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Michael J. Fox plays Milo James Thatch, a bumbling archeologist who is determined to complete his late grandfather's work. Seems old grandpa had been trying to find the lost city of Atlantis, but unfortunately died before he could complete his quest. Milo believes the legendary city exists, but just can't get the funding required from the museum heads where he toils away in a basement laboratory. Milo had lost all hope, until the mysterious Helga Sinclair (Claudia Christian) shows up with an offer he can't refuse. Her employer, the eccentric billionaire Preston B. Whitmore (John Mahoney), had worked with Milo's grandfather for years during his expedition, and also believes that Atlantis exists, and needs Milo to help him finish his search.

Of course, Milo jumps at the chance, and is given a wild set of mercenaries to lead his expedition off the shores of Iceland, where the great city is rumored to lie. James Garner plays Commander Rourke, while the supporting crew is just as wild. Vinny Santorini (Don Novello, aka Father Guido Sarduci) is the demolition expert, Dr. Joshua Sweet (Phil Morris) is the team physician, and Audrey Ramirez (Jacqueline Obradors) plays the quick-witted mechanic. Also along for the ride are the late Jim Varney as Cookie, Florence Stanley as Wilhelmina Packard the droll communications officer, and Corey Burton as "Mole," the team's mineralogists, and resident, well, I don't know...

Directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise have created an entertaining adventure with their fellow producer Don Hahn, which breaks the standard Disney mold by being heavily influence by anime and comic books. And with the creators of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beauty And The Beast, and The Lion King behind the project, Disney had every right to have high expectations for a big box office success. Unfortunately, according to the eventual box office tally, it looks as if this leap of faith was too much for most families to take. Being accustomed to Disney's typical scheme, it seems families were not ready for the death and carnage which accompanied this film. But likely this film will find its audience on video, as it is a underrated adventure and certainly worth a look for any fan of Disney animation.

Video: How Does The Disc Look?

Venturing into territory usually reserved for live- action films, Trousdale, Wise and Hahn use the wide canvas of cinemascope to visual their latest adventure. Atlantis is presented in its original 2.35:1 theatrical aspect ratio with anamorphic enhancement, and is just short of reference quality. The animated style of this film is unlike anything else Disney has produced, so the typical references I would use are thrown out the window this time. As I mentioned above, this is a mark darker film for Disney, and the color palette reflects this. Shying away from the typical natural lighting effects that normally accompany a Disney feature, there are some distinct hard shadows throughout. Colors are much deeper, such as the reds, which are nearly crimson, while the cave scenes contain a consistent bluish tinge, a la James Cameron. The blacks are rock solid, as one would expect, and contrast excellent.

The only flaws I saw in this disc were some rather hard edges during a couple scenes where the gradients in the backgrounds seem harsher than usual, but this may have just been due to the film's animation style. There were also a couple transitions where you could see a limited amount of digital compression, but most people probably won't even notice. Edge enhancement also appears nonexistent. While maybe not quite perfect, this is pretty damn close.

Audio: How Does the Disc Sound?

So, how is this audio mix? Two words for ya: Gary Rydstrom. All right, I know that's not much of a description, but if you are familiar at all with the state of the art in terms of sound mixing, do I really need to say anything else?

Presented in Dolby Digital 5.1 EX and DTS 5.1, both soundtracks are stellar, but may not be as aggressive as some would like for a true demo disc. Every channel is constantly active, but much of the time it's reserved for subtle little effects, such as water or a bubble flowing by. The are some very distinct separated effects, and an ample use of the rear EX center channel with this track. During the opening tidal wave which hits Atlantis, the Atlantean vehicles zip from the front of the sound field to the back, filling every channel, are there are solid left to right pans as well as a few nifty diagonal pans from the front channel to the rear. During the final battle sequence in chapters 15 and 16, there are more aggressive uses of left to right pans, while also keeping an ample amount of directional splits within the rear channels as gunfire erupts in the dormant volcano, with nice and tight imaging.

When comparing the Dolby Digital track to the DTS track, I actually preferred the Dolby mix this time out. It seemed to have a little more punch on the low end, especially with the strongest sound effects such as the explosions. Imaging and overall dynamic range was also about equal between both mixes, with both sound natural and pleasing. Either will certainly please even the most discriminating fan.

On a side note, for once the Dolby Digital track has actually included the flag for EX encoding. While the DTS track likely includes the information for a DTS-ES 6.1 matrixed track, it has not been flagged as such. Disney has also included a French 5.1 EX soundtrack, which surprisingly uses a lot of subtitles - normally, Disney's films contain alternate sections only for moments when translations are needed. The only subtitle options provided are English Close Captions.

Supplements: What Goodies Are There?

Oh, my god, where do I start with these supplements? I think I'll tackle the menu design and presentation of the supplements first, which are outstanding. While the 3-D menus designed by Gork Enterprises seem a bit cumbersome on disc two, they completely fulfill their purpose of bringing you into the depth of Atlantis' production. In a first from Disney, all of the supplements are presented anamorphically, from the documentary footage and deleted scenes, to all of the still frame galleries. (The only thing I found really confusing were the trailers in the publicity section. For some reason they were windowboxed 1.85:1. While they show up perfectly on my standard dimension television, they are letterboxed on all four sides on a 16x9 television.)

The first major supplement on disc one is the screen-specific audio commentary with directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale and producer Don Hahn. There are two ways to listen to and/or view this commentary - the standard audio commentary as well as the Visual Commentary, which enhances the experience via seamless branching. Since the core of the commentaries is the same, I chose to go with the visual commentary. This is the second time these three clowns have gotten together to record a commentary track, having previously recorded a rather raucous one for The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1997, which will be included the upcoming DVD release. (Why do I call these guys clowns? Because I think these guys feel jilted that they never had an opportunity to perform at the Apollo. Sure, they get their behind-the-scenes stories across, but every once in a while they have to pop off with a real bad joke. At least they know they're performing bad comedy.) I don't think any stone is left unturned in this commentary, from the original Mexican dinner meeting to discuss the idea for the film to a sweet homage to the late Jim Varney, who sadly passed away during the production, or how Hellboy (Heckboy for Disney's purposes) artist Mike Mignola was a primary inspiration for the look of the film. The most novel aspect of the visual commentary is that every once in a while, it veers from the standard commentary and goes more in-depth about a certain hidden feature of the film. One such bit involves an animator's in-joke where a digital character waves at the camera while it does a flyby. (You would have to use your DVD player's jog function to see this normally, but it clear as day in this case.) I also found it quite amusing how the preliminary characters look a hell of a lot like Schoolhouse Rock characters. These additional video portions run approximately 30 minutes and can be accessed via the visual commentary menus in the bonus features section as well.

Also included on this disc is DisneyPedia - Atlantis, Fact or Fiction, which includes brief snippets about such topics as "Atlantis," "Ancient Writing," "Submarines," "Archeology," and "Legends." Each segment of this supplements can be viewed individually or consecutively with the "Play all" feature. Besides being a relatively weak section, I'm a little disappointed that the menu, which are written in "Atlantean," does no conform to the written form of the language created. As one would expect, there is also a set of Sneak Peeks included on disc one. Unfortunately, unlike most of Disney's other collector's editions, previews do pop up on this disc.( I would have been really annoyed, except that Beauty And The Beast was one of them.) Among the other promos included were Cinderella II, TRON, a new Disney DVD promo, 101 Dalmatians II (isn't it done yet?) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame II. At least these were all presented in 5.1.

Guess what folks, I'm just getting to disc two. The second disc opens with a funny Whitmore Industries Industrial Film, which serves the function of explaining Whitmore's place in history, and how the navigation menus work. The viewer is given three options to explore Atlantis: "Tour," "Explore" or "Files." I first chose "Explore," which takes you into a 3-D model of the Ulysses ship. As with most other Disney collector's editions, this allows you to go into each individual section of the disc: "History," "Story and Editorial," "Art Direction," "Animation Production," "Digital Production," "Music and Sound," and finally "Publicity." Within each of these sections, we get even more sections, all broken down methodically.

In History, there are four sections: "The Journey Begins," "Creating Mythology," "The Shepherd's Journal" and "How To Speak Atlantean." The first section, "The Journey Begins" is a basic 9-minute featurette, which explains how Atlantis came about, expanding on the commentary from the three wisecrackers. Next is the 8-minute "Creating Mythology," where our buddies explain the length they went to research the project, and develop the basic rule and laws within Atlantis' storyline. "The Shepherd's Journal" is contains a decent set of still frame information which explains the legend and travails of The Shepherd's Journal, while another subsection contains art designs center around the book creation, including the pages which are seen during the film. Finally there is the 2-minute "How to speak Atlantean" where some basic phrases are explained in the simplest way possible.

Up next in Story and Editorial, we once again start with a basic featurette called "Finding the Story," while the original treatment is included in still frame form. Also included within this section are four deleted scenes. The first is "The Viking Prologue," which is fully completed, and had previously appeared on the Atlantis CD-ROM, which was included with the first shipments of The Emperor's New Groove. The remaining deleted scenes, "The Squid Bats," "The Lava Whale" and "The Land Beast" include the temporary audio tracks, but are set to the original storyboards created for their production. As mention above, all of these supplements are presented with anamorphic enhancement.

The Art Direction section once again opens with a featurette called, "Designing Atlantis." Within the submenus of this section, as well as the Animation and Digital Production area, there are literally over 1,000 still frames of art, be it storyboards, early character designs, and other miscellaneous production art. Also included in the character design section is something called the "Whitmore Expedition," which includes every major and minor character broken down to the most finite point. Using Milo as an example, the subsections include his dossier, designs (over 120 stills for him alone), the original animation test, which runs about forty five seconds, and the only multi-angle feature I found, called the "Production Progression." This allows you to switch between the rough draft, cleanup and finished versions of Milo in a scene. Most of the other characters also include dossiers, designs and original animation test.

Oh, did I forget to mention the other two ways to explore this supplemental disc? The "Files" section is designed for people that miss the rather linear design of a laserdisc. There are eight pages of material, which takes you directly to all the specific information you want. Sick of going through five pages of submenus to find the production progression of Milo? Well, you can find it real easy here. (While the "Files" menus essentially duplicate the function of the "Explore" set-up, one extra piece of information is hidden here, Atlantis Found. This seven-minute featurette was shot during the premiere of Atlantis specifically for this DVD, and contains Hahn in his rather untraditional premier grab, leading us around proceedings.)

Finally we have the "Tour" way of exploring the supplements on disc two. This is essentially a two- hour documentary, which contains all of the major video elements included in each individual subsection, including "Atlantis Found." For people with little patience to dig through any DVD menus at all, this is probably the best way to go, and I know that unless I'm really in an anal-retentive mood, this is how I will likely go through the supplements on this disc from now on.

Disney, the team at Kurtti/Pellerin, Hahn, and his crew have broken down this film almost every which way imaginable. I swear the only thing missing are behind-the-scenes stills featuring the voice cast and other members of the production crew. Let's hope this fall's Platinum Edition of Beauty & The Beast receives just as solid a treatment as Atlantis has. It's that good.

DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get when you pop the disc in your PC?

Pop the disc into your ROM drive, and you're greeted by Disney's usual nice custom interface, embedded with weblinks to the Disney DVD site, and due to launch on the disc's January 29th street date, a special website devoted just to Atlantis. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing not much was there...just some notes on the film and a teaser for what is to come, which should include interactive games, and undoubtedly more production notes and stills. Stay tuned for an update...

Parting Thoughts