If you don’t know the name Kirk Wise, you certainly know his work. Wise is a Disney animator who, along with Gary Trousdale, co-helmed three features for the studio – 1991’s Oscar-nominated “Beauty and the Beast,” 1996’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and 2001’s “Atlantis: The Lost Empire”.
Wise’s work stretches beyond that though. He was an animation assistant on “The Great Mouse Detective” and “Oliver and Company,” director of the U.S. dub of Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” and he and Trousdale helmed the Epcot Center attraction “Cranium Command”.
Wise recently spoke with Collider in an in-depth interview when discussion turned towards his “Atlantis” and how the animated science-fantasy action-adventure film fared. The feature flopped at the time, pulling in a soft $186 million from a $90 million budget, but has since found more of an audience.
While a quickie direct-to-video sequel called “Milo’s Return” was created from the leftovers of an abandoned TV series in development titled “Team Atlantis,” Wise has revealed that had he succeeded then a proper theatrical sequel from Walt Disney Feature Animation (now Walt Disney Animation Studios) would have gone ahead and Wise already had a storyline worked out:
“[Story supervisor] John Sanford, Gary and I actually concocted an idea for a sequel to Atlantis. It had no relation to the Atlantis TV series that was being developed at Disney Television Animation. This was a feature-length, full-on, full-blown sequel to Atlantis.
We were going to have a new villain in the story. The villain was going to be wearing big, scary, wool, bulky, World War I-style clothing with a frightening gasmask to obscure it’s face; a little Darth Vader-esque. And this villain was going to try and retake Atlantis and finish the job that Rourke was unable to accomplish.
And the big twist in the climax of the movie is that the villain is unmasked and it turns out to be [Rourke’s thought dead second-in-command] Helga Sinclair. Plot twist!. So Helga survived her fall, became an early-20th-century cyborg and started her own team of mercenaries.”
“Atlantis” borrowed elements from numerous sources – the works of Jules Verne, visual style of comic book creator Mike Mignola, and Miyazaki’s “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”. The film also came under some legal fire for its distinct similarities to the anime TV series “Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water”.
Reviews for the film were mixed at the time and the project was also one of Disney’s last hand-drawn animated features before the full adoption of the CG animated approach by Pixar and Disney.
