Working closely with screenwriter Tab Murphy ("Tarzan") and a talented story team (supervised by John Sanford), Hahn, Trousdale and Wise began to incorporate new plot points and character development through a storyboard-driven process. Kevin Harkey, Chris Ure, Todd Kurosawa, Kelly Wightman and Dean DeBlois comprised the story team and contributed to this process. David Reynolds is credited with writing additional screenplay material.
From the very inception of the project, the directors had a strong concept of what the film should look like. Mutual fans of a popular comic book artist named Mike Mignola (Hellboy. "Brain Stoker's Dracula" — the official comic adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's film, etc.), Trousdale and Wise chose a bold departure for the design and style for "Atlantis: The Lost Empire." Enlisting the talents of art director Dave Goetz (their collaborator on "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"), the directors brought in Mignola to help design the production and freely adapt his flat, graphic and layered style for their purposes. The resulting blend of classic Disney and Mike Mignola — a style which was internally referred to as "Dis-nola" — gave the film a daring and expressive look unlike any of the Studio's other features. Mignola himself had a hand in designing Atlantis and giving it a distressed tropical paradise look with a Southeast Asian flavor. His design style is felt throughout the film in the look of the characters and the background settings. In keeping with the film's 1914 setting, the artistic team incorporated elements of the machine age / industrial period with the imaginative graphic style of Mignola.
Helping to achieve this distinctive look for the film was an artistic team that included background supervisor Lisa Keene, layout supervisor Ed Ghertner and artistic coordinator Chris Jenkins. The film's other artistic leaders were computer graphics imagery supervisor Kiran Joshi, visual effects supervisor Marlon West, cleanup supervisor Marshall Toomey, scene planning supervisor Tom Baker and color models supervisor Karen Comella. Ellen Keneshea was the film's editor. Another key player on the production team was associate producer Kendra Haaland.
In order to do justice to the film's vast landscape and lavish settings, the filmmakers chose to present "Atlantis: The Lost Empire" in CinemaScope'. This wide-screen format has only been used in animation on rare occasions ("Lady and the Tramp," "Sleeping Beauty," and the Disney/Pixar film, "A Bug's Life") and the impact is extraordinary. A wide-screen presentation requires a special approach to composition plus additional animation to utilize the larger screen area. Hahn notes, "The CinemaScope screen is 30% bigger than a regular movie screen and it delivers a visceral moviegoing experience that transports audiences. Action / adventure films are ideally suited to the wide screen and 'Atlantis: The Lost Empire' uses this expanded canvas to maximum advantage."
Movie Database
In Theaters
