Toons with 'Tude

It's the year 3028, and manŠ is an endangered species! (Haven't we heard that somewhere before, like last month?) This time around, the threat is a little more intimidating than those effeminate, Xenu-worshiping Conehead psychologists in platform boots. The villains in Fox's new animated spectacular, Titan A.E., are the Drej (pronounced "dredge," as in "dredge up all the good sci-fi movie ideas that have been used already"), a neon-blue race of energy beings halfway between the Independence Day invaders and Tron's video game warriors, who speak in digital surround-sound bass and have their own portable Death Star, er, mothership that destroys whole planets in a single blast. The level of computer effects used here is superior to that of many live-action movies, and it's never more evident than during the apocalypse sequence that kicks things off. (A.E., after all, stands for "after Earth.") Given the subject matter and the eye-popping computer effects, there has been much speculation that U.S. animation may have finally evolved beyond the kiddie stage, that Titan A.E. may be the film that makes animation safe for adults and shatters our homegrown stereotypes. It's certainly a good start, but it bears mentioning that the film's co-director/producer is Don Bluth.

Remember him? Former Disney employee, the man who brought us such Nutrasweet overloads as An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven. Bluth is a man who thinks classic Disney animation is the pinnacle of the genre; did you really believe he'd take the form to the cutting edge? Sorry, folks. Whatever your opinion may be of the stylized look of Japanese anime, it's certainly no worse, or more generic, than the wide-eyed cutesy-wanna-be-Disney style employed by Bluth. Bluth has done sci-fi once before, for the interactive laserdisc game Space Ace, and if you've seen that, you know what to expect here: Every alien in the film looks like a classic Disney talking animal, from Janeane Garofalo's gun-toting kangaroo (shades of Tank Girl) to the turtle-with-glasses straight out of Robin Hood, here named Gune (pronounced, appropriately, "goon") and voiced by John Leguizamo.

Still, the designs aren't quite congruent with the more teen-oriented story line: A giant wisecracking bug, for instance, is introduced early on, only to be splatted into goo by a Drej trooper, leaving just his dentures unscathed. Lead hero Cale (Matt Damon), meanwhile, envisions himself sustaining a gaping, bloody hole in his stomach at the hands of his enemies. The fact that everyone looks like a Disney character makes these acts of violence seem doubly perverse. From a technical standpoint, however, it should be noted that the merging of three-dimensional, computer-generated animation (spacecraft, planets, etc.) with the traditional hand-drawn kind (all characters other than the Drej) works just fine. The drawn characters are shaded for a fairly effective 3-D illusion, as in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The film's plot is a classic hero's journey -- reluctant warrior seeks mysterious object that will save his people -- embellished with elements previously seen in Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, the Star Trek films and even Battlefield Earth (coincidentally, one assumes): A key development calls for a spaceship that has been derelict for years -- and used as a house -- to function perfectly, explained away by the ludicrously expository line "She's still got her ionic vacuum drive; those things never drain!" Our hero, Cale, is a layabout with abandonment issues because his father never came back to find him after Earth was destroyed. Recruited by the mysterious renegade captain Korso (Bill Pullman), Cale discovers that his genetic code activates a map that will lead them to the Titan, a spaceship containing some kind of highly advanced secret that scared the Drej enough to provoke their preemptive attack on Earth.

And thus the journey begins. Korso's ship, as is the norm in these animated movies, is crewed by a team of lovable misfits, all of them wacky aliens except for one, who just happens to be the perfect love interest: a goth-punk chick named Akima, voiced by Drew Barrymore and wholeheartedly ripped off from the character Freefall from the comic book Gen13. Since primary Titan A.E. scripter Ben Edlund is a big name in the comic world, it's unlikely he missed the resemblance.

Misgivings aside, Titan A.E. delivers some of the best-thought-out and best-executed action sequences to hit the screen in quite some time, at least since Michael Bay's The Rock back in 1996. It's rare to find an action movie with one solid, memorable sequence these days, and Titan A.E. has at least four, all of which are truly impressive and should keep audiences sufficiently distracted from such minor details as character and script. And Graeme Revell's score, with its melding of world music, electronica and Also Sprach Zarathustra, is nearly perfect; it's unfortunate the producers couldn't leave well enough alone. Sensing marketing bucks, no doubt, someone had the bright idea to hire ¨berproducer Glen Ballard to collect a "cutting edge" song soundtrack (remember, Ballard's known for producing mainstream acts, from George Benson to Alanis Morissette). Thus, many of the scenes are underscored with that hip music all the kids are listening to (in corporate executives' minds, anyway): Lit, Powerman 5000 and many others that sound like overproduced big studio copies of the Sub Pop catalog circa 1991.