Atlantis: The Lost Empire Still Feels Like Undiscovered Treasure
Disney’s most misunderstood adventure is finally getting the love it deserves.
The supremacy of Disney’s ‘90s Renaissance is an uncontested fact, but for many a Zillennial, the films that came after that era were just as formative. The 2000s were hard for the House of Ideas: by the time Tarzan swung to zeigeist in 1999, the world was moving on from the hand-drawn, Broadway-inspired juggernauts that’d saved Disney from another bankruptcy. The hopeful kids who’d gone all moony-eyed over “A Whole New World” and Beauty and the Beast were aging into disaffected teens: soon, films like Shrek would put a torch to all that Disney held dear, and its audience would be dancing in the flames.
It’s into this quiet crisis that Disney’s “Experimental Era” was born. This period, and the projects that gave it life, gets the worst rap out of any in the company’s history — and sometimes for good reason. Disney hadn’t yet figured out how to reconcile its once-foolproof formula with the rising tide of cynicism. It’d worked so hard to make fairytales and musicals into unmissable events, so its search for a new niche led to some awkward trial-and-error. On the other hand, though, it did not deserve the dismissal it ultimately got. Sure, there were stinkers within this 10-year period (mostly towards the tail end), but Disney’s initial pivot out of its comfort zone was something to be celebrated. Unfortunately, no one seemed to get what the company was going for, making one of its most charming risks the least understood.
It’s shocking, in hindsight, to learn that something as innovative as Atlantis: The Lost Empire was raked over the coals when it first came into the world. When you’re a kid, all you have is your personal movie collection, and the knowledge of how those movies make you feel. Atlantis was a classic in my home, and the same could be said for countless ’90s babies. Outside of that bubble, however, the film hadn’t fared so well. A dismal 48% on Rotten Tomatoes — and critical pans that called it “old-fashioned,” “massively boring,” and “the essence of craft without dream” — puts Atlantis very close to the bottom of the barrel for Disney. But that status doesn’t align at all with the film I remember watching (and religiously rewatching) as a kid... or the film I revisited 25 (!) years later.
Calling a film “underrated” nowadays has long started to feel glib, even inefficient; it’s definitely not enough to describe the misplaced reception to Atlantis. Where critics see an old-fashioned story, I see a classic homage to the pulpy odysseys like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or Journey to the Center of the Earth. At 95 minutes, Atlantis also moves at a brilliant clip — but the absence of a “dream” is harder to argue against. Atlantis doesn’t run on quite the same gusto that the films of the Renaissance did, and maybe that was lost in an attempt to tell a more adult story. Whatever the cause, the craft on display does pull its weight and then some. If nothing else, it’s a pleasure to watch a Disney movie that also looks nothing like a Disney movie: its visual language, inspired heavily by production designer (and Hellboy creator) Mike Mignola, established a new dynamism that propels Atlantis from start to finish.
If Atlantis was “old-fashioned” when it premiered in 2001, it’s become a classic since.
In taking a concerted step away from the showtunes that were Disney’s bread-and-butter, Atlantis also had more time to build up its characters. Granted, the likes of Milo Thatch (Michael J. Fox), Helga Sinclair (Claudia Christian), and Mole (Corey Burton) — just a few of the sprawling cast of explorers searching for Atlantis — are still little more than archetypes here. But Atlantis eschews internal development to strengthen or complicate their relationships instead. By the time the team actually reaches the center of the Earth, where what remains of Atlantis floats in mid-air, they’re less a well-oiled machine than a pressure cooker ready to blow. Some, like the rugged Commander Rourke (James Garner), have less-than-gracious plans for the hidden city, forcing the well-meaning Milo to choose between the team financing his dream expedition and the Atlanteans striving to survive.
Is it a tale as old as time, a retread of Disney’s own Pocahontas and a forebear for James Cameron’s Avatar? Maybe, as Milo forges a bond with the Atlantean princess Kida (Cree Summer) — but Atlantis updates otherwise-tired tropes about the colonizer and colonized with a gorgeous sci-fi twist. The film’s stunning action sequences, rendered with a combination of 2D and 3D animation, hold up decades later. At the time, though, it wasn’t enough to stand up to the might of Shrek (still dominating despite being weeks into its theatrical run) and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, making Atlantis a box office bomb. Its reception wouldn’t be the first black mark for Disney after the Renaissance, but the pendulum has swung back around in the intervening years. Atlantis’ cult fandom has mostly drowned out the noise surrounding the film, but it’s a shame that it took so long for the consensus to weigh out in its favor.
