If the average person was asked to name some of Disney’s most influential animated classics, you’d probably hear names like Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, or The Lion King. Far less likely would be Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which was released 25 years ago this month on June 15, 2001. Coming off what is widely considered one of the studio’s strongest eras with the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s, Atlantis was an attempt by the team behind The Hunchback of Notre Dame — directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, producer Don Hahn, and screenwriter Tab Murphy — to chart a new course for Disney theatrical animation, one styled after Adventureland at Disney’s theme parks.
Sadly, that attempt didn’t fare so well. Atlantis flopped at the box office, and was met with mixed to negative reviews. You might think that would be the end of the story, but sometimes, movies have longer shelf lives than their initial reception would suggest. Atlantis developed a strong cult following after making its way to home video, and has been far better received now than it was on its original release. But more than that, the film has arguably helped shape the entire direction of North American theatrical animation by essentially being the road not taken for animated features. How did this happen? Let’s take a look...
When it comes to the eras of Disney animation history, the period after the much-lauded Disney Renaissance — generally considered to have ended with Tarzan in 1999 — has rarely been placed in the same conversation. Yes, there were some not-great movies released during that period, but Atlantis has always gotten the short end of the stick given the pedigree of talent involved. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise directed Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, two of the most artistically resonant animated movies of the 1990s, and Tab Murphy had penned the screenplays for both Hunchback and Tarzan. The film has a strong cast, sharply directed action sequences, a beautiful musical score by James Newton Howard, and a gorgeous art style based on the work of famed Hellboy comic artist Mike Mignola. This was not some low-rent production lacking in major talent, and the strength of those artists and their vision is why the film maintains a fanbase to this day.
I spoke to Trousdale and Murphy about the film, and asked them what they think has kept Atlantis alive in the popular imagination.
“I like to think that it's a decent film,” said Trousdale. “That it's entertaining and fun, and the characters are fun. I mean, we kind of patterned it after the live-action Disney films from the late '50s and early '60s, the Jules Verne 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, that kind of action adventure film… it didn't do as well with the adults who were expecting talking lions and singing mice and all that. And there was gunfire and there were no songs. We found out that the kids really enjoyed it, but they didn't really have a voice."
Murphy agreed, saying that “a lot of kids watched it on home video and wore out VHS tapes. So there was this growing fanbase [that] I think myself and a lot of the filmmakers were unaware of, because there's no way to track home video, how the fanbase grows out of sharing a VHS or ultimately the DVD and all that stuff.”
The sense of adventure and exploration with a vivid group of characters that the film manages to convey in a tight 90-minute runtime is one of its best aspects. Trousdale elaborated on how the creative team convinced the studio to move away from the Broadway musicals that had defined the last decade of Disney films.
“I think it might've been Kirk or maybe it was Don that came up with the notion that when you go to Disneyland and you're headed straight for Cinderella's Castle, you go through it and you're in Fantasyland. And that's the movies that we're doing for the last 70 years. But if you hang a left, you're in Adventureland. It's still a Disney land. And that's what got the executives to go, ‘Oh yeah, you're right.’”
Atlantis was not some low-rent production lacking in major talent, and the strength of those artists and their vision is why the film maintains a fanbase to this day.“
Add in evocative location, vehicle, and creature design — the Leviathan is still one of the best monsters to ever appear in a Disney film — and you have a movie that has continued to charm both older audiences revisiting it and newcomers who discover it. But the timing of its release caused a lot of problems; Atlantis was a 2D animated adventure at a time when 3D animated comedies were becoming the new model for theatrical animation... and that’s where everything started to fall apart.
Atlantis is a flashpoint in film history because it sits right on the dividing line between 20th century and 21st century theatrical animation. It’s a 2D animated adventure film with some 3D elements — a blend of two styles that would largely become segregated in the years to follow. It’s not quite akin to the films of the Disney Renaissance, yet it’s also not quite what feature animation would become after the turn of the millennium with the rise of Pixar and Dreamworks’ 3D movies that would change the industry forever. Atlantis is fascinating because it was part of a small wave of 2D/3D hybrid adventure features — Atlantis in 2001, Treasure Planet in 2002, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas in 2003. These movies, all of which bombed at the box office, ran in parallel to the mode of storytelling popularized by the likes of Toy Story and Shrek.
When asked about the impact of 3D movies on Atlantis, Trousdale said “I kind of pin it on the first Shrek for putting the nail in the coffin of 2D animation. And there's still a big appetite for it, but not as much in this country as say Japan or Italy. It's almost like a boutique kind of medium here to see 2D animation because 3D animation has taken over.”
Murphy echoed the sentiment, saying “there was a new kid on the block, a new toy glistening in the movie theaters, and that was CGI, that was Shrek. And so Atlantis got released at a time when all eyes were sort of moving off of Disney a bit onto DreamWorks.”
Not only was Shrek a massive success that spawned a long-running franchise, it opened the door for Dreamworks Animation to become a major player in the theatrical space with projects like Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon. While Disney struggled until around 2010 to find a new direction for its main animated division, Pixar was in its golden age in the early 2000s with movies like Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles.
Atlantis is a flashpoint in film history because it sits right on the line between 20th century and 21st century theatrical animation.“
That Atlantis stood in such contrast to emerging industry trends — that it was staunchly not part of the "new way" of doing things — is both what has made it so distinct in retrospect and so out of step with what audiences were coming to crave in 2001. Atlantis was simultaneously behind the curve and ahead of its time, featuring old-fashioned pulp serial sensibility in a market that longed for the novelty of fully computer-generated features and an easygoing comedic flavor. Yet those same creative instincts that condemned Atlantis’ theatrical prospects are exactly what has kept it alive as a cultural artifact a quarter century later. In the same way that Event Horizon doomed space horror movies for the foreseeable future only to become a touchstone for the format because there were so few other examples, Atlantis is one of the only entries in a subgenre that never really was: the blockbuster animated action adventure.
Atlantis’s financial failure, alongside its siblings Treasure Planet and Sinbad, didn't just cause Disney to abandon the Adventureland experiment, but also heralded the almost complete disappearance of 2D animation from the theatrical space by the 2010s.
The speed at which 2D animation fell out of favor in North America post-Atlantis is startling when you actually look at the timeline. Even with Pixar’s release schedule being nearly annual, Disney’s main theatrical division started making the transition to 3D in earnest as early as 2005, putting out Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt in quick succession (they’d done a one-off 3D experiment in 2000 with Dinosaur). Disney’s last 2D animated film was 2011's Winnie the Pooh, with every single theatrical movie since then being 3D. That’s not to say that Atlantis was the only reason for the industry's reinvention, but the movie not doing well theatrically did result in a massive shift in Disney’s operational strategy since the film was being groomed to be the next big franchise in the studio’s catalogue.
Atlantis’ creative team did have a concept for a theatrical sequel which was separate from the direct-to-video sequel that was actually produced. Trousdale confirmed that Helga Sinclair would have returned as the villain.
"There were maybe a couple outline pages written. I don't think there was ever a script, but yeah, it was an idea that Milo and Kida are exploring the other cavern networks and seeing who else is down there. And they run into Helga and she's a video game boss now. She's a steampunk cyborg who's crystal powered and she has this band of pirates and rogues.” Trousdale also discussed Disney’s plans for Atlantis theme park attractions, saying that “they were going to build an Atlantis ride in Florida. They were going to retrofit the submarine ride in Anaheim, California… they were going to put the Leviathan down there and change the architecture. But yeah, all that fell through.”
Murphy had his own idea for a potential follow-up to Atlantis — a prequel.
"My preference would've been to actually tell the story of Princess Kida from princess to warrior, and the movie would end when Milo and the team arrived… I thought there would be a great story in there, her story.”
Instead, none of these things — including the planned Team Atlantis television series — would come to pass. Atlantis has since largely been ignored by Disney, to much frustration from those who love the film.
“One of my current gripes," said Trousdale, "is that Disney has kind of elevated all the Disney princesses to this new level, and there's all the princess girls, and Kida isn't one of them. They don't count her. It's like, ‘come on guys, she's literally a princess. She's a queen for Christ's sake.’"
Murphy also spoke about the impact Princess Kida had on his interactions with fans: “I can't tell you how many women and how many Black women have come up to me and said, ‘That movie made such an impression on me, for that character alone, because it was the first time I sat in a theater and I looked up as a little girl and I saw somebody that looked like me as a character in a Disney movie.’”
Disney doesn’t acknowledge Kida as an official Disney Princess despite the fact that she was a Black princess who preceded Tiana from The Princess and the Frog by nearly a decade, but as Trousdale said: “We didn’t make enough money. That was the bottom line.”
Regarding the ramifications of Disney ultimately moving away from 2D, Trousdale said that “we've lost a lot of the expertise, a lot of the crews, the people that did the animation, the actual animators, the cleanup artists, the cel painters. Well, they didn't paint cels anymore. It was on a digital screen… most of those people have retired or died off or just moved on to other things. And every so often you'll hear of a studio or you'll hear of Disney going, ‘We're going to bring back 2D animation.’ And my reaction is usually like, ‘Well, good luck. You got to find the people to do it now. You had the people and you let them all go and they're gone now.’” As for how Disney as a company would be different if Atlantis was successful, Trousdale said “they might still have a 2D division because it had been theoretically proven that the 2D was still viable and was still marketable, so they probably wouldn't have ditched all of the 2D. That genre of picture, the action adventure, the non-musical, might have a little bit bigger space in the building.”
Atlantis: The Lost Empire was a crucial junction for Disney. It represented a moment in time where the company was open to moving in a new creative direction after years of success. That direction was cut short by Atlantis failing at the box office, and the consequences — not just for Disney, but the entire animated film industry — are still being felt to this day. But while Atlantis may not have found its audience on release, it has in the years that followed. It may not be the success it needed, but it has at least received the love it deserves.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles, and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
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