Cinema: Star-toon Time

Well, why shouldn't Hollywood make a science-fiction adventure using animation instead of live action? The Japanese have been doing it for decades (they call it anime). Besides, in Star Wars and its myriad clones the characters, the acting and the plots are already on the cartoony side. So give half a chance to Titan A.E., which has the retro-pioneering spirit of recent s-f movies.

In A.D. 3034, the universe is ruled by Drej, translucent, electric-blue beings of pure energy and malefic power. The lowest form of life is the human, including our hero Cale (voiced by Matt Damon), who has a lousy job sawing the edges off bulky space trawlers. Guess what? Cale has a great destiny in store once he hooks up with his dead dad's pal--tough, hard-to-read Korso (Bill Pullman)--and an intergalactic crew of comic villains, saintly mutants and the requisite feisty babe (Drew Barrymore).

Don Bluth has been making just-O.K. animated features for two decades; typically, he dabbles in tantalizing subjects (the immigrant experience in An American Tail, the historical romance in Anastasia) without freshening them. But Bluth's best film, The Land Before Time, was set in the distant past, where he was freed from his tendency for painterly realism. Here he and co-director Gary Goldman use 3-D computer technology, and some very talented designers, to dream up a world--a galaxy--of marvelous sights, spaceships, planets, vistas and critters. And when it shifts into action mode, the movie can be a spectacular rush. It's the video game that plays you.

The good news: what Star Wars was to live action--the reimagining of an old genre with new tools--Titan A.E. is to animation. The bad news: dramatically, it's also the Phantom Menace of animation.

--R.C.