Atlantis: The Lost Empire Reviews

Click Here for the Digital Media FX Review of Atlantis

Click Here for Harvey Karten's Review of Atlantis: The Lost Empire

Quotes From Mainstream Press Reviews of Atlantis:

Susan Wloszczyna of USA Today - "...What Atlantis gains in chills and thrills, it loses in pure emotion. The visuals are a stunning widescreen mix of digital and hand-drawn artwork that is far more edgy and angular than typical Mouse fare. The giant waves, monster crustaceans, flame-throwing fireflies and rivers of lava arrive in a furious rush. It's a Saturday-morning cartoon pumped up on steroids..."

Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times - "...Disney's newest animated feature, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, is a monumental treat as well as a crafty assemblage of mythologies. The movie accepts the squareness of its period, 1914, instead of trying to amuse audiences with anachronisms, although a few do slip in..."

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly - "...Atlantis, with its gee-whiz formulaic characters, is the essence of craft without dream, but the movie, in a strange way, is more personal than the artists who made it realize. Its real lost empire might almost be the day that hand drawn animation in the conventionally Colorform Disney style could still saturate us with wonder..."

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times - "...Atlantis: The Lost Empire plays more like the best Disney animated film of 1981 than 2001. Story line and characterization are decidedly old-fashioned, and a curious decision about production design gives this wide-screen cartoon some of the look and feel of a Saturday morning TV cartoon series..."

Eric D. Snider of The Daily Herald - "Atlantis: The Lost Empire is nearly as great as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, but is also utterly and completely different from them...When it moves, the film is wildly exciting, recalling the great adventure films of the past. When it's funny, it's outstandingly so..."

Lou Lumenick of the New York Post - "Disney's disappointing Atlantis, sadly, is a lot like much of the studio's recent animated output: eye-popping visuals and great vocal characterizations sunk by a dead-in-the-water script... Unfortunately, it's so oppressively tedious at times that you almost wish the cast would break into a chorus of Under the Sea..."

Frank Lovece of TV Guide - "Despite a confusing and contradictory Atlantean backstory and occasionally clichéd dialogue, the film is spectacular, with fantastic design work so well-executed that when that crane's iron hooks disengage and the sub plunges into the sea, you can almost feel its weight. The character designs, however, are much less impressive. Except for the oddly naturalistic Sinclair, the rest look like cartoony characters from one of Disney's '60s films..."

Glenn Whipp of the Daily News, Los Angeles - "Atlantis remarkably merges conventional hand-drawn animation with computer-generated images more than any previous Disney film, but largely fails in terms of storytelling, character development and audience involvement. Given the potential of the subject matter and the resumes of the talent involved (directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale made Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame), the movie can't help but feel like a disappointment."

more reviews forthcoming...