John Musker and Ron Clements gave a new
interview where they talked about Treasure Planet. Here are some interesting tidbits.
• The executives at Disney really wanted them to do something else other than an adaptation of Treasure Island. At some point, they suggested turning the story into King Solomon's Mines in space or Romeo and Juliet in space. They also suggested making Long John Silver the protagonist and telling the story from his point of view, making Jim Hawkins an African-American or a girl, and giving Jim a love interest and have the story focus on their romance, all ideas Musker & Clements opposed and rejected.
• Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio had written an early script for it after finishing up Aladdin. They were the ones who introduced the character of Amelia, although she was bird-like instead of cat-like in their version. The space port being shaped like a crescent moon was their idea as well.
• Joe Ranft was the one who suggested turning the character of Jim Hawkins into a troubled teen. Initially, Musker and Clements were going to portray Jim as a typical courageous and noble adventurer.
• According to Ron Clements, the "missing piece" is a running motif in the film. It doesn't only refer to the missing piece of the map, but the main characters having a piece of their selves missing that they end up finding during their journey, just not in the way they expected.
• Ron Clements wanted the film to begin with a Star Wars-like scroll saying "Another time, another place, another universe" to clarify this was not set in the future, but in a fantastical parallel universe.
• The film used the Deep Canvas technique that allowed the directors to get dynamic angles and perspectives similar to live-action filmmaking.
• There was pushback from management about making Long John Silver a 2D/CG hybrid character because it would require to essentially animate the same character twice which would slow down the production pipeline.
• Studio management had told Musker & Clements to convince Glenn Keane to come back from Paris and animate Long John Silver because it was very expensive for the studio to keep supporting him and his family living there.
• This is the first film by Musker & Clements where all of the backgrounds were painted digitally.
• At one point, Peter Schneider and Thomas Schumacher wanted Treasure Planet to be an all-CG film because at the time the CG crew was finishing up Dinosaur and they had no other projects lined up for them to do next. Musker & Clements considered it briefly, but ultimately turn the idea down because CG animation of human characters wasn't up to par at the time.
• Ron Clements said that because of the commercial success of Pixar films and the dwindling box office of 2D animated films, Disney decided to move away from 2D animation and commit to CG before Treasure Planet had even premiered. The last year of Treasure Planet's production was really rough because everybody at the studio could see the writing on the wall. There were severe salary cuts during production and it was announced there would be layoffs at the end of it.
• Morph was initially green-colored, but was changed to magenta to avoid similarities to 1997's Flubber.
• The directors wanted Emma Thompson from the start for the role of Amelia, but it almost didn't happen over a pay dispute. Eventually, Disney caved and offered her more money.
• Contrary to popular belief, the character of B.E.N. was not something executives came up or forced onto the directors. He was always conceived by the directors as a robot who had lost his mind and was very needy and the part was written with improv comedy in mind.
• One theory John Musker has as to why the film underperformed the way it did, is that Disney had become synonymous with girls' entertainment by that point in time. Even during previews, the audience for it were mostly moms and their little girls. That's when he realized that Treasure Planet would be a difficult sell to an audience who had developed certain assumptions as to what a Disney movie is. Ron Clements added that they had a tough time getting boys to go and see the movie even though teenage boys was the group reacting most favorably towards the film during preview screenings.
• Ron Clements dispelled the myth that the film had gone over budget. Even though there was a high budget allocated to it from the start because of the 2D/CG hybrid technique, the film came significantly under budget.
• Ron Clements said that the Monday right after the film's opening weekend, Disney publicly announced they were writing the film off. It was underrepresented to do that so early during a film's theatrical run. Ron Clements mentioned he felt hurt by a Los Angeles Time
article where it was insinuated that him and Musker had forced Disney to make this movie. This wasn't true, of course. Michael Eisner had used this project as an enticement to get them to stay at Disney and not move over to DreamWorks. The article in question also came down hard at Roy Disney who was a supporter of the film and of hand-drawn animation. He believes the film being painted in the press as a failure prematurely was premeditated. That Michael Eisner knew it would fail and had planned to use that as a tool against Roy Disney in their feud and as a justification of an already-made decision to abandon 2D animation and lay off veteran 2D animators from the studio.