If you haven’t seen it since you were a kid, do yourself a favor. Watch it tonight. Listen for the clank of Silver’s limbs. Feel the wind of the solar surf. And when Jim stands on the bow of his ship, looking at the stars, remember that sometimes the biggest treasures aren't gold—they're the weird, expensive, beautiful failures that studios are too afraid to make anymore.
The score, by James Newton Howard, mixes sweeping orchestral adventure with synth-heavy electronic beats. It sounds like a Hans Zimmer pirate movie playing inside a TRON video game. We have to address the elephant in the room. Treasure Planet was a box office bomb. It cost $140 million to make and only pulled in $109 million worldwide.
In an era of photorealistic CGI sludge, the hand-drawn energy of Jim’s messy red hair and Silver’s shifting metal plates feels alive. It took risks. It gave us a Disney hero with daddy issues, a villain who wasn't really a villain, and a literal planet that explodes into a supernova. Planeta del tesoro de Disney
Have you rewatched Treasure Planet lately? Did you have the PlayStation 2 game? Let me know in the comments below—and don’t forget to hoist the solar sails. 🏴☠️✨🛸
Two decades later, this “flop” has aged better than almost any other film in the Disney Renaissance’s hangover era. If you haven’t revisited it lately, or if you dismissed it as a kid because it wasn’t Lilo & Stitch , buckle up. We are diving into the genius of the most expensive hand-drawn film Disney ever made. The premise is pure genius on paper: Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure novel Treasure Island… IN SPACE. If you haven’t seen it since you were
You get Treasure Planet .
They blended 2D traditional animation with revolutionary (for the time) 3D CGI backgrounds. The result is breathtaking. When Jim Hawkins catches a solar flare on his solar surfer, the movement feels fluid and dangerous. The massive port of Crescentia—a space station that looks like a Tatooine cantina mixed with Venice, Italy—is a visual feast. You feel the rust, the salt, and the vacuum of space simultaneously. Let’s talk about the protagonist. Jim isn't a prince. He isn't a chosen one. He is a rebellious, angry, fatherless teenager who gets his adrenaline fix from "sky-surfing" on restricted utility beams. Feel the wind of the solar surf
But directors Ron Clements and John Musker (the duo behind The Little Mermaid and Aladdin ) didn’t just slap spaceships onto a period story. They invented a new genre: