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Description
Lets bring our Don Bluth marathon to a close with his final feature featuring a space adventure in the far future.

In 3028, humanity has mastered deep space travel and interacted with several alien species. A human invention called "Project Titan" alarms the Drej, a pure energy-based alien species. As the Drej start to attack Earth, Professor Sam Tucker, the lead researcher for "Project Titan", sends his son Cale on one of the evacuation ships with his alien friend Tek while Tucker and other members of his team fly the Titan spacecraft into hyperspace. The Drej mother ship arrives and fires a directed-energy weapon into Earth that completely destroys the planet, while debris from the explosion also destroys the Moon. The surviving humans become nomads, generally ridiculed by other alien species.
Fifteen years later, Cale works at the salvage yard in an asteroid belt called Tau 14. He is tracked down by Joseph Korso, captain of the spaceship Valkyrie. Korso reveals that Tucker encoded a map to the Titan in the ring he gave Cale. Tek tells Cale that humanity depends on finding the Titan. When the Drej attack the salvage yard, Cale escapes aboard the Valkyrie with Korso and his crew: Akima, a human female pilot, along with Preed, Gune, and Stith, aliens of various species.
Now it's up to Cale, Akima, and the crew to travel across the galaxy to find the Titan and protect it from the Drej.

Pros:
1. Cale is a pretty likeable protagonist.
2. Akima is a very likeable secondary lead.
3. Likeable side characters like Korso, Gune, Preed, Stith, Sam, and Tek.
4. The Drej are pretty threatening villains.
5. Some pretty well handled humor.
6. The action scenes are pretty fun and intense.
7. Amazing voice acting.
8. Graeme Revell provides a pretty good score.
9. Very well crafted animation that is mostly successful in blending 2D and CGI.
10. Decent chemistry and development from the characters.
11. The film's tone is pretty good in balancing light and dark.
12. The writing for the most part is pretty decent, and very action-packed and adventurous.
13. Pretty neat alien/creature and background designs.

Cons:
1. There are some weak jokes now and then.
2. Sometimes the 2D and 3D blending looks off.
3. The story does get pretty predictable and cliched at times. It can even be confusing to some people.
4. There are some bits where it gets slow and boring.

Overall:
While definitely not among Bluth's best work, this movie is well deserving of the fanbase it gained over the years. And while it does suck that this is Don's last film he directed, at least he went out on a good note.

Rating:
7.5/10 (Good to Great)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. In development at 20th Century Fox since 1998, Titan A.E. was originally going to be a live-action film. The script had been passed around to various writers such as Ben Edlund, Joss Whedon and Art Vitello. After $30 million had been spent in the film's early development with no progress, Art Vitello was sacked. Then-chairman of 20th Century Fox Bill Mechanic then gave the script to Fox Animation Studios creative heads Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, who were fresh from the success of their recent film Anastasia (1997). Mechanic had no scripts for Fox Animation Studios to work on and was faced with the choice of laying off the animation staff unless they took Titan A.E. Despite their inexperience with the science fiction genre, Bluth and Goldman took the script regardless.
2. Fox Animation Studios was given a production budget of $75 million and 19 months to make the film. Unlike Bluth and Goldman's previous films, the animation in Titan A.E. is predominantly computer-generated while the main characters and several backgrounds were traditionally animated. Many of the scenes were enacted by the animation staff using handbuilt props before being captured by a computer. Many scenes and backgrounds were painted by concept artist Paul Cheng, who had worked on Anastasia and its direct-to-video spin-off Bartok the Magnificent. Much like Anastasia, the storytelling and tone in Titan A.E. is much darker and edgier than Bluth and Goldman's previous films with the film being regularly compared to Japanese anime. Although Bluth and Goldman denied any influence by anime, they have acknowledged the comparison.
3. During production of Titan A.E., Fox Animation Studios suffered a number of cutbacks which ultimately led to its closure in 2000. Over 300 animation staff were laid off from the studio in 1999 and as a result, much of the film's animation was outsourced to a number of independent companies. Several scenes were contracted to David Paul Dozoretz's POVDE group; the "Wake Angels" scene was animated by Reality Check Studios (their first feature film work) while the film's "Genesis" scene was animated by Blue Sky Studios, who would later go on to making 20th Century Fox's Ice Age and Rio film franchises as well as Horton Hears a Who! and The Peanuts Movie. Under pressure from executives, Bill Mechanic was dismissed from 20th Century Fox prior to Titan A.E.'s release eventuating in the closure of Fox Animation Studios on June 26, 2000, ten days after the film's release. All these events stunted the film's promotion and distribution.
4. Titan A.E. became the first major motion picture to be screened in end-to-end digital cinema.
5. A video game adaptation by Blitz Games was planned to be released for the PlayStation and PC in Fall 2000 in North America, following the film's summer release. Development on both platforms had begun in March 1999 under the film's original title Planet Ice, and an early playable version was showcased at the 2000 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. In July 2000, a spokesman from the game's publisher Fox Interactive, announced that development on the title had been halted largely due to the film's poor box office performance which was "only one of many different factors" that led to its cancellation.

In Conclusion:
Don Bluth is recognized as one of the most important and influential figures in animation. Not only was he the first man who's films were able to go up against Disney's films and actually beat them for a while, but if it weren't for him, Disney wouldn't have stepped up their game to try to beat Don at his own game, which resulted in some of their most classic films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. And this also influenced other studios like Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Paramount, Sony, and to an extent DreamWorks to make their own animated films to be able to legit compete against Disney. Don said that he wanted to save animation during the 1980s, and that's exactly what he did. And now to close this off, here's my ranking of all of Don Bluth's projects, which includes the movies, the shorts, and the games.

16. A Troll in Central Park
15. Rock-A-Doodle
14. The Pebble and the Penguin
13. Thumbelina
12. Bartok the Magnificent
11. Titan A.E.
10. Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp
9. All Dogs Go to Heaven
8. Banjo the Woodpile Cat
7. Space Ace
6. The Small One
5. Anastasia
4. An American Tail
3. Dragon's Lair
2. The Land Before Time
1. The Secret of NIMH

That's all I've got for Don Bluth. Next time, we'll be looking into the film catalog from another animation studio, but this studio isn't in America, but actually in Japan.

Description
Lets bring our Don Bluth marathon to a close with his final feature featuring a space adventure in the far future.

In 3028, humanity has mastered deep space travel and interacted with several alien species. A human invention called "Project Titan" alarms the Drej, a pure energy-based alien species. As the Drej start to attack Earth, Professor Sam Tucker, the lead researcher for "Project Titan", sends his son Cale on one of the evacuation ships with his alien friend Tek while Tucker and other members of his team fly the Titan spacecraft into hyperspace. The Drej mother ship arrives and fires a directed-energy weapon into Earth that completely destroys the planet, while debris from the explosion also destroys the Moon. The surviving humans become nomads, generally ridiculed by other alien species.
Fifteen years later, Cale works at the salvage yard in an asteroid belt called Tau 14. He is tracked down by Joseph Korso, captain of the spaceship Valkyrie. Korso reveals that Tucker encoded a map to the Titan in the ring he gave Cale. Tek tells Cale that humanity depends on finding the Titan. When the Drej attack the salvage yard, Cale escapes aboard the Valkyrie with Korso and his crew: Akima, a human female pilot, along with Preed, Gune, and Stith, aliens of various species.
Now it's up to Cale, Akima, and the crew to travel across the galaxy to find the Titan and protect it from the Drej.

Pros:
1. Cale is a pretty likeable protagonist.
2. Akima is a very likeable secondary lead.
3. Likeable side characters like Korso, Gune, Preed, Stith, Sam, and Tek.
4. The Drej are pretty threatening villains.
5. Some pretty well handled humor.
6. The action scenes are pretty fun and intense.
7. Amazing voice acting.
8. Graeme Revell provides a pretty good score.
9. Very well crafted animation that is mostly successful in blending 2D and CGI.
10. Decent chemistry and development from the characters.
11. The film's tone is pretty good in balancing light and dark.
12. The writing for the most part is pretty decent, and very action-packed and adventurous.
13. Pretty neat alien/creature and background designs.

Cons:
1. There are some weak jokes now and then.
2. Sometimes the 2D and 3D blending looks off.
3. The story does get pretty predictable and cliched at times. It can even be confusing to some people.
4. There are some bits where it gets slow and boring.

Overall:
While definitely not among Bluth's best work, this movie is well deserving of the fanbase it gained over the years. And while it does suck that this is Don's last film he directed, at least he went out on a good note.

Rating:
7.5/10 (Good to Great)

Production Notes and Trivia:
1. In development at 20th Century Fox since 1998, Titan A.E. was originally going to be a live-action film. The script had been passed around to various writers such as Ben Edlund, Joss Whedon and Art Vitello. After $30 million had been spent in the film's early development with no progress, Art Vitello was sacked. Then-chairman of 20th Century Fox Bill Mechanic then gave the script to Fox Animation Studios creative heads Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, who were fresh from the success of their recent film Anastasia (1997). Mechanic had no scripts for Fox Animation Studios to work on and was faced with the choice of laying off the animation staff unless they took Titan A.E. Despite their inexperience with the science fiction genre, Bluth and Goldman took the script regardless.
2. Fox Animation Studios was given a production budget of $75 million and 19 months to make the film. Unlike Bluth and Goldman's previous films, the animation in Titan A.E. is predominantly computer-generated while the main characters and several backgrounds were traditionally animated. Many of the scenes were enacted by the animation staff using handbuilt props before being captured by a computer. Many scenes and backgrounds were painted by concept artist Paul Cheng, who had worked on Anastasia and its direct-to-video spin-off Bartok the Magnificent. Much like Anastasia, the storytelling and tone in Titan A.E. is much darker and edgier than Bluth and Goldman's previous films with the film being regularly compared to Japanese anime. Although Bluth and Goldman denied any influence by anime, they have acknowledged the comparison.
3. During production of Titan A.E., Fox Animation Studios suffered a number of cutbacks which ultimately led to its closure in 2000. Over 300 animation staff were laid off from the studio in 1999 and as a result, much of the film's animation was outsourced to a number of independent companies. Several scenes were contracted to David Paul Dozoretz's POVDE group; the "Wake Angels" scene was animated by Reality Check Studios (their first feature film work) while the film's "Genesis" scene was animated by Blue Sky Studios, who would later go on to making 20th Century Fox's Ice Age and Rio film franchises as well as Horton Hears a Who! and The Peanuts Movie. Under pressure from executives, Bill Mechanic was dismissed from 20th Century Fox prior to Titan A.E.'s release eventuating in the closure of Fox Animation Studios on June 26, 2000, ten days after the film's release. All these events stunted the film's promotion and distribution.
4. Titan A.E. became the first major motion picture to be screened in end-to-end digital cinema.
5. A video game adaptation by Blitz Games was planned to be released for the PlayStation and PC in Fall 2000 in North America, following the film's summer release. Development on both platforms had begun in March 1999 under the film's original title Planet Ice, and an early playable version was showcased at the 2000 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. In July 2000, a spokesman from the game's publisher Fox Interactive, announced that development on the title had been halted largely due to the film's poor box office performance which was "only one of many different factors" that led to its cancellation.

In Conclusion:
Don Bluth is recognized as one of the most important and influential figures in animation. Not only was he the first man who's films were able to go up against Disney's films and actually beat them for a while, but if it weren't for him, Disney wouldn't have stepped up their game to try to beat Don at his own game, which resulted in some of their most classic films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. And this also influenced other studios like Warner Bros., Fox, Universal, Paramount, Sony, and to an extent DreamWorks to make their own animated films to be able to legit compete against Disney. Don said that he wanted to save animation during the 1980s, and that's exactly what he did. And now to close this off, here's my ranking of all of Don Bluth's projects, which includes the movies, the shorts, and the games.

16. A Troll in Central Park
15. Rock-A-Doodle
14. The Pebble and the Penguin
13. Thumbelina
12. Bartok the Magnificent
11. Titan A.E.
10. Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp
9. All Dogs Go to Heaven
8. Banjo the Woodpile Cat
7. Space Ace
6. The Small One
5. Anastasia
4. An American Tail
3. Dragon's Lair
2. The Land Before Time
1. The Secret of NIMH

That's all I've got for Don Bluth. Next time, we'll be looking into the film catalog from another animation studio, but this studio isn't in America, but actually in Japan.