Treasure Planet

Day 130 - 5/10/09 - Movie #130

BEFORE: I was hoping to get 2 movies in today, but after sleeping late, picking up Merlin from the vet, and squeezing in 2 episodes of "The Amazing Race", there just wasn't time. And tomorrow after trivia, I want to watch those final 2 episodes of TAR, so it looks like I'm going to fall behind again...

My current theme is classic literature updated into modern animation - this is an animated version of "Treasure Island", but moved into futuristic outer-space. Let's see how well it adapts...

THE PLOT: Treasure Planet follows restless teen Jim Hawkins on a fantastic journey across the universe as cabin boy aboard a majestic space galleon.

AFTER: The story seemed to translate well, from a sea-pirate tale to a space-pirate tale, with a few minor glitches. Am I supposed to believe that a galleon-shaped technological spaceship that can sail between worlds is still kept clean with a mop and a bucket? Shouldn't there be a Roomba or some other robot to swab the deck?

Long John Silver now has cyborg parts instead of a peg-leg, which is kind of cool - but in general it's a little sad that some studio executive probably thought that an old-school pirate story wouldn't appeal to kids in a post-Star Wars world. And they had to dress it up with so many silly-looking, flatulent alien characters - an effete doctor, a broken robot, and a tiny morphing alien (what, no cybernetic parrot on Long John Silver's shoulder?). I remember "Treasure Island" being a very exciting book to read as is - if they had just waited a couple of years, "Pirates of the Caribbean" would have come along and made pirate movies cool again, and they could have played it straight.

As for the voices, I knew that Joseph Gordon-Levitt (from "3rd Rock from the Sun") voiced Jim Hawkins, and there was no mistaking David Hyde-Pierce as Dr. Doppler, but I failed to recognize Emma Thompson as the ship's captain, or Martin Short as the robot B.E.N. (I thought that was David Cross...) And hey, it's Roscoe Lee Browne again!

RATING: 7 out of 10 supernovas (would have been an 8, but I'm docking 1 for having one too many silly sidekick characters)