8/19/02 Treasure Planet Sneak Peek

Attendees at The Producer’s Guild panel discussion on "Producing Animation in the 21^st Century" were treated to sneak peek at Disney’s upcoming tradigital feature Treasure Planet.

For this retelling of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic pirate tale, Disney doesn’t go back in time or attempt to update the setting. The team has created an entirely unique universe "where the 18^th Century meets the 24^th Century," a fantasy environment where Jim Hawkins finds time to participate in some extreme sports while on the trail of buried treasure.

Since the story takes place in an invented world, Writers Alex Mann and Sam Levine, Director John Musker and the many artists were able to pull out all the stops creatively. Ships raise solar sails and soar through the air amidst schools of flying manta rays and a host of other imaginative and beautifully animated creatures.

Where most primarily traditionally animated films try to seamlessly integrate 3D elements, Treasure Planet showcases the added dimension as a stylistic element. 2D and 3D characters interact in the same space, and in at least one case, occupy the same body. The vision of Long John Silver here goes beyond the eye patch and peg leg. He is a cyborg, with living tissue being hand-drawn and mechanical elements created in CG. "It started off as a nightmare for me," says Producer Roy Conli, "but it turned out to be an incredibly great artistic feat."

The traditionally drawn Hawkins (voiced by Third Rock From The Sun’s Joseph Gordon-Levit) hooks up with a CG robot named B.E.N. (Bio Electronic Navigator), voiced by Martin Short in what promises to be another scene-stealing performance. Animators took advantage of digital technology to give the robot detail that is hard to achieve in drawing, then ran him through a software package called Ink or Render, which takes CG lines and turns them into simulated pencil lines. The result is a 3D character that mimics a drawn character.

Treasure Planet, featuring the voices of David Hyde Pierce, Emma Thompson, and Brian Murray, is scheduled for a Nov. 27, 2002 release.