STARS AND ARRRS 'TREASURE PLANET' SENDS JIM HAWKINS AND LONG JOHN SILVER ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

Byline: Evan Henerson Staff Writer

NOT EVERY in-studio wrestling match is a harbinger of financial losses or creative discontent.

In the preparation stages of Walt Disney's ``Treasure Planet,'' animator John Ripa would knock on the office door of his fellow animator/mentor Glen Keane, primed for work ... and battle.

``Sometimes something works and you get this spark of life, and you'd get these, like, hyper kinds of moods,'' says Ripa. ``One of these days, I was feeling comfortable enough with Glen, and I'd be in a mood. He'd open up the door and I'd be like, 'C'mon let's fight.'

``I'd look up, and all of a sudden it's like a freight train coming across the room at me and the next thing I know we're wrestling and I'm fighting for my life to keep from being lifted over Glen's head. I'm holding on to his shoes, anything to keep from being picked up off the ground.''

It's a friendship thing, both men insist. ``Typically, animators don't have to be physically close,'' says Keane.

You get the sense any number of rule books were rewritten for ``Treasure Planet,'' most in the spirit of fostering partnerships, collaboration and some new animation bells and whistles. If the occasional office tussle inspired such creativity, well, nobody in Burbank is complaining.

Forget about closed doors or ``Do not disturb'' signs. Keane's animating team for the character of cyborg pirate John Silver blended with the Ripa-led crew responsible for Silver's 15-year-old protege, Jim Hawkins. Both crews learned to create both characters, and the two supervisors would ``act out'' scenes together on the same page, one drawing overlapping another.

Keane and Ripa even demonstrated a bit of teamwork for a room full of journalists last month at Disney's Feature Animation building. Capping off a polished presentation with detailed explanations of computer generated animation, terms like ``deep canvas,'' ``virtual sets'' and the Brandywine school of painting, Keane and Ripa stepped to the podium, pencils at the ready.

In less time than it took to say ``Quickdraw McGraw!'' Hawkins and Silver stood side by side on the paper, with the burly, gap-toothed pirate all but crowding out the 15-year-old cabin boy.

Bringing John Silver to life meant that Keane - a veteran Disney animator whose previous creations included Tarzan, Ariel and Aladdin - also had to work closely with CG illustrator Eric Daniels. Animators accustomed to drawing flesh and bone tend not to do well with the geometric shapes that make up a cyborg's mechanical arm, leg and eye.

``It had to be on a computer,'' says Keane. ``If I had to do that mechanical arm, I would still be drawing it 30 years from now and not doing half as good a job.''

Kidnapped classic?

Long John Silver ... pirates ... Jim Hawkins. The scenario may sound familiar even if the fantastical tweaking doesn't. Fans of Robert Louis Stevenson should recognize ``Treasure Island'' even with the ship RLS Legacy traveling in the cosmos and a pirate's parrot transformed into a protoplasmic blob called Morph. It's still the tale of a young boy's maturity, a hunt for hidden treasure and a pirate saga all wrapped into a classic adventure yarn. Leave it to Disney, of course, to latch onto the heart-tugging, fatherless boy in search of an identity theme.

``The big part of 'Treasure Island' is this kid and this pirate who becomes sort of a surrogate father to this kid,'' says co-director John Musker. ``We wanted Jim to grow more and change more in the course of the story. We really feel in some sense like this pirate makes a difference in this kid's life.''

It was 17 years ago that Musker and his writing and directing partner Ron Clements first pitched the idea of setting ``Treasure Island'' in a fantasy universe. Three films later, the two men (the directors of ``The Little Mermaid,'' ``Aladdin'' and ``Hercules'') finally got their go-ahead, by which time animation technology had caught up with their dreams. A richly detailed past/future and hand-drawn/CGI hybrids were both possible and intriguing challenges.

The setting, say Musker and Clemens, is a future that has somehow been influenced by the past. There are advanced, animal-like creatures and aliens, but nothing can happen by way of magic, and people can breathe in space without difficulty. Jim Hawkins has a modern haircut, with pony tail, but wears clothes that have a vaguely 18th-century quality. His boots are a combination of high seas and snowboarding wear, and when we first meet the teen, he is streaking through the sky on a craft that looks like a catamaran as reimagined by George Lucas.

No challenge was greater than Silver, a combination of human body parts and a Swiss army knife. Keane would start with a rough drawing of the character's human and mechanical side. After the mechanical arm was broken down into simple shapes, the drawings would be scanned into a computer, where Daniels would create a robotic overlay over them.

Where Keane drew his inspiration from characters like Quint (the shark hunter played by Robert Shaw in ``Jaws'') and an influential high-school football coach, Daniels drove around L.A. researching ancient machinery. Silver's leg ultimately was based on ancient dry-cleaning gears.

Background bytes

With the exception of Silver and the Martin Short-voiced robot B.E.N., all of the characters are hand-drawn. The backgrounds, influenced by the Brandywine painters like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, have an oil-painting style that was actually created in a computer. The extensive background detail of these ``virtual sets'' is one reason why ``Treasure Planet'' will also be simultaneously released in 35mm and IMAX formats - another Disney first.

The milestones even filtered into the recording booths. While voice recording for animated films tends to be a solitary activity involving an actor alone with the director in a sound booth, the ``Treasure Planet'' team brought performers Brian Murray (who voices Silver) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jim Hawkins) together to record many of their scenes. Murray, a British actor with much stage experience, took to the voice work more easily, according to Musker and Clements, and ended up helping Gordon-Levitt. Since Murray is based in New York and Gordon-Levitt goes to school on the East Coast, the joint recording sessions became possible.

``Acting is all about playing off another actor, so yeah, it took some getting used to,'' says Gordon-Levitt, 21. ``We did get to play the scenes together and look each other in the eye. That made a huge difference.''

No word on whether outside the booth, the two actors hit the mat together.

Disney animation till the cows come home

``Treasure Planet'' is in orbit, and ``The Lion King'' pounces into IMAX on Christmas Day. But Walt Disney's animation-producing hydra is hardly done.

During publicity session for ``Treasure Planet,'' Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation, laid out the schedule of the upcoming animated releases both from Disney and its Northern California-based studio, Pixar, the maker of ``Toy Story'' and ``Monsters, Inc.''

Here's what's in the works, with a special barnyard nod to ``Home on the Range'' directly from Schumacher.

Feb. 14, 2003: ``The Jungle Book 2''

Easter 2003: ``Piglet's Big Movie,'' with Winnie the Pooh and friends.

May 30, 2003: ``Finding Nemo,'' father and son clownfish in the Great Barrier Reef. From Pixar.

Fall 2003: ``Home on the Range'' (more on this in a minute) and ``Aladdin'' in IMAX.

Summer 2004: Either ``The Incredibles,'' another Pixar film about a family of superheroes hiding out in the suburbs, or ``Bears,'' in which a boy (voiced by Joaquin Phoenix) is transformed into a bear and made to live among them. Music by Phil Collins.

Fall 2004: ``Chicken Little,'' the studio's first fully computer-generated movie by the creative team that brought us ``The Emperor's New Groove.''

Schumacher waxed particularly eloquent about ``Home on the Range.'' We thought we'd let him run it down in his own words ... without giving too much away, of course:

``If you are an 'I love ``Lady and the Tramp,'' I love ``101 Dalmatians'' ' kind of person, like me; if you like that talking animal movie when the animals step in when the human world fails them, and the colors are bright and the music is fun; that's what 'Home on the Range' is.

`` 'Home on the Range' is an animated western musical set in the wild West with music by Alan Menken. Bonnie Raitt sings one of the opening songs, and k.d. lang sings a song. It's set on a farm called the Little Patch of Heaven. Pearl is a lone woman farmer who loves her animals. She has pigs and ducks and geese - and they better hurry. She takes in animals from other farms that are being destroyed because a cattle rustler has stolen all the cows.

``We will celebrate our story of the western with the great hero of the West proving to be the dairy cow. And they're played by Jennifer Tilly, Roseanne Barr and Dame Judi Dench in her bovine debut.''

Evan Henerson

CAPTION(S):

6 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) pixels & pirates

Disney animators strike a balance of old and new styles for `Treasure Planet'

(2 -- 5) Jim Hawkins, top left, zooms over a ravine and sees the cosmos with a half-cyborg John Silver, above right, in Disney's update of ``Treasure Island.'' Animators John Ripa, top right, and Glen Keane, above left, often let the cannonballs fly during the film's production.

(6) John Musker, left, and Ron Clements pitched the movie 17 years ago.

Box:

Disney animation till the cows come home (see text)