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Diving into uncharted realms of art and the imagination, Walt Disney Pictures and the
filmmaking trio responsible for the recent animated favorite "Beauty and the Beast" -
producer Don Hahn and directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise - take moviegoers on a
wondrous animated expedition to "Atlantis: The Lost Empire." With its bold, graphic
visual interpretation and eye-popping wide-screen animation, "Atlantis" is an exciting and
imaginative cinematic journey to a fascinating and mysterious place. Expressive character
animation, the Studio's most ambitious blend of digital and hand-drawn special effects and
an action-oriented story add to the film's extraordinary appeal. With a vocal cast headed
by Michael J. Fox, James Garner and Leonard Nimoy, innovative sound effects by seven-time
Academy Award®-winning designer/mixer Gary Rydstrom, and a stunning underscore by
acclaimed composer James Newton Howard, the film's sound is as impressive as its look and
delivers the right tone of comedy, action and drama.
In "Atlantis: The Lost Empire," an inexperienced young adventurer becomes the key to
unraveling an ancient mystery when he joins a group of daredevil explorers to find the
legendary lost empire. At the center of this action-filled animated adventure is
naïve-but-determined museum cartographer / linguistics expert Milo Thatch, who dreams of
completing the quest begun by his late grandfather, a famous explorer. When a long lost
journal surfaces, providing new clues to the location, and an eccentric billionaire agrees
to fund an expedition, the action shifts into high gear. Milo ultimately leads Commander
Rourke and his team to the elusive undersea kingdom but what they find there defies their
expectations and triggers an explosive series of events that only Milo can resolve.
A wonderful group of actors and actresses were enlisted to give voice to the characters.
Michael J. Fox's bold vocalization of Milo Thatch gives the character the energy,
strength, and appeal of an action hero. Veteran actor James Garner lends his genial,
avuncular style to the character of Commander Rourke. Leonard Nimoy gives a royal turn as
the reclusive King of Atlantis, who alone holds the secrets of his civilization.
Providing the vocals for his daring daughter, Princess Kida, is veteran voiceover actress
Cree Summer. John Mahoney is heard as the eccentric billionaire, Preston B. Whitmore, who
finances the expedition to Atlantis. David Ogden Stiers, a Disney animation favorite,
returns to the Studio to voice Milo's bombastic boss, Fenton Q. Harcourt.
"I play the Director of the Institute," grins Stiers, "he's not a particularly open minded
man and a bit of a snob about what he does, as people in large institutions have tended to
be. We play the stereotype rather than the contemporary model. Stuffy, vicious and
grudge carrying."
Mr. Stiers enjoyed his work on the animation. His typical work day was "…actually very
fast. They tend to limit sessions to about three hours because, after three hours, I
can't hear any difference in what I'm doing. It just isn't productive to go beyond that
point. They're very good to me. I tend to work very fast so we get the work done that's
slated for the day."
What's it like day by day for an actor to work on an animation? Mr. Stiers elaborates,
"In a weird way, it's freeing because there's nobody looking at you. You don't care how
you look when you produce a voice. It's very limited because you don't have the present
energy of another actor, even if it's someone you don't particularly agree with. There is
still some solution you find [when working alone] since you don't have that wonderfully
creative energy or vibration another actor has to offer. Still, actors find wonderful
vocal solutions without confronting one another."
From the very inception of the project, the directors had a strong concept of what the
film should look like. Mutual fans of a popular comic book artist named Mike Mignola
(Hellboy, "Bram Stoker's Dracula" - the official comic adaptation of Francis Ford
Coppola's Film, etc.), Trousdale and Wise chose a bold departure for the design and style
of "Atlantis." Enlisting the talents of art director Dave Goetz (their collaborator on
"The Hunchback of Notre Dame"), the directors brought in Mignola to help design the
production and to freely adapt his flat, graphic and layered style for their purposes.
The resulting blend of classic Disney and Mike Mignola - a style which was internally
referred to as "Dis-nola" - gave the film a daring and expressive look unlike any of the
Studio's other features. Mignola himself had a hand in designing Atlantis and gave it a
distressed tropical paradise look with a Southeast Asian flavor. His design style is felt
throughout the film in the look of the characters and the background settings. In keeping
with the film's 1914 setting, the artistic team incorporated elements of the machine
age/industrial period with the imaginative graphic style of Mignola.
Helping to achieve this distinctive look for the film was an artistic team that includes
background supervisor Lisa Keene, layout supervisor Ed Ghertner and artistic coordinator
Chris Jenkins. The film's other artistic leaders are computer graphics imagery supervisor
Kiran Bhakta Joshi, visual effects supervisor Marlon West, cleanup supervisor Marshall
Toomey, scene planning supervisor Tom Baker and color models supervisor Karen
Comella. Ellen Keneshea is the film's editor. Another key player on the production team is
associate producer Kendra Haaland.
In order to do justice to the film's vast landscape and lavish settings, the filmmakers
chose to present "Atlantis" in CinemaScope. This wide-screen format has only been used in
animation on rare occasions ("Lady and the Tramp," "Sleeping Beauty," and "A Bug's Life")
and the impact is extraordinary. A wide-screen presentation requires a special approach
to composition plus additional animation to utilize the larger screen area. Hahn notes,
"The CinemaScope screen is 30% bigger than a regular movie screen and it delivers a
visceral moviegoing experience that transports audiences. Action/adventure films are
ideally suited to the wide screen and 'Atlantis' uses this expanded canvas to maximum
advantage."
Adding a whole other level of credibility to the Atlantean civilization, the filmmakers
turned to real-life linguistics expert Marc Okrand to create an original readable,
speakable language. Okrand, who had previously created words for the Vulcan language (for
"Star Trek II") and went on to invent the Klingon language (used in "Star Trek III" and on
"Star Trek: The Next Generation"), made up hundreds of Atlantean words for this film that
are spoken by Michael J. Fox, Leonard Nimoy, Cree Summer and others. The Atlantean
language, which has a corresponding 29 letter alphabet, is rooted in Indo-European but
essentially has a set of rules all its own.
In keeping with its reputation as an action-adventure film, "Atlantis: The Lost Empire"
represents the biggest animated effects film the Studio has ever done and the best
integration of traditional 2D and digital 3D effects in Disney's history. Artistic
coordinator Chris Jenkins estimates that there is some form of effects in 6000 of the 7600
feet of film. Digital effects (362 in all) are seen in 30% of the film and "Deep Canvas"
(a digital approach to painting backgrounds which was created for "Tarzan" to add a sense
of depth to the scene) was used in at least half a dozen scenes. Among the dynamic visual
effects seen in "Atlantis" are explosions, lava-spouting volcanoes, fire-setting
fireflies, glowing crystals, laser beams, atmospheric effects, tidal waves, bubbles, and
crowd scenes, among others.
Adding to its impact as an action-adventure film is a dynamic score by James Newton
Howard. Director Kirk Wise notes, "He gives the film such scale and sweep and really huge
emotion. He doesn't remove a portion of his brain and write 'cartoon' music, which is a
trap that some composers can fall into when they write for this genre. He treats the film
as he would a live-action film and his contribution is truly amazing."
Animation on "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" began in late 1997 with the production team
eventually reaching a maximum of about 350 artists, animators and technicians. Although
most of the production took place in California, Disney's Paris Animation Studio also made
a major contribution to the effort with the animation of Helga Sinclair and some of the
film's backgrounds, cleanup animation and digital effects.
The filmmakers assembled a top team of animators to bring their large ensemble cast of
characters to life. Many of the supervising animators (including John Pomeroy, Ron
Husband, Dave Pruiksma, Tony DeRosa, Mike Cedeno and Shawn Keller) have been associated
with Disney Feature Animation for two decades. Several have supervised characters before
(Mike Surrey, Russ Edmunds and Randy Haycock), while others (including Anne Marie Bardwell
and Yoshi Tamura) stepped up to the plate with first-time supervising roles on this film.
"We had a great group of people working on this film," notes Hahn. "There was a lot of
experience in the ranks, from Gary and Kirk on down, and this was a team which had largely
worked together before on 'Beauty' and 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame.' They communicated
well and they had a lot of fun in the process. We had a lot of depth on our bench in
terms of creative talent and we discovered some really great new talent as well."
Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, observes, "'Atlantis'
presented our creative team with a great opportunity to explore the action-adventure genre
in animation and Don, Kirk and Gary have taken full advantage of the medium to tell a
great story. They are masters at what they do and this film reflects a new level of
maturity and storytelling excellence for them as filmmakers. The film itself has a look
and style all its own with a great ensemble of characters that we think audiences are
going to love. Everyone seems to have a different theory about Atlantis and it was fun
for us to learn about some of those exciting notions and come up with our own mythological
take on this fascination subject."
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"Atlantis: The Lost Empire"
