Atlantis: Milo’s Return (2003)
Review by Dindrane
Film:
DVD:

Directed by Victor A. Cool, Toby Shelton & Tad Stones
Starring the voices of James Arnold Taylor, Phil Morris, Cree Summer, John Mahoney, Jacqueline Obradors

Features:

• Deleted scene
  
• "Search for the Spear of Destiny" game
  

Released by: Buena Vista.
Region: 1
Rating: G
Anamorphic: Yes

My Advice: Rent it if you don’t like your kids and want them to grow up stupid.

Atlantis: Milo’s Return is really three short films in one. It begins in Atlantis, where the rebuilding efforts are proceeding apace. Yet Kida (Summer) is restless, and when they hear about a sea monster that might be a rogue Atlantean weapon, Kida is ready to take off with the crew from the first film to investigate and explore the surface world at last.

The first section of the film deals with this rogue sea monster that, as it turns out, is not Atlantean at all. The plot of this section is borrowed quite closely from Lovecraft’s story “Shadow Over Innsmouth,” complete with a weird little baby, souls in a seaside town being traded away, and mind-controlling living creatures from the sea. The second section of the movie sends Kida, Milo (voiced this go-round by Taylor, and not Michael J. Fox), and crew to the American Southwest, where a flock of wolves made of sand are terrorizing artifact collectors. A hidden city and some ancient spirits later, we learn that Atlantis has had more of an effect on the surface world than anyone realized. In the third section, the crew is sent to Iceland to deal with a crazy industrialist and his plans to bring about Ragnarok.

The three tales are tenuously connected by Kida’s increasing angst about the role of Atlantis on the world stage. Just when the viewer thinks she has been resolved, something else happens to confuse her. Truly, the movie seems like nothing more than pilots for a Saturday morning cartoon series which never happened.

One of the inexplicable elements to this movie is that the crew is never constant. Vinnie (Don Novello), for example, doesn’t go with them to the Lovecraft village, but is there in the other two sections, while the old lady operator is only there for the connective scenes. The doctor is missing from both the Nordic adventure and from the seaside village, presumably tending to his medical practice. You would think that the artists would either keep the gang the same throughout, or at least both to animate a reason why someone stays behind--or just eliminate him or her completely.

The animation is mediocre at best. While the first Atlantis film was lovely to look at, this one is just getting by. At times, the characters are oddly angular, as if different animators were working on the same scenes at the same time and not using any kind of Standard Manual of Character X. The digital transfer to DVD works all right, but is nothing particularly special.

The features are nice enough: we have an oddly difficult game or two and a deleted scene, which, incidentally, should never have been deleted at all, even though it might frighten a child or two. I would have liked a primer of Meso-American and Norse legend to have been included as a feature in order to redress the butchering jobs that these rich mythic systems get at the hands of the Disney writers. Also, it would have been nice, if not family-friendly, to have been given the text of Lovecraft original “Shadow Over Innsmouth” for comparison.

In short, if you liked the first movie, then you might want to give this one a rental. Otherwise, I can’t see kids wanting to see it multiple times, and their parents, while preferring this to reruns of Pokemon or the new Scooby-Doo movie, will not thank their kids for wanting to watch it at all. Just wait for Vinnie and Mole to be funny (and they will be), and you’ll get through it.