Disney's costliest hand-drawn film sent Treasure Island into space and flopped
Treasure Planet turned Stevenson's pirate classic into a voyage between stars aboard ships with solar sails. At $140 million it remains the most expensive traditionally animated film ever made, yet it earned only $109.6 million worldwide before slowly finding a devoted cult audience.
John Musker and Ron Clements first pitched the idea while working on The Little Mermaid in 1989, but development did not start until they had finished Hercules in 1997. They directed and co-wrote the 2002 film with Rob Edwards for Walt Disney Feature Animation. It was the studio's third take on the 1883 novel, after a 1950 live-action version and Muppet Treasure Island in 1996.
Technically the film layered hand-drawn characters over three-dimensional computer-animated settings, a new approach at the time. The spacecraft deliberately look like eighteenth-century sailing ships. Joseph Gordon-Levitt voices the young hero, with Emma Thompson, David Hyde Pierce and Martin Short in the cast, and Patrick McGoohan in what proved to be his last role. James Newton Howard wrote the score, and John Rzeznik wrote and sang the songs.
Jim Hawkins helps his mother Sarah run an inn on the planet Montressor until a dying Billy Bones hands him a sphere and warns him to watch out for a cyborg. The sphere hides a holographic map to the planet where the pirate Flint stashed his loot. Jim sets off aboard the RLS Legacy under the cat-like Captain Amelia, where the cook John Silver, a cyborg, becomes a kind of father figure even as he leads a mutiny. The planet turns out to be a vast machine, rigged by Flint to destroy itself, and Silver finally gives up his treasure to save Jim.
After a Paris premiere on November 6, 2002, it opened in the United States on November 27 and became the first film released in ordinary and IMAX cinemas on the same day. Reviews were mixed to positive, and it earned a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, though the box office counted it a bomb.
Source: Treasure Planet
