Gune (John Leguizamo), creepy rat-like first mate Preed (Nathan Lane) and Stith (Janeane Garofalo), a weapons specialist with an attitude and powerful kangaroo-like legs. Bluth supervised several voice sessions as the screenplay evolved and the cast members developed their own ideas of what their parts should entail. "The script started to morph into something that was more of a human story than [something about] space hardware," he recalls. "It meant that a lot of the interpretations of the lines weren't really on, so we went back and re-recorded them. That time it was spun a little differently, and we found that there's a love interest between Cale and Akima. The relationship between Korso and Cale was also a little different because now Korso was like a surrogate father. "[The voice sessions] are always interesting because the talent brings something to the microphone that the script pages don't, which is their own life experiences. With Matt Damon, he's a superb actor, so you don't have to direct him, he gets it and he's able to deliver. The same thing with Drew Barrymore." Bluth continues: "Nathan Lane was probably the most interesting of the actors because he represents an alien force and he's a comic. He's a very funny man, so he re-invented a lot of the lines on the page to make them funnier than they were already written. "Even more telling was John Leguizamo, who was not satisfied with the number of lines in his part. We recorded him once. The second time he had re-written the entire script and had written himself into all the scenes." Bluth laughs at the memory. As the story became clearer, scenes were handed off to the animators for rendering. Since Bluth had never worked in the science-fiction genre before, part of the development process also involved him catching up on what he had missed and staying current with the field so that they didn't duplicate anyone's ideas. "I really wasn't a big [fan] until we did this movie and then I became very aware that science-fiction is an interesting realm," he says. "I had to go see a lot of science-fiction films so that we wouldn't repeat what [others] had already done and to understand the genre a little better. With all that extra time, I gained an appreciation I didn't have before. "I loved The Sixth Sense," he responds when asked for particulars. "I was a big fan of The Fifth Element. I even look at Farscape on TV. And, of course, all the Star Wars movies. They were big moments in my life. Our chases resonate very similar to the chases in those movies." Working For The Mouse A former animator himself who broke in with Disney during the early 1970s as he worked on Pete's Dragon and Robin Hood, Bluth obviously takes a lot of pride in his work. It's no secret that he left Disney in the late 1970s because he was unhappy with the direction the company was taking, and he has no problem with speaking his mind about their latest release, Dinosaur. "I was hunting for the story," he says. "They just keep doing the same thing over and over. Disney is lodged in a formula movie, which I haven't seen them break out of. As long as someone's fool enough to buy a ticket, why stop?"
"They didn't want a Disney wannabe movie," he explains. "They wanted to find their own footprint, so they made a movie for a very specific audience and that's why it's a science-fiction film." Anastasia didn't fare very well at the box office, but Bluth still feels like he's done better with his projects than some of his colleagues. "If you know your animation history," he says, "you know that Anastasia got itself into the black, but barely. You know that Dreamworks did two pictures which crashed on the runway. That's not good. That means that the marketing didn't work or the pictures didn't work. It's a twofold issue: the production of the movie has to be good and the marketing has to know its way around the block. If one falls short, the film won't work." Bluth hopes that Titan A.E. is marketed better than Anastasia was. With gobs of incredible CGI, a soundtrack blaring songs by the likes of Jamiroquai, Luscious Jackson and Wailing Souls and a slick ad campaign that started in early June and played up comparisons to Star Wars, Heavy Metal and The Matrix, Titan A.E. is certainly positioned to reach its intended audience. It also has a theme that is appropriate for the dawn of the 20th century. "Is the human race worth saving?" Bluth asks. "If you knock them down to where they're discouraged and they're no longer in the majority, can they get back up again? Are people worth fighting for? Or are they so cynical and so bitter and so materialistic that it's better to just blow them all away?" [Still want to find out more about Titan A.E.? Click here to read interviewer Brad Cook's review of the film!--Editor]
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