Cast _* Interesting Facts _* Interview with Gary Goldman _* Production Details

Directed by: Don Bluth, Gary Goldman
Written by: Randall McCormick  (story), Hans Bauer
Music by: Graeme Revell

Production Start Date: August 1, 1997
Release Date: June 16, 2000
Running Time: 94 minutes

Budget: $55 million (plus $30 million in early development before Don Bluth's involvement)
U.S. Opening Weekend: $9.376 million over 2,734 screens
Box-Office: $23 million in the U.S., $ million worldwide
 
 

CAST
 
 

Cale... Matt Damon
Akima... Drew Barrymore
Joe Korso... Bill Pullman
Preed... Nathan Lane
Stith... Janeane Garofalo
Gune... John Leguizamo
Sam Tucker... Ron Perlman
Chowquin... Jim Cummings
Also featuring the voices of Hank Azaria and Lena Olin.
 
 

INTERESTING FACTS

  Set in the future, after Earth has been destroyed by a devastating alien attack, Titan A.E. is the story of an orphaned young man who suddenly finds himself on an incredible adventure. As he travels the far reaches of this unknown galaxy, he must find the strength within himself to survive the perilous journey. He will also face his greatest challenge as he struggles to unlock the secret of a legendary planet which is believed to hold a hidden treasure that could ultimately save mankind.

  The movie was originally titled Planet Ice but was officially renamed Titan A.E. (Titan being the name of the ship and A.E. standing for "After Earth") in March 1999.

  Titan A.E.  was done, from start to finish, in 19 months: "Titan's schedule was 19 insane months and not by choice," recalled Gary Goldman in July 2002. "We were on strict financial limitations from Fox."

  It received a PG rating for "action violence, mild sensuality and brief language".

  For a preview screening on 6 June 2000 in Atlanta, Titan A.E. was transmitted in digital form from the studio, across the Internet, to the digital projector at the theater. It never once touched film, and was the first major Hollywood film to be seen that way.

  This heavily hyped animated from Fox earned only a disappointing $9.5 million on its opening weekend, placing fifth.  Analyst Rockwell observed that the results showed that Fox is continuing to have "a tough time breaking into Disney's animation business." In an interview with Daily Variety, Fox distribution chief Tom Sherak acknowledged the difficulty: "Were we hoping for more? Absolutely. ... But if you consider the business this weekend, none of these pictures seem to be taking hold. People are just doing other things instead of going to the movies."

  Looking back at the film two years after its release, Don Bluth candidly confirmed: "we liked what we did with Titan AE, but there are people who absolutely hate that film. We've seen some of the audience reactions and reviews of the films on IMdB and some are pretty strong and sometimes downright hateful. All we can do is try. You cannot please everyone all the time. Fox wanted the film targeted to 14-15 year old males. We felt that animation for this age/gender group could spell disaster. At the audience reaction screenings, prior to release, there were some very interesting arguments, among the members of the test audiences. The over 25's thought the skew was for under 17's and for males. The under 20's thought it was an older skew, targeted to both males and females. Parents thought it was too violent for their children. We think we hit the target that Fox asked for. We didn't agree with this target. Animation, traditional animation, seems to have a split audience, 6 to 11 and 19 to ?. We think that the 12 to 18 year-old audience abandons animation in favor of PG13 and any other adult product they can get into. They regard animation as too young, a product that they go to see with their parents and now they want to break free and be an adult, at least with regard to films. Titan was definately a departure from the main stream animated product. It really needed promotion and advertising to fit the product target. It was a big mistake to advertise on Nickelodean for a 14 year-old male-targeted film."

  After six years of trying -unsuccessfully- to challenge Disney's domination of the feature animation business, 20th Century Fox threw in the towel and closed its Phoenix-based animation unit headed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. The decision comes in the wake of the failure of the studio's Titan A.E., which reportedly cost $80 million to produce but which has grossed only $16.7 million at the box office after three weeks -it had previously been suggested that the fate of the studio rested on the success of this movie. It also followed the resignation of Fox chief Bill Mechanic, who is largely credited with reestablishing Fox's hand-drawn animation unit.  Still, Fox does have other animated projects wrapped and others in the works including Ice Age and Monkeybone.

  Gary Goldman revealed in 2002 that "there was a ton of pre-production art, a lot of which was not used in the final product. The DVD would have been a great place to show it and talk about some of the artists that were involved in pre-production. We’re sure the artists were disappointed as well. There were a lot of twists and turns in the production of that film both in the 18 months of pre-production and our 19-month production schedule. We actually produced over 15 minutes of animation, which is not in the final product. This is phenomenal when you consider a normal production schedule is around 23 or 24 months. Obviously we were working 6 and 7 days a week, throughout the process. However, we did not have much to do with the production with the DVD. That was done at Fox in Los Angeles."

  Don Bluth admitted in February 2003 that "Titan AE had a negative cost of $85 Million (between the $30M spent on it before Don and Gary's involvement and the $55Million spent to the finish the film). The film grossed only $27M in the North American territory and maybe less overseas. To date it has only sold 3.3 Million units in video/DVD, world-wide. This is clearly a financial failure."

  Gary Goldman shared with readers of DonBluth.com why he thinks the movie bombed: "1) It was targeted to a teenage male skew. This was the first big mistake by Fox executives. Teenagers are busy becoming adults and their interest in traditional animation has been put on hold. They identify traditional or 2D animation as 'cartoon' and a product they we allowed to watch during their childhood. Now, they are almost adults and they want to see films not necessarily targeted to the family. 2) The film was not really advertised in a mass TV campaign until about a week and a half before it opened and the following Monday, all TV ads were cancelled. The film only grossed $9.8 million on that opening weekend and marketing basically gave the film up. Their formulas suggested that the film would gross under $40 million domestically and it 'would be throwing good advertising dollars after bad.' They decided to cut their advertising budget internationally as well. So, no one really heard about the film or saw the advertising, so they weren't really aware it was in the theater. The film basically didn't exist. 3) Fox saw that the teenage ads they were showing on the WWF station were objectionable to the MOMs. So, they altered the trailers and started showing them on Nickelodeon--the 'death node' for teenagers, the film must be for children and families--not going there. We had heard that the ad budget for the domestic release had been cut by $15 million, so the film was not going to get 'opened' or have a chance to show it had any legs. [Titan A.E.] was first developed by an L.A. director and producer. They spent $30 million before Fox executives asked us to take it over. Lots of work was done on research, writing and inspirational art for environments and character designs and some storyboarding that ended up being redone with our Phoenix crew. The total final budget was $85 million. We spent $55 Million on our part. The shut down [of Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix] was interesting. It was a choice of moving their attention to CG animation and their acquisition of Blue Sky in N.Y. They could have converted the Phoenix facility to CGI very easily and economically, but since the News Corp head and Mr. Mechanic, chairman of 20th Century Fox, were not getting along--when Bill went, so did his 'pet' project, Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix.
 
 

INTERVIEW WITH GARY GOLDMAN

Gary Goldman and Titan A.E. co-director Don Bluth have had a longstanding working relationship, from their early days at Disney in the 70's up till now.  Gary gave the following -very interesting- phone interview, from Dublin, for some "Irish luck", a few days before the movie's release.
 

Q: There are a lot of similarities between Star Wars and Titan A.E. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Gary Goldman: Well, there was nothing intended. I think people just sort of are folding some things in because of the genre and probably because of Cale's situation in the beginning and Korso coming in almost like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Q: Right. He's kind of a Han Solo / Obi-Wan Kenobi mix.

Goldman: Yeah, but there was nothing intended there. In fact we were trying to avoid every science fiction film that we knew of in modern times for the last 30 years. And every time we started to go in any direction, a couple of our people who are sci-fi fanatics would alarm us that we're moving in a direction that's dangerously close to something. There was no intention there. A couple of people have said that it feels like Star Wars in animation, but there was no intent there. In fact, we were desperately trying to find environments that would not be reminiscent of any of those films.

Q: That's what I noticed. While it did have the similar adventure feel to Star Wars, the environments and the aliens were very unique.

Goldman: Well, that's what we were intending to do. (laughs)

Q: It seems like with animation you have a lot more freedom to create imaginative characters that you just can't do with live action.

Goldman: Yeah, well, they're getting pretty good at it in live action, I can tell you that. I think live action seems to be going more and more towards cartoon and animation seems to try to get closer and closer to reality.

Q: Titan A.E. started out to be a purely computer animated film, correct?

Goldman: At one point Fox was trying to examine the possibility of doing it as a CGI project, and it was at that time called Planet Ice. And they did an experiment which apparently looked very good, but when they started delving into the cost of doing it and the plausibility of doing it with CGI animators they could only find one or two animators that were free that really comprehended, you know, the computer and how to animate a human character. So they kind of abandoned the idea because it was going to take so much time with that many human characters in the film.

Q: How much of that original work shows up in the final product?

Goldman: The Titan design was done before Don and I took it. It wasn't done as a computer element yet, but we had all the drawings that had been approved by the Fox executives, and the Valkarie had been designed. Those two main ships were designed. There were some rough approvals on Akima, but we redesigned her somewhat. Korso wasn't approved yet and Cale wasn't approved yet. There were some rough concepts that were close on Gune, and definitely on Preed. But all of it were drawings. There was no animation, per se, there was no layouts. I'd say there was a good 3000 pieces of art that had gone through in pre-production, but only a few things had been approved.

Q: The planet with the hydrogen trees. It was a very good blending of the hand drawn animation and the computer animation. How much of that environment was computer animated?

Goldman: The trees themselves were a computer element, and a lot of it was done in the computer and a lot of it was done just with computer scene planning, so that we took a series of...I think they did about 7 to 12 trees totally, and then Vincent Clark in scene planning would actually assemble them and he would make them move with the animated water, but he'd assemble them into a forest of trees. And he himself did an awful lot to repair scenes that weren't working just correctly and had a lot to do with the look of the thing because he grasped what we're trying to do artistically and can maneuver the computer beautifully as far as planning scenes and planning the camera moves through those trees. Also David Dozoretz had an awful lot to do with that last half of that world where we were trying to escape. Once the characters were being flown by the Gowl down to the ocean he did us an animatic that gave us a really good map. Don storyboarded it and then David's crew did us an animatic that was very, very exciting, and then from there our guys got involved again. 3D and Vincent Clark actually pulled it off in the end.

Q: The ending sequence, the chase in the asteroid ice field....

Goldman: Yeah, that was a combination of our boards, David Dozoretz and his crew and Martin Smith who edited for him and our crew doing 2D traditional animation and some 2D layouts. There were some scenes where you were inside the cockpit and it was a standard 2D layout with a 3D background seen out through the windows.

Q: That all merged beautifully together. That was by far my favorite scene in the film.

Goldman: The hydrogen tree sequence on the planet Sesharrim and the ice crystal seems to be a favorite among the audience. And then I think the finale's quite beautiful to the audience. The creation of the new world. That was done by Fox's other company, Blue Sky in New York.

Q: Why don't you think there's been much animated sci-fi before Titan A.E.? There's been Iron Giant, but it wasn't really a space film or anything.

Goldman: We did a space game in Space Ace, but I don't think anybody's actually ventured in to this area because, you know, it's been done so well in live action. I mean, George (Lucas) kicked it off with a fabulous story in the first Star Wars and I really loved the Yoda stuff in the second Star Wars. I think the best story was the first one, but in the second one the environments were so dark and mysterious, I really liked those.

Q: Speaking of being dark, I was surprised how some of the scenes in Titan A.E. were rather dark.

Goldman: Yeah, we went out of our way to make them dark. We felt it would be more interesting to look at, and maybe a little more frightening even in what you don't see. I find lots of times that it's what you don't see that's more interesting than what you do see.

Q: It was also dark in content with the characters getting shot and bleeding, and people's necks being snapped.

Goldman: Boy, you should have heard that when we first dubbed it. It was really interesting. (laughs)

Q: It sure had the audience going , "Oooh! Ahhh!"

Goldman: The attempt there was really to try and paint a picture , you know, a pallet of a picture that appealed to a more adult audience. So we didn't want to get too much into the bright colors of what you're seeing Disney do and what we may have done in the past. Very muted and actually quite saturated colors really when we got into the space backgrounds. But we kept them rather dark on purpose. We actually chose the idea of approaching it like a dark comic book. And it's funny, when we finished a lot of people said, "Well, did anime influence you a lot?" And actually the answer is no, it didn't. Because it just has a complete different style, or approach, more like a Japanese comic book and a decendant of Samurai matinee movies.

Q: I've heard Titan A.E. described as American Anime.

Goldman: (laughs) I'll take that as a compliment. Hopefully we'll grab a lot of anime fans in the United States cause we heard out of some groups in San Francisco that they hated our style and they hated Disney, but they'd seen some trailers on Titan A.E. and they were really looking forward to seeing the movie.

Q: Well, there's been a drought of good science fiction lately.

Goldman: Well, let's hope it catches on. It's a really crowded summer so we gotta make some noise this first weekend if we're gonna have a life at all.

Q: Was the teenage audience your target audience? Was it the twenty-somethings or all of them?

Goldman: You know it started off as a 14 year old male audience, and I think as the movie progressed, as we got further and further into it, the thing spread out and I think it probably reaches all the way up to, say, a 45-year-old person. And maybe down to as low as a 9 or 10 year old.

Q: I noticed there weren't a lot of "kiddie promotions". They kind of ran some ads for it during Saturday morning cartoons, but it definitely seems more geared towards the older audience there.

 Goldman: Yeah, you're gonna see an awful lot, probably on MTV. There's a video they've got, I was told it was going to start Thursday. It's the Lit song "Over My Head". They've done a 3 minute and 40 second video that's really fabulous. They used artwork from the movie and they took the scenes with Cale in the space suit and removed the hand drawn heads and put the lead singer of Lit in there. They've even got him driving the Valkarie, and I said, "How do they really match him up and register him to the controls?" It was amazing to me.

Q: That's pretty good when they're amazing you, huh?

Goldman: I was amazed! I mean I thought they did a terrific job. They put him something that looked like a bombed out balcony or something of some sort and the whole band is playing and they're flying through our environments and I thought that was fabulous.

Q: The soundtrack is very unique. It definitely uses a lot of pop music and groups that appeal to the younger crowd.

Goldman: Yeah, normally Don and I would object to that, but this time around, because we were seeking an older audience and we were making a major departure from our normal storytelling from fantasy and more of a family audience, that we agreed to let Glen Ballard take a shot at providing some underscore using rock bands. And we're all very pleased with it, because I think it drives it. It gives it a good energy.

Q: It definitely gives it a unique feel compared to Star Wars which is purely orchestra.

Goldman: Yeah, we wouldn't have minded going with Graeme's orchestral score as well. I mean, he left these spaces for Glen to have his performance in there because we dropped rock and roll songs that were just needle drop from other groups all the way up till he handed over the rock pieces when we started the dub at the end of February. We did the dub up there at Skywalker (Ranch).

Q: What was it like working there?

Goldman: Great. A great atmosphere. I mean George has got the place filled with posters, historical posters from all over the world. And the team on there had just finished...I don't know if Gary Summers was it, but I know that Chris Boyes was on Titanic and he had won an Academy Award for it. So we had a dynamite team working on it and our own sound supervisor, Mark Server, was involved. He went up there with me. So we kept an eye on it and pushed the sound around the room as much as possible to try and immerse that audience in the film. Really immersing you in sound and try and bombard you with as many tricks of the film trade that we knew how to do.

Q: Yeah, the sound in the ice sequence was just really well done.

Goldman: Yeah, well those are all raw sounds effects from glaciers up in Alaska.

Q: That's what I was wondering. I kind of thought that's what it sounded like, but I wasn't quite sure.

Goldman: Yeah, and they're very organic. In the sequence where he flies the spaceship and goes through a kind of a red-orange nebula, with the wake angels, I think they're humpback whales.

Q: They sounded like whales or dolphins or something.

Goldman: Yeah, they were whales, and then he processed them so that they weren't exactly the same as what you'd heard. But he was trying to keep the sound of the film to be much more organic than hardware.

Q: Yeah, that's what Ben Burtt did with Star Wars and it came off so well. I mean they used real world sounds and just modified them a little bit and it really brought it alive.

Goldman: Yeah, and I don't know what theater you saw (Titan A.E.) in, but I know if the theater's tuned properly you'll hear those vehicles leave the theater through the back or come in from the back of the room or out in the front, and in the sub woofer he used a lot to just vibrate your chair. And it worked well, usually with the explosions and with the ships as they would pass by.

Q: The Wake Angel sequence I really loved. That was very unique to Titan A.E. I hadn't seen that in science fiction film really before.

Goldman: That's almost a dolphin effect. I think that's why you might have thought it was a dolphin sound effect, because dolphins will chase along with a ship, almost playfully, and so the idea of the wake angels were a similar idea, but they were like alien animals, almost, or alien fish. (laughs)

Q: What really struck me about the whole sequence was, as dark as the rest of the film is, that was very colorful. I mean, space is very colorful in this. If you look at pictures from the Hubble telescope, it's just bright, beautiful colors.

Goldman: Yeah, well that's one of the things that Bill Mechanic kept asking for. He says, "You know, when you do these outer space things, look at the Hubble telescope photos, but don't copy it. Give us something better if you can." So we were reaching out there trying to give you something you hadn't seen before, but maybe are reminiscent of what you'd seen when you'd look through the books that have been put out on the Hubble photographs.

Q: Do you have any favorite characters?

Goldman: Personally, it's interesting. I kind of flopped around. I think Korso is an interesting character because he's so complex and he's not what you think he is. We had enormous discussions over whether or not he would redeem himself or would he just die.

Q: Right. I saw an early draft of the script and he just turned bad and then he died.

Goldman: Yeah, he died before. So we had some arguments and Don and I were saying he really needs to redeem himself, and this movie's about the spirit of mankind, and we can't make Korso be completely bad. You know, blowing up changes a man, but the boy helped him see the light.

Q: It helped, towards the end, wrap it all up. It's definitely very difficult to make that transition from good, to bad, to good again.

Goldman: We set it up, I think, pretty good. The script provided a really good setup for him in the first place. The discussion was just getting everybody on the same track as far as whether or not he would redeem himself. I know Bill Mechanic at first didn't want him to, and then when we discussed our ideas of why, he said, "Go ahead. Go ahead and bring him back."

Q: That's what the audience loves anyway.

Goldman: Oh, yeah. Everybody wants everybody to be a good guy in the end if possible. I was really afraid that somebody was going to go after us saying that the Mother Drej death was too much like the Wicked Witch's death in The Wizard of Oz. (laughs) "Help, I'm melting, I'm melting! What a wicked world!" (laughs)

Q: One of the big audience favorites in every screening I've been in was Gune.

Goldman: Yeah, Gune seems to be. And it's funny, cause he's the most cartoony character. Everything else is fairly realistic, and that would be what I would call the most caricatured, or the most like a cartoon. And you're right, they do like him, and I think John Leguizamo brought a lot to that character.

Q: It was unbelievable. Towards the end of the movie everybody was watching the credits. Nobody realized that was him.

Goldman: Yeah. Did you see it with a regular audience or with press?

Q: I saw it with a regular audience in Dallas. A guy named Ben Stevens, he does the Sci-Fi Expo there and he handed out 200 tickets, and they packed us around some exhibitors in Dallas. So you had a lot of fans there that were loving it. And I saw it again with the press in Houston.  The "Who's your daddy?" line really got a good laugh.

Goldman: Isn't that weird? The first time we recorded that line and we pumped it into the dub and we did a test audience and they loved it, and I said, "I don't even understand what he said" because the sound effects were up so loud and they had to have it on this day and so we burned a disk for the show and I went to the show and they really freaked out and really caused a belly laugh. I turned to Graeme Revell, who was sitting next to me, and said, "I don't believe they laughed at that. I couldn't understand the dialogue." And he says, "Well it shows you they're listening closely to the dialogue." The music was pushed hard there and so was the effects, and when we went back to the final dub we actually carved that dialogue out of there, lowered the effects, lowered the music so you could really hear the dialogue.

Q: If I had seen it in the script I would have said it was a bad idea, but it just worked perfectly in the movie.

Goldman: Oh, it wasn't added until the last month before the dub because you don't see Gune say the words, it's filmed from the back of his head. He's sitting in the seat, so we never had to actually animate the character with that dialogue. We just burned it in over the top.

Q: Preed was another favorite.

Goldman: Was he? Good.

Q: I loved when he was shooting at the grasshopper. That was just a perfect example of the character.

Goldman: (laughs) Now how did your audience react? Did they laugh a lot during the movie?

Q: Yeah. You know, a lot of people were really into the film. I generally find Texas audiences to be really reserved, but they did laugh at all the right places.

Goldman: That's interesting. We were concerned that we didn't have enough humor in the movie. It was too dark, and too much of a just pure action adventure. But when we showed it in Agora, California, the audience literally were tittering and laughing all the way through the movie. And I went, "I don't believe this. They're getting every piece of comedic mime or side comments." It was really amazing.

Q: What was your favorite sequence?

Goldman: I'd have to say the ice crystals was one of my favorite. I think the escape from the Earth is very dramatic. I thought we really pulled off starting with the very pastoral situation with the boy playing in the water. You think you're just seeing a normal animated movie and then it twists within two minutes into absolute chaos and fright. Starting to feel very serious. And then when they got into the spaceships and they were getting out, you started to feel something for the boy and the panic of not being with his father and they're on two separate ships and suddenly you blow the world up and you're only 3 1/2 minutes into the movie. I also thought that was a good hook. I mean, when you're reading a script or you read a book, if you're not hooked within the first ten pages, then you've got a serious problem of keeping me interested. And I think most audiences feel the same way when reading the book or seeing the movie, you know. What are you going to do that makes me want to watch this movie? So I think the script, in the way we pulled off that opening sequence, I think it really works well. Both sound-wise and pictorially.

Q: Were there any little hidden references or surprises you put in? Like I had some friends who were convinced they spotted the Death Star on the New Bangkok colony.

Goldman: No. (laughs) No, it's interesting. A lot of things were added by us when we did the sound. A lot of things that were little personal additions of humor or what we thought would be really believable. Personally, that's what I push for when I'm directing, cause I'm pretty involved with the finale of the picture. Don's usually over on the next project and I take over with the final color, the final adjustments of color, all of the effects. He always comments, "I don't have the patience to do all that." So he leaves it to me. So I'm guy that gilds the lily. I'd be the guy on the Titanic as it went down, I'd be polishing the brass. So, I put a lot more effects in than we had scheduled or budgeted. And every time somebody would come to me and say, "Do you think it would be alright if I got this in here?" I'd confirm with them how long would it take it to do them, could it fit in, would it interrupt our schedules the way it was. And if it was a good idea to me, I'd say, "Yeah, go for it." I mean, a lot of people that were just watching the story might not notice it, but I do feel that subconsciously that you're aware of how extra detailed this movie is. So that's where I get my thrill in filmmaking, is adding on all those touches, you know. It's almost like when you build a house, or you redecorate and you're putting on brass hinges and stuff and you maker sure the painters don't touch your brass. There's an awful lot of stuff that we went over and over on. When a lot of the ships are being blown up in the escape, that one of the sub-contractors there locally in Phoenix was a company called Rhonda Graphics, and they do CGI product, and they did a lot of the explosions and blowing up the ships in conjunction with our crew right there in Phoenix as well. And things like there'd probably be 15 or 20 layers of explosions. A ship might have been hit once, and it has two burning smoke trails going on, and another explosion would go off on the ship and we'd try to make sure that the smoke would trail as the ship was actually losing control of it's direction, and that trailing smoke would trail following the spinning action of the ship. So a lot of things that we just kept asking people to repair, go back, fix it again, do it again until we really got it believable.

Q: Most of your audience doesn't really appreciate how much detail there is, and if it's not there they sure notice it.

Goldman: You know, it's strange. Don and I were at Annecy film festival for the animation film festival last weekend, and that's where we presented Titan A.E. first to the European audience. And we didn't think anybody would come. You know, we were sitting there and didn't even know if anyone had known about it. And they finally took us down to where the theater was. We ate lunch probably a block and a half from where the theater was, then the head of Fox in France and most of his marketing team went down there with us, and there had been 200 people waiting in line since one o'clock and the picture was going to be at four. The theater held 960 people, and at somewhere where they thought they were around 950, they tried to close the doors, and fights broke out. There was still 500 more people outside. And they were pushing on the doors and we ended up being late starting by about 15 minutes because they had to actually get 5 or 6 people to help push the doors closed and lock them. And then when we started, the theater was full and then there was like 40 to 50 people sitting on the aisle steps. And it wasn't even a normal theater. It was a theater that 50 weeks out of the year is for stage plays, and for those two weeks they bring in projectors, put in a sound system, and a screen, and it becomes one of the key theaters for the film festival. So I wasn't real happy with the reproduction of the sound, although the sub-woofer was working, the surrounds were working, it's just the dialogues had a heavy echo to them because it had a hardwood floor that stretched probably 18 feet from the back of the stage to the front of the stage. And it's an amphitheater type theater. The back seats were probably 30 to 40 feet above, you know, they were probably looking from the top of the screen. And we were seated right in the middle. In fact I was two rows behind Roy Disney. And a lot of the Disney publicity crew and some of the other marketing people that were there. They flashed a bunch of photos of me and Don shaking hands with Roy Disney so I imagine we're going to get exposed chumming up with our competitors.

Q: I'm sure Disney's going to pay very close attention to Titan A.E.

Goldman: Well, they've paid close attention to everything we've done for 20 years. Too close, actually. So we're hoping that this one will weather any storm they offer us and that the science fiction fans will pull us over the top on that first weekend.

Q: I think they're definitely going to come out.

Goldman: You know, there's a good buzz out there. We're hearing a lot of feedback. And the audience has responded very well to the film. I think there was a couple of guys in France, we had like 40 some-odd interviews while we were there in ANISI, and there was two guys that came in that were definitely die-hard Disney fans and didn't think that the rock and pop music was appropriate for the movie. Everybody else loved it. But I asked one guy, "Well how old are you?" and he says, "54". I didn't say anything else. I'm 55 and I don't mind the music at all, and I'm normally the first to object to rock and roll music in an animated movie. I would imagine that if they re-released this movie in 10 years that we may have to analyze it and test it to see if we wanted to put 11 new rock songs in there so it stayed current. That would be my only objection to using pop music, is that after 10, 11 years it would actually start to date itself.

Q: Kind of like the 70's music in movies back then.

Goldman: Yeah. It's not so bad, I think, with the way we mix it. We let it just self-support. It doesn't get in your face. There's only two songs that get in your face, and that's the one that is when they rebuild the Phoenix. The song by Lit is "I'm In Over My Head". And when you first see Cale as a 19 year old, and he's working in the salvage dump at Tau-14, there's a song there that, I'm trying to think of the name of it, I think it's called....

Q: "Cosmic Castaway"?

Goldman: "Cosmic Castaway". That one we pumped up pretty loud. Those two songs were in your face. The rest of them were laid there really like underscore.

Q: "My Turn to Fly" was another one that was prominent.

Goldman: Oh yeah, that's another one that's featured so it's more like a music video. At the same time it's a bonding moment between...it's Korso's ultimate con to make that kid really like him, you know?

Q: Titan A.E. set a new record with a digital presentation recently. The film was delivered to the theater online rather than with a disk.

Goldman: Yes, that was exciting. We were in New York having international press with all of South America and Asia, and just before I'd gone out to dinner that night I had a call from our top engineer at Fox, not at our studio. In fact he was the one that helped build our Phoenix studio with all the latest available equipment six years ago. And he was in charge of this fiber optic transmission through the network using Qwest and Cisco. They used Texas Instruments' latest screen and a cubit projector. And he said there was 3000 people, adults, no children, in that convention that were anxiously awaiting to see what was going to be shown. I don't know if they were told it was going to be animation. I know that Qwest and Cisco at first said, "No, no, we don't want an animated film." And Fox says, "Well, before you say no, come out to Fox and look at this film." And after they looked at it and they asked some questions about how it was made and stuff, they said, "Absolutely. We want this movie." (laughs) So it was shown and there was no hiccups. Perfect digital presentation, digital sound, digital picture, and he said it was a roaring, roaring appreciation for the film. And in ANISI, it was interesting, once these people got in they got really kind of riley, cause Annecy gets kind of crazy and they were throwing paper airplanes, and they were objecting that it was taking too long to see the movie, and then the movie started and there was absolute silence through the whole movie. I don't think I heard one laugh. I was going, "Oh, ******, they're not going to like the movie." And then about 2 minutes before the end of the movie they wanted us out of the room cause they were setting up another place for Don and I to do autographed posters, and so I didn't leave the theater. I left my seat, but I stood up by the exit. I wanted to wait and see what the reaction was going be at the end of the movie. There was a huge applause and whistles and screams and about 250 people got up immediately and went towards the autograph tables, but the balance didn't leave the theater. They sat through the entire credits, they applauded different departments, and it was quite exciting.

Q: I haven't seen a full length digital presentation, but I hear the colors are a lot richer in it. I think that would help the animation.

Goldman: You know, I don't know if they are or not. I know that digitally, as we were making it, I knew that we were going to be much sharper and much more saturated in color on film and it was, much better than what I've worked with for the last 19 months. But the girl that worked with me on the final color, Carmen Oliver, she's head of our color model department, she went over and did the digital presentation, cause we actually went from digital to film and from film back to digital, because if we go directly from digital there's banding that's going on. You have to get through a 16 bit render before you can get to the point where things like the dust in the opening sequences, they look more like rainbows going by. And you have to get that out of there and the only way to can get there is to render at a very high resolution, and once you do that, I mean you don't have enough memory in your machine to really hold the entire movie.

Q: This movie has got a really big name cast with a lot of well known actors in it, yet those names haven't been really pushed in the advertising.

Goldman: No, not in the advertising. They don't even push our names. But the interesting thing I think is that the actors really gave a performance, you know. All they have is a microphone and their voice, you know. They're not even allowed to move around cause you can hear their clothes rustling. So, I think Bill Pullman really pulled off a whole new character, cause normally Bill Pullman is Mr. Nice Guy that all the girls want to take home to show mom. And he had to play a pretty twisted and pretty tough character.

Q: I was expecting Lone Star from Spaceballs.

Goldman: (laughs) And I think Matt Damon and Drew Barrymore both did a terrific job. Outstanding was, I mean, Nathan Lane was Nathan Lane, but I think he really had fun doing that character.

Q: It was very different from his other characters, like the Lion King character and everything else.

Goldman: Oh, yeah. And I think he was very haughty. You weren't sure where we might be going with that, but I thought he brought the most adult element to it, especially sexually when he was coming on to Akima when Akima was trying to heal Cale. And we were concerned for a while whether Fox was going to allow us to keep that in there.

Q: Those bare butts, too, huh?

Goldman: Yeah. There was one shot there where he's looking at her rear end. He's telling her he has to have her before she says, "In your dreams." That scene was a three shot which included all of Cale and his buttocks. And there was one of our test screenings where some of the mothers were objecting to "why do we have to be seeing so much nudity?" I said, "You've gotta be kidding me." So instead of three shots, there's now two shots. And so that's all there really was in the first place was those two shots cause he has a towel draped over him like a sheet at the beginning and when she turns him, you know, she rolls him over. And when she rolls him over that sheet drops off of him. That's when he realizes he's naked.

Q: Towards the end of the credits when all the characters and the name of the actors come up, everyone was "Oooh"-ing and "Aaahh"-ing at who was which character.

Goldman: Yeah. I think what's interesting is we went overboard. I mean in the end I sat down with the CGI guys and we came up with how much each character weighed in kilograms, how tall they were in meters, what weapons do they handle, whether they handle weapons at all, what their blood type was. That's all listed in there. And when you get down to getting the CD you'll be able to actually stop it and see what we've said.

Q: Well that's what sci-fi geeks like to do. They like to freeze frame that stuff and read it.

Goldman: So there's a few goodies in there for them. And in that end credit, too, we came up with I think really eight beautiful nebula to put in behind the credits as they went by, and they just kept cross dissolving. They took about a minute to cross-dissolve. And so you weren't aware that the background behind the names were changing?

Q: No. I didn't!

Goldman: Yeah, it was constantly changing. We had one nebula for every minute of credit. It was eight minutes of credits. And I was real happy with the way the individual actor's credit did come up because we tried to create a screen there. That, by the way, looked better on the original digital than it did on film. For some reason we couldn't get the contrast. And it went a little muddy and a little washed out on that green. We couldn't get the green the same as we had it done digitally. It just was more of an electronic green to it. And it felt a little more transparent on the final film credit.

Q: There's already been some spinoffs, like a couple of prequel novels and a prequel comic. Have you had any involvement in those?

Goldman: Yes. Dark Horse did the comics and I'm can't remember who wrote the novels....

Q: It was Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta.

Goldman: Yeah, they worked closely with the Fox development team.

Q: They did the Star Wars novels.

Goldman: Yeah. Those were recommended. I think the Fox licensing company was involved, and we were trying to get that product out there before the movie opened up.

Q: Now were you worried about putting it out before the film came out?

Goldman: No, we needed to because it's all prequel stuff leading in, giving you background information. Some of it's not correct. I've read a few of the stuff and was a little disappointed it didn't go...I mean people were making remarks like "Do we have enough detail? Do we have enough information?" And we were hoping for a little more science fiction information. But I don't know. We'll have to wait and see the response from the science fiction fans.

Q: Actually, I read the comics and the books and I enjoyed them quite a bit.

Goldman: Good! Pay no attention to me. I'm so deeply immersed in this film for 19 months that you know, I mean, I really didn't pay much attention to my family. I was just you know, so focused. We were working 6 or 7 days a week for the hole thing. In fact, I'm on a vacation now. Since 1996 I've had one week off and that was 4 days between Christmas and New Years, and New Years last years. And since I joined Fox 6 years ago I've had two weeks off total. In '96 I took a week off to go to my assistant's wedding in Ireland. And a week and a half ago I took off from Phoenix and went to L.A. Don and I had received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Animation Magazine. And then the next two days we did national press in Los Angeles, then Monday we flew to New York, Tuesday and Wednesday we did international press for South America and Asia for two days, then we got on an airplane and went to Annecy.

Q: Assuming Titan A.E. does really well, is a sequel a possibility?

Goldman: Actually, they gave us a treatment for a prequel that we're looking at. We're developing five projects right now from a horror concept to Dragon's Lair to a possible prequel and two other movies that I can't share the names with you right now. So, yes, something to do with Titan is in the works. Whether or not Bill Mechanic elects to have us go in that direction, we'll know more on the 27th of June.

Q: I loved Dragon's Lair. You're going to do a full animated Dragon's Lair movie?

Goldman: Well, we're proposing it. Yeah, we're getting a script together now to see if Fox will agree to do it as a feature film. They're interested, but they want to see a script first. We have another meeting with them, another presentation, on the 27th [of May 2000].
 

PRODUCTION DETAILS

Titan A.E. began life several years ago as a long-in-development project called Planet Ice. That film was to be totally CGI. But when Bluth and Goldman took over the project, the plan changed, with traditional, hand-drawn, "2-D" animation thrown into the visual mix.

"The biggest challenge has been trying to blend the CGI animation with 2-D animation, because about 60 percent of the picture is CGI," says Bluth.  "Oftentimes, when you put those two animals together, they don't marry very well because they look so different."

Though Bluth is best known for family fare such as An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven, he says Titan A.E. has a harder edge.  "We stayed away from the word 'cute.' There's nothing cute in this movie," he says. "That would be like going near the plague."

But director Don Bluth enjoyed thoroughly making Titan A.E.: "This particular movie has been fun, really fun, for me because I've never really gotten to build a science fiction film. With animation, one of the things you try to do is convince the audience that your characters have weight and that gravity is there holding them down. Out there in space there's no gravity. So this is the one case where we said, 'Animations rules? Let's park them at the door because everybody's going to float a little bit.' So we've had to abandon some of the thoughts that we'd always had about animation.

This story to me has been so compelling because what if you lost everything you had and you don't have any hope? The planet's gone," Bluth said. "The planet is blown up and a few survivors get out there and they just sort of drift about on little colonies. They glue their spaceships together so they can be a little community. And there's no way that they can go home. So all the things that we know are really not there. I thought 'Wow, that's a really neat concept'. You can tell that idea in just a moment. And then there's a young kid whose father was a brilliant man. He knew that this horrible catastrophe was coming so he created this 'Titan', which is a fabulous instrument and he took it out into outer space and hid it where the enemy couldn't find it. And it has the power to make a planet. So can you find it? It's sitting out there. The scientist got killed and so his son comes along and it's said, 'You're the map. You are the only kid who can find it'. But can they get it before the villains come to them?"

In developing the film's villains, a hive-minded energy life form, the artists looked to popular genre films of the not so distant past.  Said animator Tom Miller: "We looked at a lot of reference material, trying to fashion it after other predators -and actually Predator is one to keep in mind. We looked at the invisibility of Predator, combining it with the forcefullness of Terminator and even the always there feeling of Stormtroopers from Star Wars. We tried to put something together that would give us a unique villain."

On July 24, 2000, following the box-office flop of Titan AE which confirmed Fox's decision to close down their animation department, Don Bluth talked to the New York Times: "Animation isn't dead, not by a long shot.  And neither are we.  Computer-generated animation is the flavor of the month.  I will never draw another character and give the rights to someone else.  And I think that pretty much puts me out of the movie business.

Interest in traditional animation has been cyclical -even in Walt Disney's heyday.  It's a trend thing.  People get tired of looking at the same old thing."

Mr. Bluth was a veteran at Disney in 1979 when he decided that animation at the studio had grown moribund and that he needed to strike out on his own.  Gary Goldman left Disney with him.  In 1982 they released The Secret of N.I.H.M., a somewhat dark and highly regarded animated feature about animals escaping from a research lab; this attracted the attention of Steven Spielberg, with whom they worked on An American Tail (1986), about Fieveld, an immigrant mouse, and The Land Before Time (1988), about dinosaurs in search of literally greener pastures.

During the 80's Don Bluth and his partners led a resurgence in feature-film animation, while Disney remained fairly dormant.  But that changed in 1989 when Disney released The Little Mermaid, the first of its new generation of re-energized animated features that eventually produced huge hits like Beauty and the Beast and led Disney to reassert its dominance in feature animation in the 90's.  In particular the enormous success of The Lion King in 1994 -the film made more than $300 million- inspired other major Hollywood studios to build their own animation divisions and try to compete for what appeared to be a growing and enormously lucrative family market.

By the early 90's Mr. Bluth had transferred his operations to Ireland, where he felt it was easier to keep costs down and compete more effectively with Disney's deeper pockets.  But financial problems with his partners at the time coincided with an offer from Fox to move back up to the United States in 1994 and set up a new animation studio.

"They wanted us to move to Los Angeles, but we said no, that was a deal breaker, so we eventually settled on Phoenix, which was close enough to satisfy them and far enough from Los Angeles to satisfy us," Mr. Goldman said.

Those were heady times.  Warner Brothers also set up an animation division, and Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney and, with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg as partners, set up the new Dreamworks studio, vowing to compete with Disney in feature-film animation.  Experienced animators found themselves the target of bidding wars: "Suddenly, animators who had been making $1,000 a week were being offered $4,000, $5,000, even $6,000 a week," Don Bluth said.  "Everybody got an agent."

The problem was, the resulting movies were not coming anywhere close to ending Disney's dominance. For Fox, the final straw was Titan AE, an $85 million production that was calculated to appeal to teenagers, who are normally averse to animated fare.  But they stayed away, and the movie quickly sank at the box office.

In early 2000, soon after the spectacular success of Pixar's Toy Story 2, a computer-animated feature, Mr. Bluth said, Fox officials came to Phoenix and told the studio to cut back on staff as soon as Titan was finished.  The studio went from a high of 362 employees to a core crew of 70 or so.  Some of those remainnig hoped that Fox would continue to make animated features, but Don Bluth and Gary Goldman said it beame increasingly obvious that their studio would never make another movie.

In the end, they said, Fox officials flew to Phoenix and announced that the studio was closing and that everyone left on the staff had three hours to pack up and get out.  The first group of animators who left the Phoenix studiop in late 1999 had fairly good luck landing jobs, Don Bluth said.  "The ones it was hardest on was the last 70, because they died a hard death."

Don and Gary said they hoped to get involved in animation for the World Wide Web, some of it along the lines of the popular Dragon's Lair computer game they created a decade ago and some of it animated stories, both short and feature length.  Perhaps, they said, by distributing their work directly over the Internet, they would be able to bypass the Hollywood studios.  "Unless you're in the distribution business, you're not in the movie business", Don said.  "We learned that the hard way."