June 16th, 2000. The day that Titan AE premiered...
Of course, just talking about the film is one thing, seeing legendary animator Don Bluth, best known for The Secret of NIMH and The Land Before Time, following up his surprise hit Anastasia with an outdated and paper thin slog. I could go on all day ranting about its gaping plot holes, stiff and lifeless characters, terribly outdated blend of 2D and 3D, tensionless action and shoddy writing, and filling itself with truly juvenile humor even for Bluth at his worst, but here's the thing... The film's performance speaks it for me. Not only was it a disappointment among critics and audiences, but despite being produced at a now tame budget of $70 million dollars, the film bombed so harshly that it ultimately led to Fox's animation studio closing its doors for good, and to this day remains Don Bluth's final directed film.
If anything, I think Titan AE signifies a great deal everything that was wrong with hand-drawn animation at the time. With the release of films such as Shrek, Ice Age, as well as several big films from Disney's own cousins at Pixar, computer animation quickly rose to prominence, and analysts and executives were starting to subscribe to the line of thinking that the new medium was now a foolproof formula for box office popularity, with even Disney themselves experiencing more success from Dinosaur than films like Atlantis. Of course, leave it to those same executives to not realize that this alone was not the issue, or to acknowledge that their stories probably weren't all that great to begin with, but the new quickly overtook the old-fashioned, with Disney's competitors at Dreamworks closing their hand-drawn department after 2003's Sinbad. With times like this, the early 2000's saw Disney experiencing some of the most inconsistent years they'd experienced since the 70's to the 80's, with some of the widest range in quality their legacy had ever seen. Welcome to the Transitional Era...