Titan A.E. had everything going for it. It was written by Joss Whedon, the guy who gave us Firefly and Serenity. It was directed by Don Bluth, who gave us The Secret of NIMH. With talent like that, it should have been an excellent animated sci-fi film. Instead, it isn't.
 The story starts off with an alien race called the Drej blowing up the Earth. Before that happens, though, a young boy named Cale is given a ring by his father, who was working on something called the Titan Project. Fast forward fifteen years, and Cale, now an obnoxious young man, is recruited by Corso, captain of the Valkyrie and its ragtag crew: It turns out that Cale's ring is actually a map to the Titan, which is humanity's last hope. Of course, the second Cale finds this out, the Drej attack—they're looking for the Titan too—and the Valkyrie's crew have to race to find it before the Drej do. Along the way Cale has the obligatory romance with the only human girl on the crew, and tangles with the obligatory double-crossing crew member.
It's not all these clichés that make this a bad movie. It's the inconsistencies. This movie doesn't know what it wants to be. Lots of people get shot, and there is a rather large amount of blood, which makes it feel like a mature sci-fi film. But then there's the cringe-inducing, funny-talking alien-toad character who likes to say "Who's your daddy!?!"
The animation is also inconsistent and sometimes just hard to watch. The hand-drawn stuff is beautiful, but the movie also relies on a lot of CG work. It looks good in places, but when it doesn't it completely throws you out of the movie. The CG-animated Drej, for instance, never really mesh with the hand-drawn characters, which is unfortunate, because they're the villains and so tend to show up quite a lot. Some of the CG backgrounds look as if they aren't even fully rendered, which is odd, since Tarzan had come out a year before, and that movie used CG backgrounds very convincingly. There are even spots where the CG looks like it's running on 12 frames per second.
There are also quite a number of plot holes as well. Cale defeats the Drej, but there's nothing to stop other Drej from coming to blow up Cale's new home, is there? The Drej, conveniently, will try to kill another character by locking her in a box with a nicely ample air supply. Cale, unaccountably, has magic fingertips that let him slip through a force field. The film's astrophysics are also quirky: it shows a planet forming and quickly acquiring a habitable surface, though a little reflection (and scientific knowledge) suggest its surface should be molten for a very long time. Singly, none of these logical lapses should cripple the movie. Collectively, they undermine its believability.
 The Titan A.E. Special Edition is more or less your average DVD. The picture quality is great and comes, surprisingly, in CinemaScope. (Most animated films are 1.85:1 widescreen.) The commentary is enjoyable, though it mostly consists of Bluth pointing out the movie's flaws and wishing he'd had more money and time to work on it. There's a decent, kid-friendly run-of-the-mill behind-the-scenes featurette. It also has a music video, stills gallery, some pointless deleted scenes, and some trailers. Like I said, it's an average DVD.
I don't understand. Titan A.E. had such potential. Sure, Bluth had made some bad films before this one, but we all knew that if he wanted to make a more mature film he could pull it off, like he did with NIMH. Whedon can do science fiction and was actually a writer on the first Toy Story, so he had prior experience with animation.
Titan A.E. deserves respect for being an original and gutsy gamble, and we're worse off for the fact that it bombed as it led to Fox to closing its hand drawn animation studio. But it says nothing good that the best thing about it is that it's not another Ice Age sequel.
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