It was fall 1996. Just a few months earlier. Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale had wrapped production on their second animated feature together for Walt Disney Pictures, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and were looking forward to some serious time off. "After Hunchback, we all knew we wanted to do something together again," recalls Wise, sporting a scruffy beard. But they couldn't afford to take what Trousdale calls the "traditional director's break" — a holiday lasting from six months to a year — because their crew, the men and women they had come to trust and appreciate since Beauty and the Beast, was in danger of being splintered and reassigned to other projects. Explains Trousdale, dressed in a red T-shirt and trademark camouflage pants, "It was spelled out to us in no uncertain terms that if we wanted to keep the same crew, we needed to get our act together, and quick."
So one day, Trousdale, Wise and Hunchback producer Don Hahn went to a Mexican restaurant near the studio to "literally knock around ideas for movies" they could make together, says Wise. The idea that became Atlantis: The Lost Empire was born from "talking about movies we liked when we were kids. The conversation kept turning to classic adventure movies like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, that whole genre of period adventure movies, which seemed like a fun place for animation to go. Disney made those kinds of films in the '50s, but they certainly weren't doing them now."
Undersea Adventures
As the directors had, with Hunchback (STARLOG #228), just come off their second successive animated musical — a formula they felt was getting a bit thread-bare — they were anxious to explore new territory, one that didn't include having characters break into song. "We thought the timing would be right to pitch an idea that would be a straightforward, nonmusical adventure story," Wise explains, adding they also hoped to make the film in CinemaScope, a format that would allow them, says Trousdale, to "tell a bigger story."
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