Making of Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Full Documentary)

[Music] the genesis of the of Atlantis really came about when Gary myself Don Hahn and tad Murphy shortly after the release of Hunchback of Notre Dom got together in a Mexican restaurant to talk about future projects and so we met at a Mexican restaurant up in Burbank and ordered this big appetizer platter with lots of nachos and chimichanga and stuff like that and we sat around and talked about life you know we talked about what we've been doing in summer and and how we felt about our last film and and how we'd like to collaborate again with some of the same people we had worked with before and that was mostly born out of a desire to kind of keep this crew that we had put together for Hunchback together we wanted to keep them as a unit it was such a great bunch of department heads we had such a wonderful ease of communication we wanted to find a project right away so that they wouldn't be sort of scattered to the four winds you know on two different projects these guys were really hot we had we had you know great art direction and layout supervision of background supervision CGI everything these were like guys at the top of their game before that we had made lion came before that we had made beating the beasts and a lot of the collaborators on Atlantis had been together through those battles and through those Wars and through those films together and you know like colleagues and friends we want to stay together to a certain degree that meeting at that restaurant we sat around and it was great we talked about the movies we grew up with the movies we loved as kids the Disney movies we loved as kids we also talked about what it felt like to see Star Wars for the first time or what it felt like when you were in the audience when Raiders of the Lost Ark came out for the first time and you were there with your big popcorn and your you know chili cheese dog watching those movies and it was a a thrill ride out of house to describe it we were sort of lamenting the fact that they just don't make him like they used to you know and then we decided that we wanted to make a movie like they used to looks like all our chances for survival rest with you mr. thatch you and that little book so we started asking ourselves what do we want to do you know what kind of what kind of movies do we want to do we've done two musicals that we're pretty proud of you know we thought we did a pretty good job of but to be honest you know we've done that can we do something a little different can we kind of push Disney in a new direction can we push ourselves in a new direction and you know as much as we we loved the animated fairy tales there was another whole tradition of Disney movie making these these great widescreen adventure films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea this was Family Robinson and others that were really a great part of Disney's tradition in the 50s in the 60s and a lot of us grew up watching those films as well and really enjoyed them and we knew that that something like that had never been done in animation before you know there's this entire land Disneyland that's devoted to adventure it's adventure land you know and we made a couple of fantasy land movies and we thought you know wouldn't it be great to kind of turn left and make an adventure land movie immediately the the kind of movie that came to mind was the kind of movie were a bunch of sweaty guys and girls and tank tops go off and do something together as a team maybe because we kind of mirrored that in our real lives not the sweaty tank top part but the team of people that goes off and does something together and I think we had gathered around us on previous films at this team of experts and we want to go off and conquer something and that was kind of our personal story and that's somehow turned into this story about a team of experts that want to go off and discover something welcome to the city of Atlantis at that point Kirk and Gary were pretty sure they wanted to make a movie about explorers going into the earth they weren't yet sold on the idea that Atlantis was actually something that they would find and we thought you know well what if we sort of do kind of a dirty dozen goes to the center of the earth what if we take sort of a team of handpick adventurers and send them on a journey into the earth to find a lost civilization so it was it was still kind of wide open but Atlantis as we all kept talking about the idea Atlantis sounded like a it sounded much better like a better idea because it had this aura of mystery and supernatural and a lot of you know history associated and because nobody really knows what happened it left it open for our sort of warped interpretation what are they going for what are they what are they ultimately trying there's got to be a goal down there well a big a big particle don't you know why don't we why don't we put Atlantis down there that would be really cool and we don't have to actually go to the literal center of the earth but if with Atlantis is the goal that that would be really neat and so we kind of put all that together and by the time we were done with our appetizer plate at this Mexican restaurant we decide to head off and have an adventure of our own and make a film that was a big fun action adventure film we're gonna save Atlantis we're gonna die trying Don Cook encounter returned with the idea that they were gonna make this really big movie it was gonna be the biggest action adventure animation to ever done in fact the only action adventure animation had ever done consequently everybody believed in that idea and supported it so there were no there were no I know conflicting opinions about what no production numbers no songs no not this time let's do a different picture when I first came on you know Gary Trousdale one of the directors had made up t-shirts for everybody who was on the show early on it said you know Atlantis fewer songs more explosions and I was like okay man I'm with that I love action-adventure movie so my first thought was big action epic adventure movie and animation what a great thing so it was like jumping in with both feet and saying okay how can we make this good how can we make this different it's part of the legacy of our great boss Walt I mean how was the type of thing he set into motion experimentation never duplicating what you've done in the past trying out new things I think that that's healthy and I think you need to push those envelopes and you need to get differences between the films and I think this film does look different than any movie that we've done its content and its look is very very different doing these kind of effects and these incredible digital techniques and animation had never been really been done before to this extent I remember the first few times we saw screenings of mostly all just storyboards I went we can't make this film in a way this thing is way too difficult [Music] even though I'm a bit of a skeptic at heart and keeps saying I can't be done I will always figure out a way to get it done because I don't know the meaning of know if somebody says I want to see this I'm gonna deliver that you're gonna need a crew taken care of you'll need engineers and geologists got em all the best of the best well the easiest way to explain how we made the movie was to talk about the brain trust we had a group of people hate people ten people who were the brain trust for this film so you can start with Kirk and Gary this their the director is the master storyteller is whose vision we're all gonna follow and the team that we surround a curtain Gary with was Kiran Joshi Chris Chang cans Edgerton er Lisa keen Dave gets Marlon West Marshall to me those people became a brain trust of people that we could meet regularly with and collaborate regularly with it would execute the vision then to probably 600 people but that has to start with a very very small core group of people that can rally around a single vision and what's interesting about that group of people is you might think animations made like the ford motor assembly plant like you start with a chassis and that goes down and the guy puts the tires on and by the time get to the end they're putting the steering wheel on and the dice on the rear view mirror and the car is done and it rolls out into the showroom it's not really that way at all particularly on Atlantis I think what you'll find and and as you explore this disc and hear interviews and talk about the the kinds of people that worked on this film is a real improvisational kind of crossover between various departments Walt Disney had this word called plussing and it's an odd word that you don't hear out in the real world too much but we use it your a lot and it means that everybody that grabs the ball and runs down the field makes the movie better so you start out with a team of story guys that do their best to storyboard the film and then the art directors get a hold of it and make a little better and the layout guys make a little better the effects guys a little better in the anime is a little better and everybody takes it to a higher level until the movie becomes much much more than anyone could do and that blessing kind of idea is something that was really around on Atlantis to a pretty big degree you for Atlantis what was really important to us was to create a plausible impossible to use an old Walt Disney term to create a mythology around Atlantis that could make you arguably say that this actually happened we need to create a plausible Atlanta so we had to go out and hit the books we had to really go out and study everything and absorb everything we possibly could on the lost continent of Atlantis what we learned when we started doing a research and we actually used the Internet to its best advantage in this particular movie this is one movie where we did virtually all our research at the beginning of the story from internet websites all about Atlantis and lost continents and we found theories ranging from the very scientifically sound to like the looniest whacked-out the possibilities and and somewhere you know that that sort of give us the inspiration for a story if you if you type in Atlantis as a keyword you get a mountain of stuff back so we found out that a lot of people had some awareness of Atlantis just you know as a as a concept but nobody really knew the story Plato is one of the primary sources you can go to right away and sort of start to read about Atlantis and get and formulate some opinions or some ideas about it he was the first person who put it down in writing that there was a Atlantis somewhere and he heard it from a story from his father who heard it from a friend so it you know he goes way back the actual legend of Atlantis Plato describes an island beyond The Pillars of Hercules that that had which nobody really knows what that yeah some people believe that's the Atlantic other peoples believe other people believe it was just right in the middle reign Ian you know it all got so got a little lost in the translation it was an island an island continent that was basically owned by Poseidon wasn't it yeah and his sons the Titans who were like the the governors of the kings of Atlantis and they they governed it poorly and and sank it and yeah angered the gods and the gods of we eventually Sankat we researched Greek history Roman history native culture history and tried to trace where Atlantis might even be like if we were gonna go look for it today where where would it be there's a very convincing documentary that we saw on you know one of the History Channel's or whatever that that lays out the idea that it was santorini you know a sunken island in Greece most stunning kind of comparison you can make to Santorini or Syrah and Plato's accounts are that it did blow off the face of the earth one day there was a huge volcanic eruption and if you go there today you can visit the island of Santorini and see the remnants of this amazing volcanic cone and if you go down to the water's edge you can see an archaeological ruin and walk through some of the old Minoan or some say Atlantean streets that are still there today there are other things like the the lost continent that would have existed in the Atlantic Ocean between somewhere naviga between you know Europe Africa and America South America which is this idea of Lemuria that there was a whole continent that was there because otherwise how is it that you have for example pyramids in Egypt and pyramids in in South America and how is it I think someone I think there's another thing like how is it that bananas would have been in both places if they hadn't all if they hadn't if someone hadn't transported them so that's given rise to this theory so you know that's you tend to pick up all kinds of stuff like that we've looked into Edgar Cayce and all his ideas about Atlantis I called a sleeping prophet and he had these these visions from like the 1920s where and he was the one who proposed and saw these these crystals you know that powered Atlantis he really felt and believed almost prophesied about Atlantis being this living breathing spiritual force that exists today he went into great deal about a great deal of depth about how you know the Atlanteans could sort of focus their mental energy through a crystal and create a beam of destructive power and and we thought well that's really cool that would be neat to see that in animation [Music] [Applause] we found all kinds of crazy like Hollow Earth theories you know just a lot about land just stuff about about you know there being an entire universe underground you know that that exists kind of alongside of ours and all the lost civilizations and kind of ancient masters and you know mystery cults all kind of wound up down there and and flourished and we thought you know we can we could push and pull and tweak that a little bit and let and let you know the Inner Earth be the resting place of Atlantis or at least a good chunk of Atlantis that was preserved after after the disaster there are so many stories and groups of people who believe that Atlantis was real so we took as many pieces as we could find from reality and combined them into what we ended up with as I our Atlantis and where we found it her ambition was to create a mythology that made what was on the screen really plausible and allow you to dig into it so a little bit of that was getting somebody like Marc Okrand to come in and create a language that could actually sit down and converse in an Atlantean dialect then we thought we also need a written dialect and for that we went to one of our artists just named John Emerson who sat down one day and did a series of drawings and eventually came up with our alphabet of letters that became the atlantean alphabet it can't be it's the Shepherd's Journal that's true this journal is the key to finding the lost continent of Atlantis Tabb Murphy was the Shepherd's journal is his idea that the notion of the Shepherd's journal and this ancient book that was written by you know a mad Shepherd you know 5,000 years ago that detailed his his trip to Atlantis I mean for me as the writer of the story I needed a map I needed Milo to have a map to get through Atlantis one of the fun parts about making the movie is we assembled not only this mythology but actually some of the props as though the tour to Atlantis was actually a real thing and I always loved it when people would come into our pod where we were making the movie and we had the Shepherd's Journal there and they would say if the Shepherd's Journal you have the Shepherd's journal like we had the real thing and well of course I guess we did but the actual physical realization of the book was a lot of different ideas were tried on we had our development department working on we talked about Scrolls we talked about tablets we talked about Scrolls they have been recut and rebound into a book form books with sort of unusual binding that could fold into different shapes but ultimately it had to be kind of carried around by Milo it couldn't be something as unwieldy as like a bunch of Scrolls that be at the hall from place to place had to be something he could hold in his hand like a Bible and our own kind of bogus mythology of the Shepherd's Journal was that this book had traveled through history and had been fought over in fact and had gone from you know from like like barns in South of France to you know to the Chinese imperial courts to you know to Turkey to to the Tower of London you know had been all over the world we tried to tie the journal to various real events and real people and make it seem like something that had a life outside the movie so you might wonder why all this passion time effort to create this mythology for Atlantis and of course we wondered that ourselves but it's really a really simple answer you want the audience yes to believe that this civilization really existed but there's this great tradition of storytelling where the it Plato or Edgar Cayce or all these people who have contributed to the mythology of Atlantis over the centuries we want to do the same thing we want to the best of all those traditions add to it ourselves and then pass it on to the next generation and let them reinvent Atlantis another hundred years from now I think a lot of people feel like we make a movie by hiring a writer who writes a script and then we somehow go off and draw a lot of drawings and then you go to the opening of the film and an animation it's not that way at all you we had a great screenwriter on the film tab Murphy brilliant guy worked on Tarzan and gorillas in the mist and he was there from the earliest days to help us craft this concepts and the kind of underlayment and the the spine if you will of the story but then the story gets handed off to a team of story artists and and certainly the directors Kirk and Gary to try to craft that story into something that's really unique writing for animation is the most collaborative work I've ever done in my career and you have to really have a mindset of being a team player you sort you sort of co-owned the story with a bunch of people other story people artists board artists animators all the way down the line they continued to contribute to the story because the idea is to make the best movie possible with the story department and we're the first guys in we're like the first guys on the beach we're those like in Saving Private Ryan we're those guys that get killed we take all the first we take the first crack at everything so from beginning to end we have to visually illustrate the entire movie in comic strip form the editorial crew is probably the second crew on show we come in right after the story people's story people come on and they start drawing their storyboards and then we come on when they're ready to put things up basically in two reels I have nothing but a script then I get storyboards and then we'll record the dialogue scratch dialogue thanks for volunteering my loan I'll cut the pictures together with the dialogue and then we'll show it to producers executives make their changes and you kind of this process this is continuous the movies are constantly changing to make to get everything better that's the great thing about animation is you can continue to put it up and revise it and make it better and in doing so you have a lot of successes and you have a lot of failures you probably have more failures than successes there's a really early piece of paper that existed on this film where I wrote down just some title ideas that were flying around and one was pirates of Atlantis the very first image on the movie was this picture of a pirate ship on kind of a stormy sea and all around it are the huge arms of this big mechanical sea monster that have kind of risen up out of the water and that was kind of our first our first visual image on the on the film which kind of set the tone for the kind of kind of movie we're gonna make there was a part of us that were attracted to pirate movies and at one time there was the idea or the thought that Milo we gave him the heritage of being a descendant of Blackbeard the pirate and that got lost real early along the way and became a story about Milo going to discover his inner self and his inner you know tendencies towards exploration and trusting his own instincts that his grandfather imbued him with and we lost the idea of discovering your inner pirate so some of the ideas we kicked around what kind of we're kind of jewels varnish in nature we're talking about maybe doing Journey to the Center of the Earth just like an adaptation of that and if if you've read that book you know that there's a section of that where they visited Lantis it kind of pass through atlantis but they don't spend any time there it's a civilization and that's dead no one's there and right after they get there boom the volcano blows up and they're gone then we thought well let's just take the Atlantis section of that idea and turn it into a movie about a bunch of explorers that go try to find and resurrect atlantis it was really about let's just pull the cork out of our creative bottles and let it flow and let's see what we come up with you know there was no concern about oh it's got to be 90 pages because that's what an animation feature runs the first draft that I turned in was 155 pages long the very first time we got everything up on reels and screen it for people we only had the first two acts and we ran an hour and 20 minutes and people said gee that's a little long which is when we started losing realistic characters entire characters and entire sequences for example the passage of time during which the explorers enter the earth and they get to Atlantis now we all knew that ultimately that would have to be a fairly truncated section of the movie but we wrote lots and lots of sequences about what they met and the obstacles they overcame and the great you know I mean we just had a lot of fun in that area we had a whole sequences where they have the submarines surfaced in the vast underground grotto and got attacked immediately by squid bats we descended from the ceiling and they had to put up this perimeter of electric wire fence that Packard helped erect and they turn on a high voltage and repelled the squid bats we had a sequence in the movie where the explorers stopped because they found these these kind of hot springs to kind of soak their feet in and it turned out that the hot springs were actually the blow holes of these giant what we called lava whales they look just like a landmass and kind of a sea of lava okay for the record I never really bought off on the lava whales because I mean come on I mean that that would have been too much of a leap of faith for me I mean you know whales made lava okay well would they burn up that was a curtain Gary thing so sorry guys but you know I wasn't sorry to see that one go lambie's was a very fun sequence originally our explores fell down into this dark cavern and Milo is farther away from everyone else he sort of rolled off by himself and he ends up crawling through what he thinks is a tunnel and it turns out that it's this huge creature called a land beast that rears up and the beast is actually being hunted by a group of Atlanteans so we had this whole hunt sequence but he's Milo's on the land-based the Atlanteans are coming after the Beast and it was great and we all loved it but we kind of felt like gee people have come to this movie which is called Atlantis the lost Empire and here we are an hour into the movie and we're still not at Atlantis Mike Mignola described it as a monster parade for the first time he's like it's just a big monster parade there's anything wrong with a big monster for it but but fans of monster parades thank you but but the story of Milo and his journey as a hero was getting lost in in the cacophonous din of all these monsters yeah I mean they were spectacular they were fun and they were exciting but that was that was the thing it's like where's the human element where's the right actor what what do we care about ultimately we decided it was more important for Milo to kind of bond with the crew and the crew to bond to him so we decided to tell the journey to atlantis' kind of a little more on a human scale you'd get all the fantastic scenery but the story that you're really tracking is more of a human one the very first thing we put into production very first thing was the prologue of the movie which told the story about a series of Vikings navigating the North Atlantic using an ancient document called the Shepherd's Journal oddly the new Atlantis I mean I counted a giant sea monster who ate their boat and the only thing left at the end of the sequence was the Shepherd's Journal floating on the sea we wanted to give the journal a sense of history one of the make it feel like it was this ancient document that had been sought out for centuries we wanted to start the movie off exciting you know kind of started off with a bang and you know let the audience know you're in for urine for something that you have you're not necessarily used to in a Disney film it was a spectacular sequence so much so that we actually animated it and colored it and cut it into the movie and we watched the movie one day and John Sanford who's the head of our story department he brilliant storyteller said you know you're probably gonna fire me because it's gonna cost a lot of money and you'll hate me for saying this but by the time we get to Atlantis I really don't care about Keita and I really don't care about the Atlanteans because it's taken me 40 minutes to meet them and it's like a whole new movie when we get to Atlantis and I don't care about their story at all he said cut the Viking prologue and start the movie with Keita and we said there was a long pause in the room we said we're listening and he said he does a little girl she witnesses the destruction of Atlantis but it's from the perspective of a four-year-old girl and we went you know again other laws laws because in our hearts we knew he was right and Gary Trousdale went home that night and you know spiral binder he sketched out in these little thumbnails of what that beginning could be suddenly the whole thing pulled together suddenly it was more satisfying on a number of levels because you did get a back story of Keita you felt you know a little bit of her history and a little bit of what she's been going through also you got a glimpse of Atlantis you got a look at it at its heyday you got a look at what it used to be and it's still started with a bang because we couldn't blow it up and for the world it's exactly so it was still an action sequence it was still it was still about really starting the movie off with with with a bang as it were but now there there was an emotional core to it there was a little girl who you were following through this and she had this you know terrible experience where she sees her mother lifted up into the sky and that's something that could pay off for us later in the movie to the point where now in the story forty minutes in when Keita comes back and lifts up her mask in screenings we sit in the back and we always laugh because everybody audience goes and it's all because John Sanford came in that one day and said you're gonna kill me but there's a better idea and he was right so we cut the Viking prologue and we hope you enjoy it on the disc there's always a debate in retrospect when you see all these sequences of wool wouldn't have that have been a better idea or wasn't that a cool sequence why didn't you use that ultimately it comes down to a director's vision the es all these discard sequences have some value to them or we wouldn't have storyboard them and put them up in the screen in the first place but ultimately the director has to stop one night and say you know what it's a cool sequence it just doesn't belong in this story there's there's 50,000 ways you can tell the story about a bunch of explorers that make it to Atlantis what's the most compelling what's the most emotional what's the way that we really want to relate to the characters on the screen that's the story to tell and anything that's not on that spine has to be shaved off and thrown away and just stick with those core ideas that belong in the movie [Music] [Music] imagine Lion King without Africa imagine Mulan without China imagine Ariel without her under the sea and imagine Milo on a stage by himself with nothing behind him and that gives you a sense of what this team of people do there are people who are layout artists background painters scene plan or as effects artists that have to create the world that these characters will inhabit and it has to be as plausible as Africa and China and this beautiful undersea environment and Little Mermaid you have to believe in fact that Atlantis really does exist layouts a tough task because you're not only the set designer but you're also the cinematographer and edgert nur who is our layout supervisor on Atlantis is just that he has a great sense of stages and settings and how to compose things around the characters but he's also a really brilliant cinematographer he's able to take the camera in this case the virtual camera the animated camera and move it around to make you feel like you're really part of that scene I came in early because of the cinema scope on this picture I had to do I had to sell it to the people here because it had been a long time since we had done any widescreen format and they had looked at it for other pictures but found it maybe not viable for them at the time and I felt that Atlantis action-adventure should have been a widescreen perception of producing a bigger image for the screen is that you're gonna have to draw everything bigger if you have to draw everything big you got bigger sight these sheets of paper you have bigger desks maybe you have bigger animators to animate I don't know it was certainly talked about bigger rooms there was talk about you know how do we fit all these new desks these new disks that we can have to create for the paper and I realized very early on that this was just such a terrible misconception we did a little experiment so well a normal screen is this big and so you could argue that the the film is going to be 30% larger but you can also argue well the ratio could be 30% smaller you can actually take top and bottom off of it and get the same ratio and that was the argument that prevailed and in the end it wasn't 30% more expensive it was actually true that we worked on technically on smaller paper with smaller backgrounds because the style allowed it so on Atlantis we had the ability to make longer scenes because there was more space for the character to walk in when we first started this - we looked at David Lean movies we looked at Indiana Jones any widescreen picture that we could get a hold of that was famous that we all like and found that there were similarities no matter who was the director or the style of the picture I mean movies of this this type stories of this type of always been told in that format because it stores that are epic good nature seem to kind of demand that that's sort of that sort of really invest yeah exactly that kind of canvas that really sort of immersive field to bring you into this fantasy world a lot more action can be contained on the screen sort of at one time and you just get these wonderful panoramic vistas of these alien landscapes that really make you feel like you're there [Music] background painters are wonderful storytellers because color has such a strong emotional response to us as human beings when we see a color we see red we feel passion or anger when we see blue we see peace or romance all those things can go into a background painting so it's not just technique it's not just the obvious colors it's also the emotional colors of what's in a scene and so background painters in that way our wonderful storytellers that contribute to the emotion of the scene lisa keen our background supervisor was having was having this problem or that she was in this quandary about how to treat the film overall color wise my whole world is based on the color of what that environment is so one of the biggest challenges I had was what does this environment look like and how do we create light down here you know how do they breathe how do they get their water how does all this happen Lisa went away and and thought and painted and painted that thought and came up with an entire working model of the Atlantean ecosystem you know those little spheres that you'll see in some of those new-age stores and it's a whole ecology it's like a little glass bubble and it has water and it has a little plant has a little fish well the whole ecosystem works within itself and that's kind of where I launched from where you've got this basically a bubble that's sitting under the ocean if that bubble were covered by earth and and this is where we had some artistic license the crystal is the catalyst this is the thing that's still operating in Atlantis and drawing a certain amount of water that brings the water up into Atlantis and creates the the waterfall in the lake if you will that you see and that's drawing off in the ocean and there was also the concept of this being very near to the earth so we might have some magma coming up from the bottom we would have perhaps a lava flow in there now you have that bubble and you have a lava flow and you have water you can create steam which in turn waters the plants which in turn create oxygen so you can start to build an environment in which you might be able to have life so that crystal is what is so important so when they actually steal the crystal and take it from Atlantis they realize their world is over that that's when the lava becomes more intense in the whole world becomes red and it's a struggle to get that crystal back to the Atlantis to get that equilibrium back on track for survival we never have a character go look at it and go hmm why this must be like a giant garden pump the water is pumped up we just we just we just thought we just do it yeah and we thought that it would just give the whole place a little more credibility even even if a character doesn't stop and explain it for the audience the fact that we knew what it was and the artists knew how it worked just enabled them to believe in it more when you go to make a film like Atlantis you really want a seasoned professional to kind of jump in and create your special effects because it is a toy store full of opportunities and you know we had no seasoned professionally on Atlantis we had a gentleman named Marlon West who turned out at the end of the movie to be a brilliant seasoned professional I got this visit from from Donna and the producer came to visit me in my little office that I had at the time and you know asked me if I wanted to work on Atlantis and that was the first time I was actually kind of supervised something and I knew it was a big show and it was a pretty daunting to me being the first time supervisor and he showed me the show real at the time you know I kind of took a look at it and I saw this movie with like sea monsters and lava literal fire fly setting fire to things you know and I started looking around my room like looking for candid camera cameras or something you know because I was like these guys are trying to put one over on me but they were serious and this is just really big effects movie so it was a big job but when someone asked me you know what's effects animation and my kind of catch-all definition is everything that moves on the screen except the characters themselves the water surfaces digital bubbles in the film as well as like traditional bubbles and you know everything else that's actually moving around and steam mist clouds all of that kind of it comes under the realm of effects but the cool thing about Atlantis is it has effects you know that the effects department are doing energy zaps machine gun fire and all that kind of stuff things that people in a live-action film would associate with being an effect as well so it's like it's the same thing so that's very satisfying why I'm trying explain what I do to someone special effects and this movies for long this wasn't Marlon West movie as far as I'm concerned this was his special-effects gift to the world [Music] without scene planning animations just a bunch of drawings it's just a stack of drawings on a table what scene planning does is takes that stack of drawings on a table and turns it into a plausible shot for a motion picture that's the idea of scene planning is making all these pieces that make up a scene fit so harmoniously together that that you you get kind of that tingle in your spine sometimes when you see certain scenes you look at a sequence like the Leviathan battle where you have a three-dimensional animated articulated object like Leviathan or the submarine interacting with objects like roar barking orders or painted backgrounds sliding by a scene planner has to take all those elements and work them like beautiful ballet to make sure that they seem plausible and actual in a real world that our movie exists in if we've done our job really well you don't notice camera work you don't notice these pieces you think of it as that environment existed just like that somebody drew it all together as that one piece and it's all just working almost like you were a live-action camera just off on a location shot and you shot it exactly how it is one thing that I've kind of learned about Kirk and Gary as directors is they like to end their film with a big bang you know if they love to do these long pull backs and we tried it on hunchback and we ran into limitations with the computer and I really felt the greatest challenge that we faced was we had such a huge pull out and the directors wanted to see depth in that pull out so they wanted to see what we refer to as multi planing but the computers didn't didn't want to behave nicely it's the most complex shot we've done in you know the 100-year history of the Walt Disney Company because of the amount of levels and the amount of ambition for that scene it was a big challenge because the artwork in there is 2d so think of Kedah and Milo as they're walking up the stone Giants are probably about six inches big the characters themselves they're playing on a set that is about 16 inches big and as we continue pulling out we literally go from the equivalent of this 16 inch piece of paper to a 18,000 inch piece of paper but each piece of paper that made this set is literally 24 inches big or smaller so you're creating this set that doesn't belong together at all they're all a bunch of separate pieces that looks like it's living harmoniously together and that's where st. kleiner comes in c-minor makes that all happen and and we don't do it alone sync planning is never a job of a solo departments in planning really is a service for all these different departments and its really getting small pieces from all these different departments that brings the same together and creates the final shot of what everybody thought just happened all this collaboration all this kind of plussing process of getting the movie as good as it can goes towards one thing and that's the audience we want you to go to the theater and sit down with your popcorn and your family and have the lights go down and have an experience that you haven't had before to be able to transport you to a place you haven't had before we realize that as artists it's really difficult to do by ourselves I can't make that film myself Kirk can't Gary can't edie can't Lisa can't but together we're stronger than each of us together that kind of collaboration that kind of team effort that we have makes something on the screen that is really unique and it's always going to be viewed by our audience and by each other as this collective process this collaboration that brought Atlantis to life a lot of our movies when you look at them are based on very familiar designs if you could arguably say buting the beast it's like a moving children's book or you could say Sleeping Beauty is moving medieval tapestries at the beginning of Atlantis we we kind of said what if it's a moving comic book what if you actually could step into the pages of a comic book and feel the design and the angularity and the action and the graphic quality of comic book but feel it as a spectator as someone who was trapped in alongside the Explorers and could actually step into that world and that's what the design world of Atlantis is I think Dave gets in our art direction team on the film was at the forefront of trying to create a visual experience that makes you feel like you're sitting in the middle of environment as opposed to watching an environment this movie was a little different than movies I've worked out in the past because rather than necessarily sticking from the visual development people that we had inside the studio we actually hired freelancers from the outside who were working in the live-action business we call it a look outside the gene pool to get a group of people working on it who just bring a different design sense and you know something that we might not have seen before in the animation world and there were four gentlemen that did that as production designers in this film Matt Cod who had worked on films like men in black and some of the Jurassic Park films and others came in and designed the Leviathan on this submarine and Jim Martin who's also known for a lot of his work in in some of the most the biggest special-effects titles of the last decade came in and helped us design elements of the submarine and the sub pods and a lot of the vehicles ricardo delgado who's known primarily for his brilliant comic work and his work in film helped us to assign a lot of the sets of atlantis and the environments and the caves and the exotic world of the Atlanteans and then lastly Mike Mignola well mike is a is a great comic book artist in both Gary and I have been comic book fans from way back and we were we kind of discovered his comics at around the same time and you know really enjoyed reading him and reading him and loved the artwork and loved the stories he's done a number of comic books the most famous or notorious or is his Hellboy serious which Kirk and I are both huge fans of we recognize the style early on as something that would fit in with a kind of thing we were doing so we really drawn to Mike's work because it's a really it's very high contrast style a very bold use of black and a kind of limited color palette and that we were drawn to that but it just felt appropriate for the movie and rather than just sort of take his comics as an inspiration we decided to just go to the man himself and and get Mike Mignola on the phone unfortunately he was he was willing and able I just can't I can't get over the fact that these guys even know who I was and when I first came up here there were these big boards set up they were you know panels from whole pages from various comics I've done and notes all over them explaining how to draw like me Mike vanilla deserves my vanilla decision and I woman who did these things I actually had to ask her what some of the notes meant draw like me it's just the way I draw he came down and not only contributed a lot of great drawings that were the springboard for a lot of the a lot of the big visual images in the story but he also had a great story sense being a writer and artist himself and you know writing scores and scores of comic book stories he just has a really really fast and sharp creative mind and came up with with you know tons of ideas in the course of many story meetings a lot of them you know found their way into the movie I'm used to doing a lot of talking I'm not used to anybody listening I'm certainly not used to anybody listening to what I have to say and going off and making a movie out of it so it's been it's been pretty interesting when you look at the movie and as the directors will tell you a lot of what you're seeing our story ideas and concept ideas like flying stone fish that shoot lightning bolts out of their mouths or giant stone guardians that come up to save the day at the end of the film that are right out of Mike Mignola's hand and I think what was powerful about Mike and certainly Matt and Ricardo and Jim is their ability to create another world and be kind of visionaries for us in a visual sense and then you take a guy like Dave gets whose job it is to pull that together and all that kind of ingredients and and bake a beautiful cake that the audience will want to eat so it doesn't look like you know here's a piece of chocolate and a piece of lemon meringue pie here and all these different flavors he has to bake a cake that sits together and feels like one movie and that's the genius of Dave gets the main design theory for me it kind of revolves around the opposition of these two cultures so on the one hand you have the intruding explorers and they're clanking smoke spewing noisy world war one era industrial their philosophies all rely on technology basically and they're coming down they're invading these Atlanteans who their whole world is built around this mysticism or magic and everything about them is is really organic so we would have this organic magic kind of crystal based technology versus this world of you know pre-world War One and you can look at books and you can look at photos and you go on the internet for things like that but really for something like that nothing really beats being you know being like right next to the objects the interiors of the submarine were based on two trips not only to a harbor in Los Angeles but to a hardware in Baltimore to look at old period submarines and we actually got to go into the submarine and kind of crawl through it and imagine what that would be like to be in an environment that enclosed cramped is the word that comes immediately to mind you're talking about very compact you know men and machinery it's more like a big wad of machinery that has a little hole board through it that you know that men may pass through and barely barely cohabitate in I mean it's it's truly amazing and you know I can imagine being underwater for weeks in one of those things we also we also had the good fortune to to travel to Maryland to the everdene proving grounds was that it's like the nation's largest collection of armored vehicles going all the way back to World War one we were able to crawl into these tanks and you know look through their gun sights and you know kick the doors and slam attires it was the crudeness and the the absurdity of the technology and yet the complete faith in the technology that made it a really interesting time period I think the only era that could take place in was 1914 and those field trips helped us immerse ourself in that era it was like rich material for us to let - okay we can hold it from here a little bit from there and kind of synthesize that to the design of the explorers technology it was Birth II it was gritty it was pre-war it was all of those things as opposed to Atlantis which was watery it was more ethereal it was a cooler environment it was warmer it was rounder it had a very different feel than above land obviously there's no place to go such as that for Atlantis because it's a very made-up world however what we did do was create the umbilical cord from above land to Atlantis which was the caverns in the caves so we did some work with the Carlsbad cavern folks who very graciously took us and showed us some of the more interesting environments in the caves and some of them were quite hairy kids don't try this at home go down this hole in the ground out here in the middle of nowhere there was one cave we went into it was called spider cave and as we all kind of shimmy to our way down into it and mj-- why is it called spider cave my guy says just look above you it first thing you do is you look up and that place is covered with spiders and bugs is like a scene out of a Spielberg movie and I'm not bothered by spiders and bugs but you know when they're about three inches from your head and there's a lot of them and they're big and they look like they're hungry you know you just wanna you don't want to touch anything stays low to the ground as you can those trips aside from a bonding experience where we take our crew out and throw them together in cave ate her feet under the ground creates a certain esprit de corps between your filmmakers it also creates a real sense of the topic that you're facing we're pursuing life deep in the center of the earth and it's fascinated science fiction writers for centuries the idea of exploration in a world that we've never known that's right beneath our feet and that was something that was so apparent when you get down there and you find out well the big room at Carlsbad Caverns is 13 football fields across that's huge and that makes you start to believe that you can sustain a whole civilization underground that's based on the elements that you have available underground like the warmth from lava or the water dripping from the ceiling and create an ecosystem that's completely different than our own but exists completely for the servicing of Atlantis in that culture underground one of the things that happened right away in the creation of this movie that Kirk and Gary wanted was that Atlantis not look like the expectation you had and I think most people in their heads have kind of a greco-roman view of Atlantis the kind of cliche version of Atlantis 1950s Atlantis the aquarium toy yeah the aquarium toy look it's alike like crumbled Greek columns underwater that's not what we wanted we wanted something that would give our Atlantis you know its own identity that kind of style guy there's a little picture of a Greek a Great Temple with a with a cross crossed out you know it's just not where we're going with this we looked at Mayan architecture styles of an ancient unusual architecture from around the world and the directors really like the look of Southeast Asian architecture and if you think of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is kind of generally the idea of the model you have these kind of beehive shaped towers there's a very kind of particular characteristic to the stuff that became the basis for you know our physical appearance of Atlantis there was the idea that Atlantis was kind of the the cradle civilization or the mother civilization and that other styles whether they were South American pyramids or the temples of India or even you know the more Western stuff like like the Greek and Roman architecture all kind of branched out of this so if you take and deconstruct architecture from around the world into one architectural vocabulary that's what our Atlantis looks like you might think why not go out and grab a camera and film an expedition to Atlantis and you'd have the movie why we mess with all this design and kind of taking the audience through with these beautiful design frames and scenes and I would argue well that's what animation is about you can start with a blank piece of paper and not only take an audience on a journey to Atlantis but pull their eye around the screen and make them feel things with color and shape and texture with a pencil and a piece of paper and a paintbrush you can create a world that is fantastic you've never experienced before [Music] there's more digital production in Atlanta so lost Empire than in any movie we've ever really done [Music] I think a lot of it just depends on what the demands of the story are for instance when the submarine or the creature the submarine encounters they're huge they're very detailed they're very geometrical in their design it would be really time-consuming and difficult to do all that kind of stuff by hand whereas if you build a digital or you'd have to cut a lot of corners yes so with with digital models of both we can show a lot more so to do that in our visual development process we brought the digital production people in to work side-by-side with us to help develop the movie with digital production in mind one of the types of digital elements that end up in a movie you can pretty much classify them into like four categories first is their digital characters then we have the vehicle effects on top of that we have effects then the fourth digital element that we did was 3d environments our goal is to not only Billy's digitally and make it work but the idea is that once we go into production and can crank out a lot of scenes a lot of people don't realize when you see the movie but there's actually a lot of character animation in the movie that's done digitally by our computer graphics animators characters like the stone giants at the end of the movie if the Leviathan are all animated in a computer the Leviathan is the gatekeeper to Atlantis he's there to keep them out the directors believed it was half a machine and a half as I call it lobster crab shark mixture and it was a beast literally inside the computer as well as outside essentially before we start any character we needed drawing from the front side and back and from those drawings the modeler takes it and puts it in to the computer it was a pretty well built model and rigged and it was heavy just because there was hundreds of controls on it without even bringing in the face into it which would out of another 50 and the modeler in the 3d space inside the computer using points and surfaces shapes and molds it just like a sculptor would outside the computer with his hands they were using like the mouse and tools that the computer software gives you and you have the color and lighting people you know make it beautiful it's exactly the same as what a traditional animator does it's just in the computer the stone giants were the protectors of the city when we're animating them they were just sort of like a human being but we would just scale him up and make him move really slowly to get the effect that they were much larger than the other characters in those shots the Tonys are really the henchmen they're all the all the guys that get all the work done for Roark and all those people but you never see him there only in cars you know walking around in the background they're sort of the unsung heroes of getting the main crew of down to Atlantis they're a generic model we had like different hats and different mustaches and that we would swap in and out depending on the scenes just to make make it look like there was more of them we kind of faked it it was another way to use computer graphics is with special effects the visual effects artists use computers to create for example an amorphous glob of crystals with the orbiting rune stones around it is all animated and conceived in fact with the idea of computer graphics in mind what we were able to do digitally was make it have all these layers you know these two these three crystals orbs kind of rotating around and then there's like a sphere around them then it's emitting bright light so when you're looking through it you like it's like looking into the Sun at the Crystal energy crackling around the crystal and when it shoots out of the Leviathan it's basically the same it shoots a crystal energy blast and the idea behind the crystal energy blast is that it has its main form but then around the core there's a lot of this crackle effect and if you look at that crystal real carefully that same theme is echoed there is this plenty and crackle the shield's the cover and lattice they were also done digitally so in you know had a very energy kind of crackle kinda moved around it as well that crackle effect that's really to integrate with the Mignola style when we look at Noah's comic books like here you know you'll see that there's a lot of these crackle effect there's ladies lots of explosions with negative holes the other way we use computer graphics is in environments and sets we're able to use techniques that combine the cinematography deep canvas into these really sweeping camera moves that use the computer to create a sense of environment that you're actually flying through a part of the environment we have a hard time moving the camera through things so the advent of the the computer is helping us be able to get more what we call z-plane into into space the opening of the film we wanted it to be very intense to get a lot of emotion out of the camera work so that way you could put a fear into the audience of what these people flying the Narmada were feeling we purposely decided to make it 3d so we could get a lot of the banking that you would feel if you were on a roller coaster the part that we actually fly through the environment with our characters is basically a 3d animated wireframe that we then go on and paint over the surface what it does is it creates an environment that looks hand-painted but is 3d tunnels in the Leviathan submarine chase we built a tube flew the camera through it and then had background paint it digitally in there deep canvas system I would be interested to see if anybody could really tell the difference between the 2d and the 3d because we mixed them it's very hard to tell her he's a kid the magic [Music] a very big challenge early on was to produce a look that really fitted into this 2d environment and not just a 2d environment in even in our traditional sense but a 2d environment that's composed of comic book images there was a great test we did early on where a staff car like a vehicle drove up and drove over the foot of one of the stormtroopers and he hops off the screen this was a little gag scene but it was meant as a very serious exploration about how the look of the film could develop the ambition was to try to not make 2d traditional character drawn animation and computer graphics look like they're from two different films but rather make the computer graphics fit into the world we had created it's definitely a shotgun marriage it's it's something that took a bit of doing at the head of this because a lot of our 3d guys come from the live-action world it took a lot of arm-twisting to convince them that we want this to affect cartoons we want it flattened out one of the challenges was to get no software developed that would put a line around the edges of all of our vehicles and then just developing what they call the shader which is the way that the actual coloring of a 3d surface looks in other words does it have texture does it have gradations on it does it have interesting kind of painted maps put on it in our case no we we decided to make it look as much like a cel painted object as possible you don't need to put all the bells and whistles on anyway because movement conveys that extra dimension that you'll be missing the sub drop-shot was an interesting shot in the picture because we had to move the camera past the bubble where Milo is standing and to do that is such a tricky shot whenever you have a moving 3d object and you know and you have to draw a 2d character on that it gets really hard we have a three dimensional sub so it's it's definitely generated in a whole different environment we had two dimensional characters which was Milo once you take these two worlds and you've got to composite them together they move against each other it almost looks like buzzing or this kind of static type noise that you get and and then that's distracting to the audience so what we ended up doing we ended up taking Milo and placing them in that 3d environment the drawing itself is always at one size it never changes sizes it's the computer that then places it in the case of the sub dropping the sub is miles and miles away at the start of the shot comes right through cameras eye and then as he comes through camera he does his little head turn and moves his body and then goes miles away at the end of the shot and it's the computer that's doing the changing of the size of Milo so those two environments a two-dimensional character and a three-dimensional sub live from Linnaeus Lee together and they really feel like they're all one set even though they're not that same would have been terrible had you seen my load chattering around the whole time in the bathysphere is as he passed by but now he's completely law Tam's on it and it looks great we knew that the traditional hand-drawn animation in the digital animation we had to exist hand in hand for Alanis to be a success the goal of all this digital production in the film was not just a grandstand it was not just to stand say I'll look at all the cool things we can do it was really to make the movie this role and exciting and make you feel like you were on this kind of high powered journey to atlantis' and of course the thing you learn at the end is it really doesn't matter if an artist comes into work and picks up a pencil or picks up a mouse and a keyboard it's really the art on the screen that matters computers don't do a thing it's the artist the great artists that come in and use those computers to create wonderful production on the screen that helps you audience feel like they're just engrossed in their film [Music] [Music] in an animated film there's no ambient sound you know there's no guy in the studio recording what animators sound like cuz you know it's like a lot of slurping coffee and flipping pages so we really have to go to somebody who can create worlds for us and no one better than Gary rise from a view to watch an animated film with just the dialogue you would seem very strange there's no weight to the characters there's no other sounds so that's the fun part about doing sound effects for an animated film as an entire world has to be created so you can create that alike from scratch but you can create what you want what you want the sound to sound like we wanted somebody who could create a whole world for us that would sound like earth but not quite we all we talked to about the difference between how Atlantis would sound and how the explorers would sound which sounds odd but so that the Explorers vehicles were all very mechanical sounds very hard stones whereas he tried for the Atlantean vehicles and for it lends itself a much more organic kind of sound it's kind of web those two together that entire world has to be created around the images and the dialogue to make it believable for an audience and really think these people are walking around and handling objects and flying stone fish and getting in a sub and driving cars and all the other stuff we have this wonderfully clean pallet to work them the movies got plenty of big moments or traditional explosions and crashes and submarine chases and little submarines and torpedoes and giant rocks falling then on top of that film has you know giant stone Atlantean leviathans that chase the submarine so it's a combination of a living thing but it's also made of like a lot of things Atlantis from a kind of a crusty rocky material what is it a pot of whales uh-huh Jaeger it sounds metallic could be an echo off one of the wrecks do you want to do my job be my guest we would play with all sorts of ceramics and pottery and toilet lids and really literally all sorts of that kind of stuff to make unique sounds for those Atlantis things I guess it would be science-fiction although it's really more fantasy I didn't want to have anything that would sound electrical or part of our world Atlanta I mean really the basic sound for say the flying stone fish then musical sound recording that I made of a truck driving by and so a lot of the Atlantean sounds come from these type of pure things that crystal harmonica is rubbing your finger on a champagne glass and getting that pure glass kind of ringing sound become energy sci-fi sounds for Atlantis launch subpods the little subs that are launched from the big sub and they look around they have these tiny little motors we used a Waterpik further for that just a little water so yeah you do just sitting at home you're a Waterpik say in your head sub so it's a funny life you know a lot of the stone giant stuff just that sound of lights of stone that really make me don't joints is really just taking out ceramic the pot from the garden store taking it scraping it on itself the rattling introduced doing things like that until you find an interesting sound oh that someone like Gary right strim has to work with are the elements of dialogue music and effects it sounds so simple but it can be really detract evander knowing if the sound pull you out of the story well my favorite moments of the film is actually completely silent and it's when this giant wall of lava comes in and takes over the city and hardens over the top of Atlantis and the entire soundtrack comes down to absolutely nothing [Music] and you can hear a pin drop in the theater when that happens and so sometimes sound isn't sound it's the absence of sound and great musicians will tell you the same way it's sometimes the notes are not are equally as important as the rests it's experimenting it's having fun a lot of my job early on is really literally goofing around playing around with sounds with props and and manipulating them in funny ways and seeing what you get and when you get that unique little bit of sound then you take that and run and cut it up and use it [Music] music and animation is everything you know especially at the Disney Studios it has always been a a centerpiece of all of our films and when you think back of the movies that we've done like Bambi and Dumbo you remember the music and Atlantis is really no different it's not a musical nobody breaks into song and sings but in every way it kind of is a musical on it less because we didn't have song so it's gonna be very important to us to get a composer who could really give us that huge sense of adventure and wonderful themes and well we kind of quickly got down to James Newton Howard when you're really lucky you get to work with a composer like James Newton Howard and when you know this is our second of three films in a row we're doing with him because he's doing Treasure Planet which comes out a year from now Atlantis now and did dinosaur last year in the case of Atlantis I've approached it largely as a live-action film in terms of all the sensibilities and in that regard there they are exactly the same for me in terms of the initial inspiration initial ideas in terms of what the music is gonna feel like one's gonna be like I've always thought James Newton Howard she gets story credit on her films because he transports to you musically through several idioms in other words he's taken us from Washington DC and a very symphonic approach to music and transported us to a culture that's never existed before by inventing a musical voice for Atlantis let's do one more time and let's have Jim Thatcher play out and put on line just a fraction Mouse but the difference what I'm trying to do is establish the difference between the surface world and the Atlantean world there's a number of ways of doing that the way we chose or we talked about early on was sort of referencing to a very distant extent gamelan which is the indonesian orchestral sound is it's made up of a lot of tune chimes and bells and gongs and it's a wonderfully rich tradition of music [Music] I think the idea is to combine sounds in such a way juxtaposed it against the picture in such a way that the the totality of what you experience is a unique and wonderful event much more so than any individual sound composers in Hollywood don't get a lot of chance to write scores like this there's some big moments big moments where we carved out time with no dialogue and these beautiful Scenic's and just said this is a moment that we can't express in words you have to take [Music] as storytellers we can only take the audience so far we can only kind of lead the horse to water and what James can do with this music is he can make the horse drink he can really take you all the way and have that emotional quality resonate with the audience he really feel like he's tapping into something that's really primal in us that really helps us appreciate the emotion of the story if you're a composer and an animated feeling you really have to assume role the team player I enjoy that I really enjoy the feeling of sort of being a team what you get with James is not just a guy who's into your score for you you get a partner so he comes in very early with us on the movie over a year ahead he's with us creating themes writing themes watching the story as it develops animation can be very inviting for someone like that and when you get and when you get a composer like James who has such an expansive idea in his head about what film music can be he becomes a real partner in the marriage of of the sound of the movie and and his score is so spectacular sometimes you can't even separate the two that is his musical depth but more than that it's his emotional depth and his willingness to partner that makes him so brave [Music] [Music] some people describe the process of bringing a character to the screen like a relay race first you start out with character designers the character designers were trying to give a sense of the possibilities what are the infinite possibilities from a blank piece of paper of what that character might look like what I liked about this film was that I started off really early in this film and they had team gilmore's drawings which were really dynamic and fun and drawings from Mike Mignola he did some fantastic drawings and chen yi qiang had done some really marvelous stuff with the hands - and designs and he brought it back - a lot more sculpted designs in the way that he drew the hands the faces and things like that - the next part in the process this kind of relay race of character design is seeing if the drawing can move it may look great on a piece of paper but if a supervising animator can't take it and move it around to act and perform and dance and run and jump then it's worthless now the animator has a chance to breathe life into the character that life giving process of animation where a character goes from a still drawing on a piece of paper to a living breathing being then once you've got that pretty well defined you go into actually animating some scenes where you get the acting down and that's to me that's the main thing an animator is an actor you direct them just like you would direct any actor except that the acting all comes out from their brain and from their heart all the way down their arms you know right through the tips of their fingers you don't necessarily have to be a good draftsman you do have to be a good entertainer you do have to understand emotion and personality and how to equate that to movement and mass it's a very very strange combination of disciplines as an animator is none of myself but you know everybody that's in animation you know they study acting you know acting drawing is only half of the equation akina's is the other half that's what's great about animation you're not limited by your body type or your appearance if you can draw it you can you it I don't really worry so much about making very clean drawings as I said I try to work as clean as possible so that my ideas get communicated but clean up their job is then to take my rough drawings and clean them up basically what we doing clean up is we take the rough animation and we do the clean up line drawings that you see on the screen so the drawings you see on the screen are done by the cleanup department based on what these wonderful animators have acted out now the challenge to that is there's not just one main character we had a whole crew of characters the individual characters they were cast with as much care and and precision as Whitmore would cast each one of the roles in the expeditionary force the idea of Milo Izzy's little nerdy guy that just you know couldn't do anything right but was very intelligent everybody knows somebody like that Milo and Atlantis has a very special place in my heart I mean not only after being in the business for almost 30 years it's like this is probably the closest time I've ever come to animating a self-portrait there's a lot of me in it you know I identify with a character because I'm sort of a this historical bookworm you might say as a matter of fact my my wife has taken to calling me Milo in the household you know I'm the type of person where she'll ask me what time it is he'll tell her now how to make a watch the skills of the analytical mind dissecting how does things work I mean my look would be a great animator if you wanted to it makes me think that Milo is in character much the same type of hero that maybe Frank Capra had in a lot of his movies mr. Smith goes to Washington mr. deeds goes to town meet John Doe he is the little hero against the big world in searching for what he looks like graphically I remember surrounding myself with just tons of photographs of actors that I really admired in the cinema spanning the last eight decades I'm getting little bits and pieces of ideas that start my imagination running in high gear I put pencil to paper and just beginning working with shapes after about three or four weeks of that I got maybe an array of about 50 different types of Milo's in front of me all of them a little bit different all of them expressing a little bit different type of personality so now's the time when I say okay can I have a meeting with the directors and Don and our art director Dave gets and then they slowly start unpinning those and eliminating those that they don't think are quite Milo and then through process of elimination we boil it down to the one sketch that everybody likes so once we had that one drawing that I began to elaborate on that doing more poses more facial expressions until we finally had what we thought was Milo and now I turn on all the lights I shut the door I bolted shut but often Do Not Disturb sign disconnect the phone and I get into the scene and I struggle to get that first attitude drawing and all I'm thinking of is movement and mass on the paper and after several reams of paper I get it and suddenly Milo is born you have something there that is a life pulse a persona that's alive living on the paper I propose that we find Atlantis find that power source and bring it back to the surface [Music] Roarke was another character I think we you know in terms of a villain wanted to do something different with I love it when I win which was the idea instead of making him the usual moustached Worthing bad guy to give him a little complexity come on to not make him inherently evil but make him greedy and you know to sort of you know like try to create a three-dimensional character as opposed to a two-dimensional villain the first drawing I saw of Rourke was Mike Minneola drawing of him and then Jenny Chang who helped design Milan did a drawing kind of made Mike's drawings a little bit more animation friendly and then we started seeing the film a rough cut of it and it wasn't till I saw the story sketches of Roark in the and the reels and I thought wow that's kind of what I like it's I like that look I kind of pulled both of those and tried to make something in between because I think they both had elements it's just a matter of like finding the right ones that would work for animation when I started on Roark I think it was the feeling was that I thought okay you know I got wowed by the idea of villain you know it just it took me back to that whole idea that I'm gonna be able to do some crazy you know bad stuff with this character and then getting into the film I you know quickly realized that you know he's not gonna be that kind of villain nothing personal and it wasn't till near the end where you know he really busts out and goes crazy it was kind of when I really got the chance to be that little boy you know going through just gonna mess around and you're gonna you know get him you know kind of stuff where you can get crazy with it Cheeta she's obviously gonna run atlantis she's very strong-willed she knows what she wants she has influence over her father very strong she's tough she's cute she's the whole package well it was written in the script that the Atlanteans were kind of a mother race that they kind of were the original race and all other races and cultures evolved from them and so just as far as Keita's design and the Atlanteans in general what we tried to do is find a mixture of different cultures and different races and then put some of those elements in there she's got white hair but really dark skin and I made her nose just a little bit wider than then the average Caucasian girl I didn't want her to look like the girl next door I worked very hard to to find traits that I thought were attractive and one of the things I thought was attractive was these full lips I think it's exotic and it's also even in our you know modern times considered a very attractive when I looked at models in magazines and stuff I noticed that a lot of them no matter what their other features had very full lips we come up with ideas that are about her personality and how to play a scene which which with her has a lot to do with subtext because a lot of her dialogue could sound very firm and maybe a little too stoic and she could come off really OneNote if she wasn't played right but what we've been able to do was find you know what's inside from what's behind her words and the emotions that she expresses externally to find the subtext in her relationship with her father for example she's disagrees with her father's politics and yet she cares for him and so even as she's arguing with him helping him to be comfortable and and wiping his face with a damp cloth and dimming the lights and trying to care for him there's a side of her that's very serious and passionate about her goals in life but there's also another side of her and that's a real playful side and we see that part of her come out when she's with Milo I have some questions for you and you are not leaving this city until they are answered sweet dr. sweet was a great character to draw because we wanted to make sure that we kept his personality at all times because he was cool I wanted him to be as cool as he could be through the whole thing a name sweet Joshua sweet medical officer docks wheat one of the first african-american characters we've had in a Disney feature film is animated one of by one of our first african-american supervising animators Ron husband now sweet moves totally different than anybody else he has quick little accents it was a wonderful contradiction being he's the largest member of the team he's huge muscular hulking and this man is his fleet as compete he moves so fast and I think that's a nice little contradiction that Ron put into the animation but I was looking for something had some appeal big guy not a mean guy so when you look at him you don't want to be every pulse yeah he's a big teddy bear you might say because there's a lot of backstory in my mind as to who this character was well he was educated he was it's one part in a film where he had been in university uni but his actual medical training instead of being on the cadavers or in the classroom was out on the battlefield one day I'm studying gross anatomy in the classroom next I'm sawing up Rough Riders on Sam one he'd been a doctor what and it's been a period piece we wanted to make sure that the medical equipment and things that he was using where it would be contemporary with the time period so I was in contact with a couple of archives Howard University had an archive as well as Virginia Commonwealth University so I was in contact with them and they said some pictures and saroxas of medical equipment that was invoked during during that period of time his background is his dad being a buffalo soldier it's marrying a Native American and he'd been being produced from that Union so everything just sort of melted into it as to who he was of the character and then taking all that and designed that into the final character design the character Vinnie was somebody I thought an explosives engineer who for a while it was somebody who carried around a gramophone so every time he was gonna blow something up he'd put a little operon and he'd kaboom we'd do it to Ofra I mean you know fun you know weird strange stuff like that you know he a lot of times you have ideas that just don't translate well to the actual physical production of a movie so I'm thinking they got in and they thought how can you have this guy carrying a grandma fooling around everywhere it'll look a little strange so I had to go rethink okay how does this character gonna move how is he gonna act and I ended up thinking of him as a skinny guy in a Tyrell fit that's how I think of him I mean I think of him as actually a really thin guy underneath this big shell like this real slow-moving 30 who does all his stuff so that's how I approach it and if you look at his neck he's got his big cowl he's got this real skinny neck going down underneath it what else have you I got in there oh I took pleasure in notepads uses wicks glue and paper clips big ones like I went and watched the Godfather movies of all things for looking for specific things of Italian actors the way you know you know that old stereotype Italians use their hands you look at any of the broad Italian actors if you pointing you're pointing with your hand your whole hand they don't point with the fingers and so it's a so when Vinnie comes up and he has to say hey would you know any pointing he's pointing with his entire hand this way that way you know Vinnie was smooth as silk Vinnie didn't move a lot if you ever noticed Vinnie he did a lot of things perfectly still his personality wasn't supposed to move a lot and he had a lot of little gadgets on and his bombs I always had wires and everything with it and it's kind of like the Magnificent Seven right he's good with the knife you know well he's good with the dynamite I only got about ten bless you five of my own anytime they need dynamite you can team Thank You glycerin he's got it and he has a lot of it Hey look I made a bridge Helga was my tip of the hat to all those old forties movies the platinum blonde and all the Humphrey Bogart Mogi movies this smoking mysterious babe as a character Helga was kind of the femme fatale of this group of explorers she had to be Whitmore's personal assistants so kind of this graceful person who took care of his business life and kind of a personal assistant but also had to be a tough-as-nails commander when it came to going on this expedition we also had an opportunity and Helga to create a character that was really from the comic genre and that Paris studio gives us a tremendous chance to use a European group of artists like Yoshi Tamura who is a actually a Japanese animator who works in our Paris studio she looks like good Jen's Bond girl first so so she has to be very sexy and very active and they're stronger and also she's a villain so I tried to push her as pretty woman but very code also tell them to drop their weapons now Helga I love just because she was a tough woman she was fun she was difficult the braid had a life of his own and we had to make sure that the braids were consistently all the time you said we were in this percentage she was animated in Paris and cleaned up in Paris so we had to make sure that she fit within the group of characters because the rest of the characters were done here at in Burbank and you had to make sure that everybody fit nothing personal Audrey was again just I think a desire to have a female character that was closer to Milo's age and you know the guys were you know concerned about well we should have a mechanic person because these machines they could bus down and all that sort of stuff and I just thought what wouldn't be fun to you know to create a teenage girl grease monkey whose father you know was like this hardcore mechanic and she was kind of tough and from Queens of the Bronx I think it's in her blood she just grew up with it so it's second nature and we're talking about 1914 so I think she's a little bit oblivious to some of the standards around her of the time which would include being a female doing this kind of work because there weren't a lot of mechanics running around in to 1914 anyway never mind female mechanics never mind young female I can time do we have 20 minutes if the bump head holds you better make that five I listen to the to the track a lot I've you know by the time the scene is in my hand in my office I've already gotten direction and have some sense of where this piece fits into the continuity in terms of the acting and what's happening emotionally with the character I sit in it just execute attitude poses mostly that I think will say the little icons of the scene and then it's a matter of flushing things Audrey Ramirez reminds me so much of an reporter very feisty very spunky very full of Verve you know and a very strong character for flinching see on my loan Packard is the communications expert on this expedition but to look at her you wouldn't know that because she looks like somebody's grandmother she's sort of sullen very low-key a little acerbic very deadpan well I'm impressed mrs. Packard was a Don Han invention that he came to meeting he said I got this great idea for a character how about this like this old chain-smoking broad who runs the communications in the in that sub but she runs it like you know the Mayberry RFD you know operator or like the Lily Tomlin character so we all just thought that was pretty funny she had a lot of gadgets and the funniness of her personality was how still she was all the time and and her cigarette smoking which I'm glad they let us keep in because it was part of her personality with that rough voice she just seems like the type that would have been pretty flamboyant in her day but she's somewhat of a faded Gibson girl he'd say forget your jammies mrs. Packard I sleep in the nude a lot of of her acting comes not from action but more from finding that right attitude and then just maybe giving it a squint or a head tilt or something like that and you can get so much out of one drawing so basically I spend my time on Packard finding that one draw and then milking it molé molé year I had a lot of line mileage line mileage is how long it takes you to draw a character sometimes it takes an hour to clean up a1 drawing and in the movie there's a hundred and twenty-five thousand cleanup drawings Moliere took a little longer because he had every gadget in the world on his head Kirk and Gary they they usually give the animators a lot of leeway you know we worked on those early designs realizing that he's you know the comedy character and the movie they sort of said he's sort of like Pigpen just dirty little dirty guy French Pigpen and you know just thinking about how to keep his shape distinct from the other characters only this amount of going real simple with it was basically a real round head and this bullet shaped body and you know just keeping him real animatable and fun so we could do a lot of slapstick a lot of really broad extreme expressions on him and and attitudes if you look at the design most of the detail is really around the face with the goggles and the lamp and little string on the lamp in the low crank you know most of the detail on the character is really just on his head and Kirk and Gary said well he's sort of rodent like you know he's the mole so he has to be rodent like so I made sure I gave him buck teeth you know and kind of a mouth that's sort of like a mouse's mouth it's a sort of this triangular shape to it but I wanted to make him look French because he's a French guy and you know it's playing around with a profile with the real receding chin and Neila basically the face is construct where the chain is way back here and then the you know the thing that sticks out the furthest is this big nose and I saw a picture of Charles DeGaulle you know this great shot of this profile it turns to go on the like there's molière's profile you know he has a little mustache the whole bit so I put that up there on my board it's as I was drawing and coming up with the designs who else could be more French than Charles to go all right I remember coming in specifically with the idea of a cook who had because it's such an interesting time period you have people who you know could have participated in the settling of the West in 1912 and 13 so the idea of a cook being somebody who had cooked for General Custer on that fateful day and felt guilty because he thought it was all about you know the meal he'd served him if I'd only cooked him I've seen this back in the Dakota they can smell fear just by looking at you so keep quiet he literally is like a caricature of like all those Western sidekicks Walter Brennan Gabby Hayes when the role of cookie first came up it seemed like a good fit for Sean Keller because if you were to know him Sean Keller is cookie the appetizer Caesar salad escargot any Orientals frying road Donn cooking Guerra just really does need guys in this one meet who has work on their film they gave me the cookie character because he's like this like old western cook and like in the old western sidekick and those are types of films that I just watch a whole bunch of times uh over and over and over again and I guess they saw me acting the hallways just arms up and flailing about maybe he'd be pretty good to do this in the character version I got you four basic food groups baby bacon whiskey and lard so when the character of Whitmore knocks around we thought well who's a quirky funny guy that can do this character too we all looked each other and said well Sean if we could clone him and get another Sean he could do both characters that basically knew kind of what they wanted upfront old very old ancient eccentric old guy with too much money in his hands that he knows what to do with we knew we needed a character mr. Whitmore as it turned out to send this expedition on its way but he couldn't be an explorer he was just a partner a friend an old college friend of Milo's grandfather Satya Stach did you really know my grandfather oh yeah Georgetown passes 66 we stayed close friends till the end of his days he was in the style of those great kind of Getty Leland Stanford kind of robber barons who maybe was into logging and mining and construction and railroads and and had all the money he needed and now it was at the point in his career when he could just be a philanthropist and bankroll things that caught his fancy and of course one of the things that caught his fancy was this lifelong promise he made to Milo's grandfather I said that if you ever actually find that so-called Journal not only well I financed the expedition but I'll kiss you full on the mouth that's my embarrassment when he found the darn thing [Music] the hardest character was the king the challenges I had I think on the most on them the king was his subtlety and age and so many different points of perspective like he wants to like say something and to get there and say it you know it would it would be just all these little my new details to go no that's it he would speak Atlanta it's just funny to be able to animate a different language and go Kabbalah you know how to say that you know what those mouth shapes kind of look like to put together a sentence that you don't know what the words are and you have to know what he's also saying the king was tough to do because he's got more tattoos on his face more hair on his cheeks and beard and mustache and all that kind of stuff and he's got tattoos that go across his head as well as on his ear so it was tough for a cleanup to do and Marshall was the one that was doing it never again do I want to do a character with tattoos we we had so much trouble he's a wonderful character and he's dying through most of the movie but he had a tattoo he was blind he had a robe with every design in the world on it to stay consistent with that character was difficult I heard somebody come in my office is a you wrote a scope that I said no I didn't I didn't roll of scope of foot let alone a hand you know where a mouth yeah you really count up the number of people that it takes to make that ensemble work on the screen and it's pretty extraordinary not only the number of people but the kind of collaboration they have to have to make those characters live and breathe and exist and ultimately to make you want to just believe that you're looking at flesh-and-blood living breathing characters that's the goal of great animation is to bring characters to life you pets late June 3rd 1999 Walt Disney Studios stage beat that number 84 quarter-inch number 84 8 sequence 5 AP 1550 1 take 1 we're always looking for a way to make the dialogue sound more natural and more conversational or funnier or more interesting or unique to that character and when you have someone like Michael in the room who's whose own personality is so unique anything that he does to make the line more to his just gives us a more a more believable character on screen when you're voicing you do things that you don't do you don't get to do when you're acting in other words you you don't have to worry about what you look like when you're trying to find the right emotion the right reaction for a scene or for a moment so that you can really just contort yourself on once to get that noise that sound that you want and that reaction that you want and it's um it's a lot of fun not to mention personally delivering the most powerful force known to man in the hands of a mercenary nutcase who's probably gonna sell it to the Kaiser come on Meowth that was a difficult scene Michael J Fox gave a incredible performance and so wanting to animate something that is worthy to his vocal performance and then takes it beyond was a real challenge he's got a quality to his voice or it's like kind of a youthful exuberance I mean he's like he's our age you know he's like it's like 37 38 years old he still comes across you know really young and enthusiastic which is a quality we wanted in Milo by the way you know we were never properly introduced my name is Milo my name is Kiera gosh get Amish naga uh hey you got a nickname Kida I've been doing cartoons since I was 12 but now I'm 30 years old and I finally get to work on a Disney cartoon it's worth the wait I have some questions for you and you are not leaving this city until they are answered go ahead strong firecracker very cool character well first she's very curious about Milo I'm sure he's really really interesting and I think he annoys her a little bit and that kind of fascination I've been also good annoyance cheetah you do swim do you know what's up you know how to swim away I remember meeting curry the first time she kept me very off balance because she's a little bit wild she's she's very playful and open and it intimidated me a little bit to be honest when I first met her and I realized boy that's that's Keita when Milo first meets her you know Akita is intimidating so I played on that if these Outsiders can unlock the secrets of our past perhaps we can save our future what they have to teach us we learn her name what he's so professional and deep and him go so 1,500 years old okay and he would change and you could just you know it would smell moldy and dust yes here we go you just had so rich character with this thing we vowed to eliminate all knowledge of the crystal and swore never never to use it again as it grew it developed a consciousness of its own I'm watching him I'm looking at him corner Wow return to your people you must leave in lantus at once your majesty be reasonable the voice of vork is James Garner which is uh you know my mother just idolizes me now because the James Guard is doing the voice he does a great job it's kind of an irresistible temptation to use James Garner because he also has this know great history of action pictures in westerns and or movies that he's been a part of so this this type of role in this type of movie kind of fits him like a glove I'd do it heartbeat I know I'm forgetting something like at the cargo the Crystal crew oh yeah oh it's definitely an ensemble piece it's always hard to do when you've got ten twelve people that you're bringing together so the directors did a wonderful job mr. Widmark wrote John Mahoney does these these just wild local peaks and valleys where he'll be speaking calmly about one thing for a moment and then just turn on a dime yeah turn on a dime and be laughing like a maniac and you know doing doing yoga finest Explorer I ever met Preston Whitmore was gonna meet you Milo join me in a little yoga there's something so freeing and so much fun about doing voice work and it just allows you to be so outrageous and so big and then you know you're constantly have it drilled into you that less is more but what you're doing animation you you know less is less and less is boring and more is much more fun and it's great to just be able to blow that out what are we standing around for we got work to do but mr. whittemore's you know in order to do what you're proposing you're gonna need a crew got him all the best of the best Audra Ramirez I'm gonna have to pull spare from one of the drugs can I not bookies Nana I'll be right back she's tomboy she's very in touch with her masculine side mm-hmm yeah yeah thank you very much shut up so I think she thinks she could take him down two for flinching I think she likes to tease him and give him a hard time in the beginning am I in the right ballpark I felt like a little kid again it's great it's like you pop in and do a couple hours and you just want it to go more well I did this job when my dad retired but the funny thing was he always wanted sons right want to run his machine shop and the other to be middleweight boxing champion he got my sister and me instead what small story I can't oh yeah and he loves me when you find a character and a certain magic happens and the character seems to just leap out of you someone needs to talk to that girl I would go someone with good people skill we do it someone who won't scare away I volunteer someone who can speak the language oh you go to miss Chong I will go it all works best for me when I'm just in a room with these wonderful people and we're all enjoying ourselves and I'm making a funny voices and trying to throw myself into the scene and feel like I'm in this make-believe world money money money I'm going to say money Don Novello is is a really gifted improvisational artist and he's brought kind of a a quality to his character that's very hard to describe because it's very much coming from Dawn Dona Velo came in and read his lines he would look at the sheet and he would read the line that was written once and he never read it again and he just went off and we never used the written line we just used his improv the whole movie geek got turned on to explosives by having a Chinese Laundry next door to his flower shop blow up one day and this you know this excited him I guess there was this leak next door of a gas or what boom no more Chinese Laundry blew me right through the front window it was like a sign from God I mean his voice delivery was very very rarefied that was one of the challenges keeping this character believable nice isn't it the catalog says that this little beauty can saw through a femur in 28 seconds I'll bet I could tuck that time in half when he talks really really fast and we have to draw all those mouth movements and it's not going this slow it's going over all of them really really fast oh no I have family up that way beautiful country up there you do any fishing oh I hate fishing I hate fish hate today you hate the smell Nate all the moon bones when he's happy he's really happy I can't say too loud when he's solemn is real solemn you know there's no kind of middle ground with him he's a very extreme character oh don't forget eat the head that's where all the nutrients are blocking the exit I got the same problem with sauerkraut I got the same problem with funny she's very cynical we're all gonna die and very secure and she just feels that she does her job and when she's not busy she does she does anything she wants you know including talk to her girlfriend on the telephone about recipes and things like that and how to catch a man Milo James thatch were you how did you get in here I came down the chimney ho ho Oh my name is Helga Sinclair I'm acting on behalf of my employer who has a most intriguing proposition for you are you interested she's rather sensual and when you first meet her and I I am I like to I like to think that she looks a little like Veronica Lake but that's just me she's quite striking actually I was pleasantly surprised when I saw her you know I'd hate to you know go through all this and find out my characters a toad that's how you see me the men need the four basic food groups I got you four basic food groups babes bacon whiskey and lard it's once in a lifetime you get to work with a comedian like jim Varney and I think when I think of Jim I think he's not only a comedian that people know as Ernest her slinky dog or now as cookie but what most people didn't know is he was this really smart intelligent sensitive man underneath this facade of wackiness and it was sad to a degree that he gets a chance to see Atlantis as a finished film but we did get a chance to show him clips along the way and every time he came into the studio we showed him little bits of what his animation was and of course he loved it that was kind of really kind of sad the fact that he knew that he was not gonna be able to see this film before he has passed away no lady named I mean he did a bang-up job doing the voice work knowing the fact that he was never gonna see his last performance Kurt and Gary did a fantastic job bringing this great ensemble cast of voice actors that lent their spirit and their souls to the characters in Atlantis maybe that's why they're into animation maybe it's just that childhood that they never quite gave up enjoying it I enjoyed the work enjoyed working with all these people are so good it's been a long time and a lot of work but it's been worth it [Music] we are on the red carpet or in this case the blue carpet for Atlantis and I suppose we want to take the DVDs viewing audience here because one of my favorite clips of early Disney lore is that shot of Walt Disney arriving at the Snow White from here and you know we're dressed a little differently than he was and the times are different it's the same feeling you feel like you've worked for four and a half years on the show and here you are the cast is here the crews here and everybody's really excited about it this is really new to us and we didn't used to get invited to these kind of things so it's like we're walking around like the country it just really helps because of the complexity of these that these types of movies to have a court of people who you really can communicate with and who are really sort of sort of on the same wavelength as you creatively the whole collaborative thing the whole idea of this many people working on one project is is really interesting to me and it's and it's fun because I usually spend all my time scrawled away by myself in a room drawing comics so to suddenly be thrust into a world where people are in meetings and it was almost like going back to art school I found in going through this movie that I actually learned so much that I had forgotten some of our basic concepts that we have gotten in our very first design classes when we go to art school and realizing that it had so much to offer me personally as an artist and I feel like I personally gained from making this movie I'm never gonna have a first opportunity to supervise at Disney again I mean this was this was it I honestly feel that if I can if I'm working on another like you know eight movies here at Disney I think I'm still gonna be going you know when it was really cool working on Atlantis this movie made it feel like I had a family here you know so it was something that I think you know 20 years down the road you know I can still recall all the stuff that went that's right very good feeling to me it's it's I don't know it's it's everything about what animation should be about and that is imagination and and it was caused as a pleasure to work on this film and and it was it was extremely difficult film but I wouldn't trade a date of it I know I was six foot three when I started this movie and I'm five foot six now on a good day when I was standing on a bucket and you know I've lost time I've lost those inches what am I gonna do I'm not gonna get him back I could go on for three hours about the kind of individual heroism of the creative team but we want you to forget all that when you watch the movie you want to forget the filmmakers you want to forget the passion and the blood and sweat and tears that went into making the movie and just forget that it's drawings at all and be transported to this new place in looking back on this it fits well into our portfolio of Disney movies because it's different and it makes a big difference that is there because it has to be there it had that you have to have a snow white you have to have a Pinocchio you have to have a Tarzan you have to have an Atlantis in there it fits it's the adventure that we haven't done yet we should go on and take chances in making movies that push the envelope in our techniques as much as in the story environment itself Atlantis is what can happen when you put baby boomers in a room who haven't grown up yet wanting to make a movie that was a tip of the hat to our childhood to the movies we loved growing up that's essentially what it'll anta's is my sister came down from San Francisco she was visiting me and she says Oh John we were cleaning out some stuff out of mom's attic and we found a whole box of something and there was something interesting in it that I thought maybe you should have and so she hands me this strange little parcel it looks like the parcel that Whitmore hands to Milo and I open it up and inside it is my grandfather's Journal now he was uh he was in the French army in 1905 but it's like my goodness life imitates art or is it vice versa your granddad had a saying our lives are remembered by the ships we leave our children that's such a wonderful message a lot of times when we are growing up we we immerse ourselves in the daily activities of life the fetching and the laundry and the going to school and the kind of nuts and bolts of existence and that's all really good we have to have our lives but somehow we cover up our basic fundamental desire to explore the unknown and it's hard to do when you're living in a house in a suburb and your backyard is the size of a postage stamp but you know what your backyard is a lot bigger than that and I think if I had an ambition for this movie above and beyond the movie itself it would be to open up in the mind of our audience not just kids but in all of our audience the fact that your backyard is the cosmos and there's no need to stop at your back fence there's a huge world under our feet a huge world at the bottom of the ocean a huge world above our heads and it's so instinctive in us to want to explore that world that it's it's almost our duty as human beings to seek out and discover that world and bring that exploration that discovery back to enrich our lives in much the same way that Milo brings that sense of discovery back to his life it's not just discovering Atlantis from Milo it's discovering who he is [Music]

Channel: Sean Dudley

Views: 655,883

Rating: 4.8822055 out of 5

Keywords: disney, bonus feature, making of disney, disney making of, michael j. fox, don hahn, wdas, walt disney animation studios, james newton howard, treasure planet, bts, behind the scenes, backstage disney, classic disney, 2000 animation, titan ae, disney channel

Id: tvR9Zdp74fY

Length: 116min 2sec (6962 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Badloss]

Kida is an actual princess and should be absolutely involved with all the other Disney Princesses #Justice4Kida

[u/theglenlovinet]

In the original Tarzan book series, Tarzan visits Atlantis (yeah, the series gets weird). But given that Disney made both a Tarzan movie and an Atlantis movie set around the same time period; I’ve always wanted a legitimate crossover film.

[u/TheJoshider10]

This and Treasure Planet are movies that actually deserve live action remakes because there's ways they can be improved and a remake could also bring deserved attention to the original animated films.

For example with Atlantis, it takes too long actually getting to Atlantis and then they only spend like a day or two there. The shortened runtime really hurt the film but with around 120-140 minutes I think they could do so much lore and character building. It could essentially be Disney's version of Avatar (yes I know technically Avatar is Disney's own Avatar) with Milo/Jake learning to love Atlantian/Na'avi culture and that progression happening at a steady pace over several weeks.

[u/theOFFbutton]

I love this movie, I would love to have a model of that submarine.

[u/dollardoublecheese]

I think I have a vhs of this someplace should I watch it?

[u/monchota]

It is not forgotten because you are only 20 now, the rest of us remember.

[u/Tonbbaaa]

This movie is so good!

[u/OhhIckyIckyGoo]

"forgotten"

[u/Sarnick18]

This, Iron Giant and Treasure Planet were the best Disney movies in my eyes, the animation was beautiful. I understand why they went away from it but my god it was gorgeous