Atlantis: Milo's Return (2003)

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General		Extras
Category	Animation	Trailer-Return to Neverland (1:46) Menu Animation & Audio Game-Search for The Spear Of Destiny Deleted Scenes-1
Rating
Year Of Production	2003
Running Time	77:09
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Ads Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Tad Stones Toby Shelton Victor A. Cook
Studio Distributor	Disney Walt Disney Studios Home Ent.	Starring	James Taylor Cree Summer John Mahoney Jacqueline Obradors Don Novello Corey Burton Phil Morris Florence Stanley
Case	Amaray-Transparent-Secure Clip
RPI	$29.95	Music	Don Harper

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.66:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.66:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English English for the Hearing Impaired French French Titling	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    One almost universal constant to be found in every review of Atlantis: Milo's Return overseas is an opening line along the lines of "Disney's made-for-video films have never well regarded". Well, I may as well join the line of reviewers and start with similar complaint. Indeed, even by the famed dollar-grabbing standards of the Walt Disney Company, the recent spate of made-for-video fare is pretty ropey. Unfortunately, by making such made-for-video sequels to some of their quality films, the ropey nature of the issues is made all the more evident. I really cannot see how it benefits Disney to pursue this marketing strategy.

    Whilst the general consensus regarding Atlantis: The Lost Empire was that it was a decent film but no classic, I thought a little more of it than most. Sure, it was not a classic but it had some really fine animation and the vocal casting was also quite impressive, and I quite enjoyed the film. So I was perhaps expecting a little better in this effort than most. Boy was I way off the mark, and like most reviewers I am going to pan this piece of crud. At just about every level this is tripe. The story, and the word is used very loosely, is really chunky and jumps all over the place. There is no flow - it seems more like a bunch of independent short films joined together in some haphazard way. Potentially interesting directions are suddenly and inexplicably abandoned, leaving you wondering what the point was. Character development is non-existent. What is staggering is that it took the combined talents of no less than three directors to put together this heap of tripe! The animation is often quite pedestrian and in some instances, notably the sand coyotes, perspective and size is off. By modern standards, the efforts in producing atmospheric fog effects in the animation are almost laughable. The sheer lack of anything near quality in the film is probably nowhere more evident than in the lethargic performances of the vocal cast. With only Michael J. Fox missing of the main talent from the earlier film (replaced by James Taylor), you would have expected something at least close to the work in the earlier film. Not so - most of this is strictly by the B-grade by-the-numbers manual and in particular Florence Stanley and Don Novello are nowhere near the heights they achieved in the earlier film. Okay, the banal nature of the "story" has something to do with this, but there is none of the wit from the first film here at all. This really is a piece of tripe and there is little to offer in the way of redemption for the film.

    The story, such as it is, starts in the North Atlantic where a German freighter is beset upon by a huge sea-monster that presumably consigns the ship to Davy Jones Locker. Meantime, in Atlantis, Queen Kida (Cree Summer) is overseeing the restoration of the legendary lost city, with young Milo (James Taylor) in tow. Out of the blue, Preston Whitmore (John Mahoney) arrives with most of the original crew in tow - Vinny Santorini (Don Novello), Gaetan Moliere (Corey Burton), Audrey Ramirez (Jacqueline Obradors), Joshua Sweet (Phil Morris) and Mrs Packard (Florence Stanley). Turns out that the freighter was one of several lost and Milo's help is needed to sort out the mystery of the sea monster. Kida obviously comes along for the ride. That ride sees the bunch taking on the monster (known as the Kraken), then being consigned to a mysterious fishing village shrouded in fog, thence tossed back to civilisation, sent off in search of Odin, settle that matter and then being tossed into the American West desert to deal with mysterious sand coyotes. Along the way, Kida seems to understand the erroneous thoughts of her father, so when everyone is returned to Atlantis, the Spear of Destiny is used to restore the lost city to its rightful place.

    Gotten seasick yet? You just might the way this lurches all over the place!

    By no means a high point in the direct-to-video lexicon of the Walt Disney Company, there really is nothing here that seriously warrants wasting your money. At best give this a rental only, otherwise expect this to turn up in the $19.95 budget bins pretty quickly. Move along - nothing worthwhile seeing here...

Video

    Just about everything that made the original film release memorable is missing from this direct-to-video sequel.

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.66:1 and it is 16x9 enhanced. Compared to the glorious widescreen vista of the original film, this looks decidedly cramped at times.

    About the one thing that is consistent with the original film is the presence of aliasing. At times quite gross looking (such as at 10:27), this is usually more minor league stuff that just gets annoying. The animated lines and outlines alias almost constantly and occasionally other stuff adds into the mix.

    The general transfer is decently sharp but nothing near what I would expect from modern animation. At times even that descends into quite flat looking stuff. Detail is adequate enough I guess, other than in those areas with that ropey atmospheric fog, but the lack of sparkle that was evident in the earlier film is sadly and noticeably missing here. Clarity is fine and there is nothing really approaching graininess in the transfer.

    The colours are quite acceptable, although on occasions a bit more subtlety would not have gone astray (the bright orange lava is really a bit too bright). I would not call this a vibrant transfer, and at times I would certainly have liked a bit more depth and consistency to the colours (the undersea depictions of the Kraken for instance are way too flat). The later scenes in Atlantis are much better than the rest of the film.

    There seems to be a slight problem with loss of resolution in movement throughout the film, but that would be the extent of the MPEG artefacts - if indeed they are such. I have a sneaking suspicion that the directors were trying for some arty stuff and fell flat on their animation cels. Other than the aliasing there are no problems with film-to-video artefacts. The transfer is pretty pristine and whatever film artefacts were present were barely noticeable.

    Given the shortish length of the film, and the fact that I could not detect a layer change, I would suggest that this is a Dual Layer formatted DVD with the film on one layer and the extras on the other.

    There are nothing much in the way of subtitle options here. I sampled the English efforts briefly and they seemed fine - although the font was a little bigger than I would normally prefer.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are two soundtracks on the DVD, being an English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack and a French Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. Interestingly, the English soundtrack is a full bit rate effort, whilst the French soundtrack is at the lower 384 kb/s rate. I stuck with the English soundtrack.

    Dialogue at times is a little difficult to hear - Don Novello's contributions most notably - but otherwise is acceptable enough. Unlike the predecessor film, this one suffers quite notably from animation audio sync - as befitting more traditional hand animation rather than computer animation.

    The thoroughly unmemorable score comes from Don Harper and is barely worth mentioning. In that regard, it fits the pedestrian nature of the film very well indeed.

    The soundtrack really is nothing special. Indeed at times I found myself fiddling with my setup to make sure that it was actually playing six channel Dolby Digital. Most of the time it sounded like straight centre channel mono sound with sod all in the surround channels and the low frequency effects channel. It was only when the LFE channel suddenly burst to life that I really noticed that the soundtrack was six channel. By the way - it did not add much to the film and overall they might as well have stuck with a 2.0 soundtrack for all the value we get from the 5.1 effort. At least the sound is really open thanks to that high bit rate.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Not much of an effort here - but then again by the time they got this far they probably figured it was not worth the effort.

Menus

    Okay I guess but hardly the most memorable you will ever see. Apart from the audio and animation enhancements, the menus are also 16x9 enhanced.

Trailer - Return To Neverland (1:46)

    Playing before you get to the menu, this really does show how much they have denigrated the wonderful original Peter Pan in my view. Presented in a Full Frame ratio that is not 16x9 enhanced, the sound is okay Dolby Digital 2.0.

Game - Search For The Spear Of Destiny

    By which you navigate the submarine through the obstacles as you search for the spear. I found this to be clunky, slow to respond to commands from the remote and ultimately frustrating as there seemed to be no consistency in how close you got to an obstacle before it was considered that you had hit the obstacle. Boring is the best description I can think of.

Deleted Scene - Kraken Baby Sequence (0:30)

    Whoopee! Thirty seconds of a deleted scene that seems to play exactly as the final scene in the film barring the last five seconds. They could probably have left it in the film - it would have made no less sense than the rest of the film. Presented in the same format as the feature, it is of good quality although audio sync is a bit wonky.

    The Region 4 release misses out on:

• dts 5.1 754 Kb/s soundtrack
• Additional trailers

    The dts soundtrack is by at least one account an exceptionally good one - but not even that would be sufficient inducement to indulge this piece of tripe masquerading as a film. Still, it does make the Region 1 release the region of choice. There appear to be a plethora of different Region 2 releases, but these seem to mainly involve local language variations.

    Atlantis: Milo's Return sets pretty low standards even for Disney direct-to-video releases. There is nothing really wonderful about the film or the DVD and I could not suggest this as a recommendation for purchase. At best, give it a rent but even then I could offer plenty of suggestions for vastly superior films. Not even the blurb writer managed to make this sound exciting.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall