The 2020s have birthed a thrilling era of animation. Audiences have never had so many options: anime is more accessible than ever, the biggest film of 2025 is a Chinese cartoon, and an independent, near-silent film from Latvia won the Best Animated Feature Oscar. It’s easy to forget that, not so long ago, Disney had a near-total monopoly on the form for American audiences.
In the ‘90s, their much-mythologized renaissance made them more commercially and critically beloved than ever. The rest of the industry tried to keep up, starting their own animation divisions to keep up with the House of Mouse, either by outright copying their formula or offering an alternative to their brand. One studio brought in the era’s great anti-Disney animator to helm their new project and to create the kind of cool, teen-oriented film that the other company just didn’t make. It ended with a notorious flop that crushed this ambitious project before it really started.
While the ‘90s were excellent for Disney, it wasn’t so great for Don Bluth. The former Disney animator left the company in the ‘80s, when it was at its nadir, to make his own films that never would have been greenlit by Uncle Walt and his successors. While Disney struggled with a series of flops, Bluth became a hitmaker with weird, moving, and thematically dense movies like The Land Before Time, The Secret of NIMH, and An American Tail. But Bluth’s work fell out of favor when Disney returned to the top spot with its princesses and fairy tales. Eventually, Bluth just joined in with the copycat game and made Anastasia, a film that has devoted fans but is undeniably a Disney wannabe.
That film was also the debut of Fox Animation Studios, Bluth’s latest project under the banner of 20th Century Fox. Before Bluth came to Fox, the studio had distributed some animated films but never made its own. They wanted to be as big as Disney, and they weren't alone. Other studios followed suit. Warner Bros. Feature Animation, founded in 1994, poured millions into its attempt to be the next Disney. Even Miramax got in on the fight. But Fox seemed like they could pull it off, with Bluth as the face of the operation, not unlike Walt Disney was during his lifetime.
Titan A.E. was originally intended to be a live-action film before it was revamped as Bluth's follow-up to Anastasia. The story follows Cale Tucker, a young man in the year 3043 living among the remnants of humanity after an alien empire blew up Earth. Facing extinction and in need of a new home planet, Cale becomes the head of a crew searching for the Titan, a spaceship with the ability to create a new world for their kind.
As Bluth noted in 2000 to Cinefantastique, "One of the things that we all talked about was that we shouldn't try to be a 'Disney wanna-be'. We wanted to make a picture that's edgier, still reaches the family and goes a little further and even brings in the teenagers." The studio also wanted to appeal more to a pre-teen audience, and to boys, since Disney’s work was seen largely (and wrongly) as being only for girls. To help bring that vision to life, Joss Whedon revamped the script and the movie received a $55 million budget. By the time it premiered, the film's final cost ballooned to $75 to 90 million, and Fox was struggling with cutbacks and layoffs. Titan A.E. was meant to save them. It did the opposite. Fox Animation Studios was shut down 10 days after the movie's release.
While reviews were mixed, there is a lot to appreciate about Titan A.E. It’s an anime-inspired space adventure full of grunge music and retrofuturistic flair that wouldn’t feel out of place in an Adult Swim line-up. The opening scene of the destruction of Earth is nail-bitingly good, with a blend of 2D and 3D animation that hints at the upcoming new norm of Hollywood cartoons. It’s less successful when, somewhat ironically, it verges into Disney territory, such as with the gloopy “we have Phil Collins at home”-style songs and irritating alien sidekicks.
The film also signals the strange state of the animated feature in 2000, a time of transition where nobody knew what would be a hit. Disney’s renaissance ended as they tried to move on from princesses with a slew of non-traditional narratives with mixed results (including films like Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which are not unlike Titan A.E.). Pixar ushered in the era of 3D dominance, followed by the likes of DreamWorks, which made its name lampooning Disney’s brand with Shrek. Spirited Away introduced Studio Ghibli to a new generation. On TV, animation just got weirder and appealed to older audiences.
In another timeline, it’s easy to imagine Titan A.E. ushering in a new millennium of tween/teen-oriented animation with a heavy speculative focus. As it is, this is a movie that deserves to be seen as more than the flop that ended a studio.
FTTT
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