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Bringing"Atlantis" Back to the Surface: An Interview

© Heather Wadowski

There once was a time where Disney Studios was the only production company that could make a successful, high-grossing, animated feature film. With the recent success of Dreamworks’ “Shrek” and “Chicken Run” however, the days where Walt Disney was king of the animated empire seem to be coming to an end—that is, unless, Walt Disney Studios makes some changes. Disney’s latest animated feature, the adventure film “Atlantis,” seems to be a step in the right direction, bringing a maturity and adventure-feel to the Walt Disney scene that no other Disney animated feature has tried to capture before.

“We thought we had been to Fantasyland a lot in our films,” “Atlantis” producer Don Hahn said. “We’ve done a lot of musicals and Fantasyland-like movies, so we started talking about the kinds of movies we liked. Kirk Wise, Gary Trousdale and our writer Tab Murphy started talking about the films we loved as kids. Of course, pretty high on the list were action/adventure movies. We’d all grown up with films like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and we didn’t have to look too far into the Disney library to find movies like that. That’s the genesis of where “Atlantis” came from.”

Ready to fight for a movie unlike anything ever seen in a Walt Disney animated film, “Atlantis” co-directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale pitched the idea behind “Atlantis” to Michael Eisner and the Walt Disney Studio execs ready to fight for the film. They carefully planned out argument as to why Walt Disney Studios needed a change from their usual summer animated musical, incorporating both the Walt Disney theme parks into their speech as well as past Disney adventure films like “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Much to their surprise, Eisner loved the idea of an animated adventure film. “The way we pitched the story when we first sat down with the Disney execs was we said instead of going down Main Street through the castle to Fantasyland let’s turn left and make an Adventureland movie,” Hahn said

“It’s not that musicals aren’t cool,” Wise added, “but there is a whole land at Disneyland devoted to adventure and it seemed perfectly logical for us to try and make a movie there.” Ready to leave behind talking gargoyles and singing candlesticks, the filmmakers behind “Atlantis” began researching the myth behind the lost city of Atlantis everywhere possible. From Internet reports to literature, visiting aquariums to visiting actual museums, the research team behind Atlantis soon discovered that there was more information on the mythological place than they ever anticipated finding.