Titan A.E.
It's uh... it's... cartoon-y.

Bill Pullman and Matt Damon manage to somehow remain attractive, even though they're cartoons.

Titan A.E. is one of those films that makes you question the wonders of human nature. It makes you ponder how your own mind works and it makes you marvel at human intelligence.

Of course, I'm not talking about the storyline here, which revolves around a group of human refugees trying to find a bad-ass planet-making starship after Earth is destroyed. Oh no. This certainly is not a movie penned with your average rocket scientist in mind. The dilemma here, the great mystery of the universe that it made me ponder, was how this movie, despite everything it had going against it, still managed to be enjoyable.

That's right, I enjoyed it. Stop laughing at me! It's really not that bad. A little dull, maybe, more than a bit on the predictable side, and with quite a few characters I would have liked to see dead, but somehow I managed to walk away saying, "Huh, that wasn't so bad."

Cale and Akima cook up some cartoon-y sexual tension.

See, I was expecting worse. After a fellow staffer was subjected to the first 45 minutes or so of this film and came back with woeful tales of Scooby Doo animation, I was pretty sure I'd drawn the short straw in getting to review Titan A.E.. But it wasn't actually so much Scooby Doo. As far as the animation goes, I'd describe it as the bastard son of Reboot and All Dogs Go To Heaven, with one particular scene that simultaneously brought to mind Pitch Black and The Secret of NIMH. The combination of computer-generated animation (used for most of the technology and backgrounds) and traditional animation, Don Bluth style (used for the characters) might've been cutting edge or something, but I just found it distracting; to give you an idea of the look that's produced with this idea, imagine The Matrix with its lush photographic backgrounds... then replace the actors with cardboard cut-outs. It's a very displaced effect, and in Titan's case the combination of animation just made the characters look like they weren't very much a part of their environment. And to add to that, the animation on the characters' mouths always seemed to be just barely off from the sound, like watching a Japanese film badly dubbed into English.

Crap. I left the planet-killing death ray on again.

The cast, too, is something of a marvel. This film managed to pull a wide range of talented and famous people into its voice cast, including Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman, Nathan Lane, Janeane Garofalo, John Leguizamo, Jim Cummings (best known as the voice of Winnie the Pooh), and Ron Perlman. Well, okay, some of those aren't really talented, per se, but still, it's pretty damn impressive. Unfortunately the casting and dialogue aren't; though Pullman is perfectly cast as a rugged space captain (he's even sexy as a cartoon!), and Cale looks enough like Matt Damon to make the voice fit, Drew Barrymore was simply not the woman for her character. Though Akima was built tough and even looked tough, Barrymore's voice made her sound like a total wussy, and completely spoiled the image. Taking the Most Annoying Character In This Feature Film prize is John Leguizamo's Gune, who grates on the nerves so impressively that you can't help but wonder whether he's Jar Jar's lovechild. Adding insult to injury is a lack of smart dialogue; the line that sticks out most in my mind is the hero turned villain turned hero who, when redeeming himself, actually utters this inanity: "It's better this way."

Drew Barrymore does her (bad) impression of a tough chick.

And even more surprising is what you'll find if you watch the credits. It took five people to write this thing: Randall McCormick, Hans Bauer, Ben Edlund, John August, and Joss Whedon. Yes, that Joss Whedon. And it was produced by Don Bluth, whose mark is clearly evident in the character animation, but the film's distinctly lacking the fun and style that made films like The Secret of NIMH animated classics.

Despite all that, Titan is somehow entertaining; occasionally it really nails a visual with some tight animation (a sequence with a bunch of flying aliens), the premise is sorta neat, I'm betting the target audience -- namely, kids -- is eating this one up. It's not complex but it's also not hideously boring, so it's just the thing for those times when you're in a scifi-without-thinking mood. And... oh hell, I'll just admit it. I liked it when Cartoon Matt Damon took his shirt off. Does that make me a bad, sick person?

Probably.

DROOL FACTOR: Bill Pullman's sexy even when you can only hear his voice. Mrow.

GROSS-OUT FACTOR: This is one for the kiddies... nothing gross here.

STRONG CHICK FACTOR: Despite Akima being written as a pretty strong character, the whole thing is ruined by the voice of Drew Barrymore, who somehow manages to make the otherwise potentially ass-kicking cartoon sound like a complete pansy.

-- Lisa Kincaid

Titan A.E. is currently in theaters nationwide in the United States.

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