This is my 200th review; I wanted to do something special. Titan AE is a cartoon. Titan AE was another attempt by Fox to try and break Disney’s stranglehold of animated movies.

“Is Titan AE any good?” asked some girl in the flat I was currently making myself known in.

I turned to her boyfriend with the ~What is she talking about?~ look on my face. I turned back and said, “Yes, it’s really great.”

“But, but I thought it was a cartoon.” she said. I gave her boyfriend the look again; he was becoming increasingly apologetic.

“It’s a breathtaking animation with a fantastic soundtrack and an ingenious story behind it.” I was speaking more slowly now in a hope that she would understand.

She asked “It is a cartoon then?” and her boyfriend cringed.

I am being mean, shamelessly picking on this poor girl but I hope I am also illustrating a point. The fact that something is a “cartoon” all to often lands it slap bang in the middle of a basket labelled “For Kids” but in Titan AE’s case and in many others, this couldn’t be more wrong. Oh, children may very well enjoy Titan AE but that doesn’t mean we, the mature and experience Ciao community, will not enjoy it either.

The action begins right at the very start with the evacuation of Earth. The little kid we have been following is, at the last minutes, scooped up and out of harms way by his father - who seems to be important in the military - given to a friend and then carried off in one of the armada of spaceships fleeing the planet.

I suppose you might have been making the stalwart defenders of the home planet to fly around in their little fighter craft and put up a heroic struggle and successfully defend the Earth against all odds. No. The Drej come and the Drej destroy. You’re not left in any doubt as to why there was a mad panic to flee the Earth.

The story picks up again with Cale working in some sort of space junk recycling yard. Cale, of course, being the blond kid all grown up. In case you had been caught up in the destruction of your home planet and hadn’t noticed how very intricate the animation is you notice it now. The “landscape” of space is awesome. You’re not given too long to appreciate it though because Cale takes us on a dangerous joyride around, under, over and through the floating debris.

Mankind has been reduced to nothing more than packs of drifters. We’re a lowly class of alien. Cale is lucky to be working in the scrap yard at all.

The Valkyrie (named after the Norse legends who would fly over the battlefield and carry the souls of the bravest warriors to the afterlife... ) docks in the scrap yard.

So do the Drej.

The chase is on! We get to see the Drej for the first time, eerily spooky aliens that are composed entirely of some dark energy. Dangerous, deadly and after Cale! We quickly discover that Cale has a map encoded onto him. The crew of the Valkyrie and the Drej both want it. Since the captain of the Valkyrie was the trusty friend of Cale’s father (Who has been missing since the destruction of Earth) and since the Drej are simply content in killing Cale, our hero makes the right choice and throws himself in with the crew of the mercenary ship.

This was the minute in the script where, I felt, everything could go wrong. After the very impressive start to the story there was the real and serious danger that the plot would settle back into nothing special. The same could happen to the animation as well. This is an unfortunate phenomenon that occurs too often in Anime. The animators know very well that only the first few minutes of the animation will be watched by the funding company and it will be those first scenes in which the future funding of the rest of the picture and even the advertising budget are decided on. The quality often starts out very high and then fades away.

This did not happen in Titan AE. If anything, the plot simply got better as the story unfolded, the twists in the tale flicked back to sting you and the scenery grew increasingly impressive.

The genetic map in Cale is to the location of the Titan. The Titan being a spaceship project that is father was working on before the Drej came and destroyed the planet. The Drej are clearly interested in it!

I’m going to stop following the plot as this stage because to continue any further runs the risk of giving too much away. However, I could certainly go on for ages and describe any individual scene in great detail. Any frame from this animation would be worth an entire lecture at Art College.

I’ll pick a highlight from the plot, though, just one.
Some of the crew of the Valkyrie are trying to gain access to a restricted area. Between them and the door marked “Private” is a large and dangerous looking guard. The crew of the Valkyrie tries the old bluff-their-way-passed the Guard. “Who would have thought it? A smart guard!” Here the story line pokes fun in a very deliberate way at some of the established clichés of the genre but through out the entire script you’ll find countless other examples of this.

I really think this animation is best watched on a large screen. It is an epic tale to which most zombie-boxes (That’s your TV) would not be able to do justice. Having said that, fear not, for those lucky souls who have watched it on the small screen say it is nearly as good.

Titan AE, as most people know, was the first movie to be distributed to the cinemas by Internet connection rather than on a film reel.

Titan AE (After Earth) is Science Fiction without apology. It is a successful adventure tale of danger, success, death and romance. The tale told by this animation is certainly of quality enough to grab and hold the attention of any adult and I am sure it will turn anyone of malleable character into a Sci-Fi fan.