Titanic : The Legend Goes On... - 2000
Directed by Camillo Teti
Written by Bozenna Intrator (translation), Jymn Magon & Camillo Teti
Starring Lisa Russo (voice), Mark Thompson-Ashworth (voice) & Susan Spifford (voice)
What we have with
Titanic : The Legend Lives On... is basically a cute children's animated film about one of the most horrific and deadly disasters in history. This Italian production also manages to veer very close to Disney animated classics like
Cinderella and
Lady and the Tramp, adding a kind of blatant and cheap 'rip-off' feel to proceedings. Then you have to add it's very odd moments to the overall impression it gives - one example being the sudden introduction of a rap song from nowhere, with one of the dog characters rapping "It's Party Time!" apropos of nothing. It was originally released dubbed at 82 minutes, but was later completely re-edited with differing story, new musical numbers and a different score - this version running 70 minutes, where the story takes up around 50 minutes, and the credits (including 'happily ever after' stills) just going on and on, including many segments which had been edited out. The first makes much more sense, while the second is kind of a little crazy.
Angelica (dubbed by Lisa Russo) travels by train with her two wicked step-sisters and wicked step-mother, dreaming of one day finding her real mother and father and heading for a cruise on Titanic. Her only clue as to her mother's identity is a locket with a blue gem in it, inside a picture of her. Meanwhile, wealthy William (dubbed by Mark Thompson-Ashworth) boards the ship with his maid, who lost her daughter years ago. Other passengers include a trio of thieves, a police detective, a lady looking for a rich man, a failed banker, William's secretary, a singer and a group of animals - a Mexican band of mice, another group of Yiddish mice, a gaggle of geese, a pickpocket bird, a cat and at least 5 dog characters. Angelica accidentally drops her locket, and from that point forward it passes through many people's hands until it's finally brought back to her, thanks to the help from some of the animal characters. Meanwhile William meets her and falls in love - but, of course, history intercedes and the ship hits an iceberg on a cold, still April night.
There is much that's wrong with this film - especially the second version. The first is a very cheap, lousy knock-off, but the second version is a complete catastrophe, and one hell of a crazy film. It was the second version I watched first - it begins with the sinking, and then flashes back to all of the events which preceded it. Firstly, the tone is all wrong - and perhaps that's why such a deadly disaster should never have been the subject for a cuddly kid's animated film. There's the "It's Party Time!" rap - but also a prodigious amount of cartoon hijinks, with a chef chasing a mouse around, the three thieves continually providing slapstick pratfalls and that rapping dog. When we get to the stage where the ship hits the iceberg, the film blusters through the sinking in a rushed hodge-podge of scenes, because a lot of what's going on at that stage involved human suffering and death. Continuity goes out the window as the ship breaks apart, gets low in the water, is suddenly a lot higher again, breaks up again, breaks up again, disappears, goes back to being low in the water, breaks up again and breaks up again.
The songs lack energy, and sound derivative. I've already mentioned "It's party time!", and in the first version of the film it's still a rap, but this time many of the lyrics are unintelligible. In the second version, the singer goes for "My Heart Will Go On" with a kind of plain number about "Eternity" - and as the ship goes down she suddenly breaks out into her "Eternity" song again. Whoever is singing it sounds like she isn't quite sure of herself, and feels inhibited. The animation is lousy. It's good compared to films like
The Misty Green Sky, but set against much else you notice how jerky and unsmooth it all is. It appears like an attempted copy of Disney-type character animation from their early days - and you can see moments taken wholesale from films such as
Lady and the Tramp. The story lacks inspiration, and is obviously as unimaginative as you could think of - which includes the dialogue. The pratfalls and slapstick attempt to add energy to the film, but appear to have been constructed by cynical profiteers instead of artists. As the ship sinks, the animators still can't stop themselves trying to elicit a laugh or two.
I had a few laughs watching it. As the ship fills with water, stokers in one of the boiler rooms get buckets and start bailing water - back into the ship. Right back into the boiler room they're standing in. When William jumps into the freezing water with a child, he yells out "We've made it!" A very odd choice of words for the situation. Members of the Titanic crew shift in perspective, and as such suddenly grow three or four times larger or smaller depending on where they're walking, which is always fun. At times dialogue simply can't be understood, or else characters just start making unusual sounds. At times they'll be talking when their mouth is closed, and at other times their mouth will be closed as they're talking. The film will often make the logical seem bizarre, and the bizarre seem logical - and as a whole the project reeks of the most cynical kind of knock-off moviemaking, with the main impetus being the success of
Titanic which had been released just a few years prior.
Was there anything good about the film? Well, I'm happy that the ship itself, R.M.S. Titanic, was faithfully reproduced, and the animators didn't simply go for any old ship design - which they could have. 1979 film
S.O.S. Titanic was filmed on the R.M.S. Queen Mary, and it's kind of painful to watch. My father has been obsessed about Titanic most of his life, and I have to admit that some of that rubbed off on me, so I recognize the shape easily. The 3D CGI rendering of the ship might look kind of rough at times, and out of step with the more traditional kind of animation that's being used in this film, but I did like that they got that one thing right. Everything else about this reaches a level that's easy to mock. Angelica's locket might not have been The Heart of the Ocean, but it's a little too obvious. The group of Mexican mice might be a little too racist. Rapping "It's Party Time!" is a little too incongruous for one of humanity's greatest tragedies. Watching it all play out isn't all that much fun, until you start making fun of it - so if you're that way inclined I included one of the many webisodes that do just that below. It gave me a few good laughs.