Treasure Planet
June 2003 Reviewed by: Rad Bennett Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Disney’s Treasure Island was the studio’s first venture into live-action film. Filmed in 1950, Treasure Island still stands as a masterpiece. Walt Disney got his start by perfecting the animated feature; how appropriate, then, that the studio should release a fully animated version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s timeless story 50-plus years later, using new animation techniques and updating the story to a time in the future. The resulting movie is Treasure Planet, and it, along with its DVD release, are surely jewels in Disney’s crown.

The story has been changed to a time and place where sailing ships powered by solar sails cruise from planet to planet. The characters still wear the 18th-century costumes familiar from the live-action version, but they embrace technology we can only imagine. It all sounds zany on paper, and I confess to expecting the worst before I saw it, but all the elements of the original story are there. This is still a ripping good yarn, and the new version pays affectionate tribute to the original, while generously peppering the familiar plot with new and amazing twists and ideas. Achieving the seemingly impossible, the folks who have brought us this movie have created a piece of art that is, in the same breath, familiar and wondrously new.

Jim Hawkins' mom, now a more prominent character, still runs the Benbow Inn where she serves dinners to various intergalactic aliens. When Long John Silver appears, we see that the cook and pirate captain, a one-legged man in the original, is now a cyborg. His pet parrot has become a lovable shape-shifter named Morph. The parchment map is transformed into a sphere that, when opened, becomes a three-dimensional guide to the planet where the treasure is buried. The castaway Ben Gunn is now a mentally deranged yet terminally clever robot named B.E.N.

The animation techniques are as fresh as the new plot devices. Though the characters are still rendered in traditional 2-D animation, the backgrounds are computer-generated 3-D images. The overall picture, especially seen on an anamorphic screen, has incredible detail and depth. In truth, this just might be the best-looking animated feature out there on DVD. The sound is robust and full, with extensive use of all channels, and the extras are plentiful, entertaining, and useful. These include a "DisneyPedia" section that tells about the history of pirates, and shows deleted scenes, featurettes on the animation processes used to create the movie, galleries of stills, and a music video.

While you are picking up the sparkling new DVD transfer of the original Treasure Island, do not hesitate to pair it with this marvelous updating. For once, everything went right in modernizing a familiar tale, as it did in the production of one of the best-looking and sounding DVDs of the year!

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