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Titan A.E. (for " After Earth") is an animated science fiction film released in 2000 and directed by Don Bluth. A plucky band of adventurers sets out to find a legendary spaceship capable of making a new Earth after the old one was destroyed in an Earth Shattering Kaboom.
In 3028, the Drej, an evil alien race, supposedly intimidated by recent human achievements, destroys Earth. Fortunately, one achievement was the technology to create new planets, and humanity launches the Titan, a ship with this capability, before Earth is blown up. Fifteen years later, the human race is an endangered species, and Cale Tucker, the son of the man in charge of the Titan project, sets out to find the lost Titan and create a new home for humanity.
Titan A.E. was quite well received by critics, but unfortunately a commercial disaster, leading to the closure of Fox Animation Studios. A variety of explanations have been suggested, but probably the most common is a deep uncertainty on the part of the makers about the nature of their target audience. Nobody ever seemed to make their mind up about whether they were making a film aimed at children, or one intended for an older science-fiction audience. This was reflected in the storyline, character-designs, dialogue, and marketing.
Joss Whedon was one of the five credited writers, and the fact that he was at that time very well known as the creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel, both teen/adult supernatural thrillers, while other leading members of the creative team were strongly associated with children's films, is possibly an example of the production company's confusion about the kind of film it was trying to make and market.
Titan A.E. provides examples of:
- Absent Minded Professor: Gune.
Gune: Does this look familiar? Do you know what it is? Neither do I. I made it last night in my sleep. Apparently I used Gindrogac—highly unstable. I put a button on it, yes. I wish to press it, but I'm not sure what will happen if I do...
- Gune also displays Mad Scientist tendencies, though he doesn't seem anywhere near dangerous enough to really qualify — unless, or except to the extent that, the above-quoted line qualifies him right there. Your Mileage May Vary.
- Action Girl: Akima. She flies, she shoots, she scores!
- Adam And Eve Plot: Not strictly true, because of the various drifter colonies, but Cale and Akima are symbolically this at the end.
- Air Vent Escape: Lampshaded: "Oh, great, no one would ever think to look for us in a vent."
- The Alcatraz: The energy-cell brig on the Drej mothership, from which Cale escapes by opening a hole in the wall with his fingers! Oops!
- Alien Lunch: Since the Earth blew up in the prologue, humans have to settle for alien food, which is pretty unappetizing.
Cale: I'd just like them to kill my food before they serve it to me. Is that too much to ask?
- Alien Scrappy: Subverted — a potential example appears to be following our heroes near the start of the film, before being blown to bits by a Mook.
- All There In The Manual: The novels, apparently.
- Animation Age Ghetto: Thought to be a major contributor to the commercial failure of the movie.
- Anime Hair: Akima definitely, and Cale to a lesser extent.
- Apocalypse How: Class X, thanks to the Earth Shattering Kaboom.
- Apocalypse Wow
- Asteroid Thicket: The ice-field. And how!
- Big Sleep: See Disney Death.
- Bowdlerise: For the home video release, Cale had the gun in his hand taken out and redrawn with his hand outstretched showing the map. This was due to a shooting incident around the time.
- The Chosen One: Cale is the only one able to operate the ultimate Treasure Map to Mankind's salvation.
Cale: For your information, I happen to be Humanity's last great hope.
Preed: I weep for the species.
- Conspicuous CG: There's a rather jarring contrast between the computer-generated and traditional hand animation.
- Contemptible Cover: Some promotional material for the film showed Akima in a breast-baring Stripperiffic outfit which appears nowhere in the film.
- Cool Starship: The Valkyrie, the Drej mothership and fighters, the Titan, and perhaps the Phoenix as well.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Several. The best of all was the formation sequence of new Earth.
- Also when Gune comes out of nowhere in his Big Damn Heroes moment yelling "I FINISHED MY NAP!"
- Disney Death: Hangs a Lampshade on it and the Big Sleep.
Gune: "I finished my nap!"
- Distressed Damsel: Subverted. Akima is kidnapped, but by the time the the rest of her crew shows up to rescue her, she's sitting on a pile of unconscious prison mooks, not distressed in the least.
- Dull Surprise: Drew Barrymore (as Akima) does not deign to give us much inflection, which is somewhat necessary in animation if you want to properly convey emotion.
- Dutch Angle
- Earth Shattering Kaboom: In the first five minutes of the movie, the Drej don't just blow up Earth, they use centrifugal force to make the planet spin so fast it blows itself up.
- Earth That Was: Earth gets blown up, forcing humanity to eke out an existence in drifting, jumbled composites of spacecraft
- Energy Absorption: Which conveniently deals with the big, bad Drej at the same time.
- The novel explains that the reason that the earth was blown up in the first place was that the technology of the Titan was the same as produced - yes, that is produced - the Drej in the first place. The Drej queen actually considers using the tech to repair their energy source before deciding it's too dangerous.
- Energy Beings: The Drej. Who aren't just energy beings, but aliens made up of "pure energy"!
- The term "pure energy" was used by Captain Korso, who could hardly be considered a scientist. What the Drej really are is far more complex: The novel seems to indicate that the Drej have mastered the transfer of matter to energy and can easily reverse the process, so they COULD be mistaken for "pure energy" by a layman.
- Epileptic Trees: An Alternative Character Interpretation of the plot goes like this: Humans invented a super-weapon that converts energy into planets. The Drej are a race made up of pure energy. The Drej, upon discovering the fact that a very hostile race had just developed a weapon capable of annihilating their entire race and make Earth-like planets in its wake, preemptively destroyed Earth. Unfortunately, the weapon-ship, the Titan, escapes. Fifteen years later, the son of the man in charge of the Titan project has to set out and complete what his father started: annihilating the Drej and making planets out of them.
- The novelization covers the Drej point of view (seriously, the plot is almost a third longer for it) and this isn't too far off from how they see things. They don't know the Titan makes planets out of energy, but they know the technology is an exact match for their own technology, and it scares them so shitless that they decide it's all gotta go. As noted above, the queen is willing to risk letting the entire mothership break down and doom them all rather than try to appropriate it to fix the problems.
- In a nutshell: As noted under "Energy Beings," the novel seemed to indicate that the Drej had mastered the transfer of matter to energy. The Titan Project violated what they regarded as their exclusive monopoly on this ability, which brought their wrath down on Earth and Humanity in general.
- Not that this was covered to any real degree in the movie, where it would have mattered the most.
- Everything's Better With Bob: And how!
- Explosive Decompression: Averted for once.
- Fantastic Racism: Humans are regarded as the homeless of space, and despised accordingly.
- Explained in the novel that it's somewhat due to aliens' fear that the Drej will come after them as well if they assist Humans in any way.
- Fridge Logic: Won't the aliens just blow up the new planet again? According to the tie-in novel, the Drej came from another galaxy, and those who were destroyed/absorbed at the end of the movie were the only ones in our galaxy.
- Even worse, considering that the Titan was activated without any thought to astronomical placement of the new planet, it seems highly unlikely that it will survive any length of time. For example, New Earth was created in the middle of an ice field. This implies there isn't a star in close proximity (like say, the Earth to the sun), yet shots from the new planet show one in EXACTLY the right place. The movie doesn't even try to explain things like this.
- Considering that Cale's father specifically picked the ice field to hide the Titan in, however, it isn't too much of a stretch that he picked that location for other reasons as well. This troper always assumed that the ice field was chosen specifically to provide the Titan with the raw materials TO create a planet, and that being a good hiding spot was just a coincidental bonus. For example: funny how the ice melts into just the right amount of water for a Class-M planet, and provides enough cooling to allow "Planet Bob" to be habitable just after being imploded into existence..? Hello? Genius scientist, anyone?
- Genre Savvy: When first escaping from the Drej on the space station
Korso: Follow ugly.
Cale: Yeah, cause no one would ever think to look for us in the vents.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: Subverted heavily when the Trojan Prisoner ploy is foiled.
Guard: (Raises his weapon, pointing it at Preed) You're lying! He's not a slave and you're not traders. He doesn't carry himself like a slave! Look at the way he stands...probably ex-military. Akrennian traders always threaten before they ask a favor, it's tradition. (to Stith) And YOUR robes are made out of bedspreads.
Preed: Just out of curiosity, did we have a plan "B"?
(Stith charges the guard and lays him out with a few brutal kicks)
Preed: Hm...an intelligent guard. Didn't see that one coming.
- Hall Of Mirrors: The ice-field surrounding the Titan.
- Hard Work Montage: Of Akima, Cale and the citizens of New Bangkok making Phoenix spaceworthy.
- Heel Face Revolving Door: Korso worked for humanity, than the Drej, then came back to the side of humanity, and was killed in a Heroic Sacrifice.
- The Herald: Korso brings the Call To Adventure.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Korso. Maybe Cale's father too.
- The Heros Journey: The marks of Joseph Campbell's cookie-cutter are all over this film.
- Hey Its That Voice: The only celebrity voice actors who CAN'T be immediately recognized the second their characters open their mouths are those who do it regularly, like Ron Perlman (Cale's father) and John Leguizamo (Gune).
- Humans Are Special: So special, that the Drej blow up the Earth because they feel threatened by humanity.
- Improbable Piloting Skills: Akima "If you fix it, I can fly it!". Cale too, when he steals an energy-construct Drej fighter to escape from the mothership.
- Could be justified in Akima's case. In her own novel, Akima's Story, she trains as an Ace Pilot in ships designed for Bizarre Alien Biology (It was probably a relief to fly one purpose-built for HER anatomy for a change). The basics would have been the same in the Phoenix (roll, pitch, yaw), with computer systems and controls in a language she could understand.
- There is a shakier justification in Cale's Story. He is depicted as having an almost magical touch with ANY technology. Also note, while he's flying it, the ship is bobbing around sloppily, and he hits the walls several times just getting out of the Drej ship. He's managing to fly it, sure, but just barely.
- Kick The Dog: Shown when the potential Alien Scrappy is reduced to goo despite trying to help the Drej, showing that the Drej don't exclusively kill Humans, but pretty much anyone they find even mildly annoying.
Alien Scrappy: No no! Down there! He went down there! Down- (BAM) Ohh... Bulls-eye...
- Laser Blade: Cale uses something like a laser chainsaw on the job in the beginning, to cut up space junk for salvage. How does the blade stop? It doesn't, that thing was huge.
- Lantern Jaw Of Justice: When seeing that genetic monstrosity of an obelisk protruding beneath the acre-wide region underneath Cale's lips there can be no doubt he is the hero of the movie and a real manly man to boot.
- Magic Bullets: Averted when the Drej come for Cale; despite Korso's efforts, an overturned cafeteria table doesn't offer much protection at all from Drej weapons.
- Million To One Chance: Invoked almost to the letter by Cale when he takes the express route to lunch.
Human Salvage Worker: Go through the docks and you'll get yourself killed!
Cale: Coward! You know the odds of a ship docking are a thousand to one!
Cale: And that would be the one...
- Mix And Match Critters: And they get pretty bizarre with this too. Stith, for example, is part Kangaroo, part Velociraptor, and all Impossible To Stage Scenes Around (watch the movie you'll see what we mean).
- The Mothership: the Drej's.
- New Eden: Planet Bob
- Novelization: There is a book of the film, which attempts to patch some of the film's plot holes. There are also two prequel novels, covering the early years of Akima and Cale, titled ''Akima's Story'' and ''Cale's Story'' respectively. Little attention seems to have been given to continuity between the books.
- No Plans No Prototype No Backup: Play for laughs with Gune's device. Played straight with the Titan to drive the plot.
- Parental Abandonment: Par for the course, being a Don Bluth film. The surviving Earthlings have even lost their mother planet, so some critics have dubbed it "The Ultimate Don Bluth Film".
- Petting Zoo People: Most of the alien designs are like this, so they rather come off as typical children's cartoon talking animals - until they start shooting people, getting their necks broken, and so on. It's all part of the film's split personality.
- Pure Energy: The Drej
- Redemption Equals Death: Korso, and maybe Cale's father.
- Red Herring in the case of Gune's mysterious device, which serves no useful purpose except for distracting him from the approaching Drej fighters. Also, the fact that Korso looks eerily like Cale's father....
- Refusal Of The Call: Initally Cale blows Korso off, but then the Drej arrive, and try to kill him.
- Space Friction
- Space Is Cold: A very, very rare aversion.
- Space Is Noisy: Zoom! Wizz! Crunch! Ka-boom!
- Space Whale: The Wake Angels.
- Special Effects Failure: Producer/Director Gary Goldman and Don Bluth openly complained about the time-and-budget crunch imposed by Fox at points in the DVD commentary, most notably involving a CG cliff shown near the end of the film that was done in literally the last two weeks of production.
- Techno Wizard: Cale.
- The World Is Just Awesome: From a cliff overlooking Planet Bob.
- Treacherous Advisor: Captain Korso, who is being paid by the Drej to find the Titan, so they can blow it up. He is betrayed in turn by HIS right hand man, Preed.
- Treasure Map: The ring keyed to Cale's father's DNA projects a visible map onto Cale's hand, showing the location of the Titan.
- Trojan Prisoner: Doesn't exactly work. See above.
- Used Future: The human refugees make do with what they have.
- Viewer Gender Confusion: For This Troper at least, Gune. Male or female? Neither? Both?
- Gune is referred to as 'he' at least once, so that presumably means he's male.
- Wall Banger: Even in the novel, Korso's stated motivation for a Heel Face Turn to the Drej side is pretty damned flimsy. If there is a better reason for a complete loss of hope for the Human race we never find out. What is worse, Korso never so much as drops a hint beforehand, so it seems to come out of thin air.
- Wrench Wench: Akima.
- Stith thuroughly averts this in that she is NOT the typical human (or alien) cutie and she HATES doing repairs, though she is rather handy with weapons.
Stith: I am educated and well-read, I am NOT a mechanic! I have my pride!
- You Gotta Have Blue Hair - Akima. Except when the animators weren't paying attention, and it went purple, burgundy etc.
- This Troper always figured they were paying attention — y'know, to this little thing called ambient lighting.
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