Milo leads the way to high action and adventure through sets inspired by real life locales. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

As they typically do for their feature films, Disney animators took several field trips across the U.S.A. to derive inspiration and observe similar items and locations to those they would be bringing to life on paper. They started at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. to get a sense of the characters' clothing. Another stop on their voyage was the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico where the Disney crew discovered that caves can be very, very big. Some of the caves in New Mexico, for example, are large enough to contain small cities. So, it is by no stretch of the imagination that a lost island nation like Atlantis could exist in such locales under the ocean...

Atlantis also represents Disney's first animated film since 1985's The Black Cauldron to bear a PG rating. The Black Cauldron was also not a musical, and despite being the brainchild of Roy E. Disney, was as close to a veritable disaster as Disney Animation has ever produced. Although Atlantis shares its motion picture rating with The Black Cauldron that does not predetermine its fate. As Hahn states, "A funny thing has happened over the last few years. Families are so thankful there are movies they can see together that they don't mind the PG rating. Movies like The Wizard of Oz and Snow White are scary at times. That makes for drama. Animation is drama and storytelling. You need to have conflict. That's what makes these movies great." The PG rating only further solidifies Atlantis in its role as a legitimate action/adventure movie and a new step in Disney's regime.

If You're Going to Go Big...Go Real Big
The widescreen format is indicative of spectacle and action, so it is not surprising that from the inception of Atlantis the directors knew they wanted to work in widescreen. "If we're going to be true to the genre," explain Trousdale and Wise, "then let's press for making a widescreen movie. It's not something you can get on a TV at home. It's worth getting popcorn for. It fills your field of vision." The executives at Disney were highly supportive of the directors' prerogative. "We needed a wider canvas. There was some fear and trepidation at Disney. There are lots of old wives tales that a 30% bigger screen means 30% more money. That's not the case at all. It's just a change in the shape of the canvas."

The resulting change in canvas required other modifications for the perennial team of Disney animators. Of course one discussed area was the root of all animation -- the animation paper. "The fear was bigger paper," says Wise. However Disney used traditional animation paper for the hand-drawn scenes and altered the storyboard paper instead. "It's really easy to use bigger paper, but we restricted ourselves — so we weren't animating on bed sheets. We recut the pads so we were always storyboarding on CinemaScope pads. Once you got used to it people didn't want to come back."

Just a few of the exciting vehicles in store. © Disney Enterprises, Inc. All rights reserved.

From a technical standpoint, as digital productions supervisor Kiran Joshi explains, "Using C-Scope really helped [the digital animators] out and saved us a lot of time." For example, to animate an abundance of vehicles using a traditional format, it would have been impossible to fit them all on the screen at a respectable size, so the camera would have had to pan across them which takes more time to design and render. With CinemaScope, all the vehicles fit simultaneously, so they can literally roll across the screen.

And myriads of vehicles there are! In addition to those used by the exploration party and the Atlanteans, there are a lot of other neat gadgets and mechanical creatures. The most notable of which is the Leviathan, which is Atlantis' gigantic mechanical guardian. Also, the flying Stone Fish vehicles used by Atlanteans are crucial to the film's plot and are powered by crystals, which make for amazing, subtle digital effects. Even the Ulysses submarine used by Milo's (voiced by Michael J. Fox) squadron of explorers is the impressive equivalent of an aquatic Star Wars battleship.