An E-Ticket? Not Quite  |   Sean Means

Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a rare foray by Walt Disney Pictures into the netherworld of PG-rated animation, is like the submarines that populate the film - sleek and fast-moving, but also mechanical and lacking in warmth.

There's nothing wrong with producer Don Hahn and directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale trying to do something different after mastering the musical-extravaganza genre with Beauty and the Beast and (less so) The Hunchback of Notre Dame. But the drive to make an Adventureland movie (in honor of that section of Disneyland where people line up for hours so they can be jostled around for five minutes on the Indiana Jones ride) was so great that they left behind some crucial elements on their way -- like character, drama and heart.

The hero of Atlantis is Milo Thatch, a bookish linguist toiling away in a museum basement, circa 1914. Milo -- voiced by Michael J. Fox, with all the nerdy enthusiasm his voice can muster -- has theorized the location of the lost continent of Atlantis, but can't get his museum bosses to believe him. Enter an eccentric billionaire (voice of John Mahoney) who will bankroll an expedition, led by the military-minded Col. Rourke (voice of James Garner).

Rourke's crew -- a ragtag, "Dirty Dozen" bunch that includes a fidgety mining expert (Corey Burton), a feisty engineer (Jacqueline Obradors), sage doctor (Phil Morris), a mellow explosives expert (Don Novello, alias Father Guido Sarducci), a deadpan radio operator (Florence Stanley), crotchety cook (the late Jim Varney), and a gun-toting second-in-command (Claudia Christian) -- appears more ready to blow up Atlantis than to explore it. The crew braves all manner of dangers to get to Atlantis, where our heroes find a dying civilization led by an old king (Leonard Nimoy) and his daughter, Princess Kida (Cree Summer). Milo also discovers a power source that could save -- if it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

Atlantis delivers the visuals, with a seamless melding of computer-animated movement and cel-animated characters. (Compare this to Don Bluth's Titan A.E., where the computer stuff was astounding but the 2-D figures looked like crap.) The voice cast provides some laughs, particularly Novello's semi-improvised jokes and Stanley's nicotine-aided growl.

But Atlantis is a fireworks show with plenty of "oohs" but not a lot of "aah" - the story is needlessly convoluted in places and storybook-simple in others, and the characters never make the leap from drawn figures to flesh-and-blood people. I'm sure it will make a heck of a ride at Adventureland. Get in line now.