One the best projects Walt Disney ever undertook, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an exciting and essentially faithful adaptation of Jules Verne's most popular 'Voyage Extraordinaire'. It was received as a breathtaking wonder upon its Christmas release in 1954, and kept its glow in many reissues thereafter - I don't remember ever hearing a kid say anything bad about it.

Disney's vision was matched, luckily, by the solid practical help of his businessman brother. For his first bigscreen film, he picked a property with countless unknown production hazards. It needed to have special effects the likes of which nobody had seen before. It would be filmed in a brand new process for which there was only one lens available. And he had to assemble the best technical resources in Hollywood, when he was known primarily as an animation producer.

About ten years ago, Disney released an impressive Laserdisc with many extras, but this special edition DVD easily beats it in both the transfer and goodie departments.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea opens with a screen bathed in light from a rippling underwater source. As the show was one of the first filmed in the new anamorphic CinemaScope process, the wide image was originally wider, spread out to a ribbonlike 1 to 2.55 aspect ratio. Disney shrewdly composed his titles in the center of that spread, as his previous live-action efforts had basically been for television, and he anticipated the film's eventual arrival on the smaller format.  ¹ The film has some amusing scenes in San Francisco and aboard Ted De Corsia's warship, but it is not long before we're completely immersed in Captain Nemo's fantastic underwater world, in a submarine so well designed that we accept its reality without question. There are undersea diving suits and a round iris window to view the magic of the deep, and its comfortable but cramped interiors are invitingly believable.

The pace of the action is deliberate and linear, perhaps too slow for modern audiences, but the adventures of the Nautilus are magnificently realized. It cruises beneath the waves and navigates submerged tunnels like a beautiful but dangerous sea creature. When attacking, it churns a terrifying wake, with its glowing eyes screaming across the water's surface. It has no modern weapons, but uses its knifelike keel to rip through the hulls of its victims. We don't see it take on any iron warships, but we believe the Nautilus would have no trouble sinking anything afloat.  ²

The comedy relief now seems a necessary diversion from the film's dark themes. When the movie was newer, we kids just took dedicated villains for granted, as if they needed no motivation but to provide us with exciting and violent thrills. Nemo's vows of vengeance & delirious musings now seem all too relevant, as is his suicide pact with his dedicated crew. The only crewman with a speaking part is played by Western villain Robert J. Wilke, and it is subtly disturbing to see an actor associated only with degenerate outlaws, playing Nemo's loyal right hand man. No doubt Disney was simply trying to be faithful to the book that had no played upon his imagination as a kid back in Kansas, but because of this unchanged use of Verne's specific motivation for Nemo, 20,000 Leagues has an amazingly dark streak at its center.  ³

Disney's DVD of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea  ⁵ looks fine in enhanced widescreen, with a lot of delineation in the various blues and greens of the ocean depths. There is some grain ... this is a 50 year old picture shot on some of the earliest Eastman stock. The box lists the aspect ratio as 2:55 to one, but it doesn't look any more wide than the usual 2:35 transfer. In compositions where characters fill the frame, those at the extremes tend to be a bit crowded. Chances are the marketing writer read the ratio off an old stat sheet. At least the image is centered on the screen - a 35mm showing I saw at the El Capitan in Hollywood in the early 90s, used a lopsided print that favored the right exteme of the 2:55 frame.

From the ample evidence of the extras, the most important man in the show appears to be a homely design genius by the name of Harper Goff. His submarine has never been beaten for design. He obviously was Fleisher's #1 man, for he not only engineered the long ships for The Vikings, but designed a cool intervascular cruiser for Fleisher's later Fantastic Voyage.  ⁶

Footnotes:

1. The only other time I can remember that particular trick was for Roman Polanski's Chinatown, which begins by composing its main titles as if they were from a 1940s Academy-ratio film noir.

Early CinemaScope's crude optics (straight from French inventor Chretien) frustrated cinematographers. It had a warped field of vision and many shots in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea suffer from the 'CinemaScope Mumps' - actors heads seem to squash out horizontally at times. Franz Planer avoids unnecessary horizontal pans - that would reveal all kinds of distortion in the lenses. They had only one lens for the whole film (!), which inspired Harper Goff to have 'squeezed' Nautilus models made, so that the sub could be shot flat underwater, and when spread out, look correct! If you look closely, there are a number of underwater shots that are done this way.
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2. I remember cheering like mad with a theater full of other ten-year olds, as the trailer for the nautilus opened up with just the high-pitched Tasmanian Devil whine of the Nautilus zooming toward us, it's wake splashing over its yellow viewport eyes. Movies in the big theaters were magic then, and the sight of the sub's screaming attack projected on the theater's shimmering curtains as they opened was a wonderment.
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3. The Disney I love is the one before Disneyland, before he became the beacon of sweetness and light and the status quo. Not only was he creatively daring, but he had no problem expressing all of his personal fears and bugaboos in films - there are scenes in Snow White, Bambi and Pinocchio that are terrifying to little kids. Fantasia and Dumbo had sections that seemed like the experience of a drug addict or an alcoholic. If Dumbo has a message beyond mother love, it's that You Have to Get Drunk if You Want to Fly, Kid. Even smaller projects like Mister Toad's Wild Ride show an absolute delight in the joys of total irresponsibility. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea seems to recognize Verne's terrorist hero as yet another of the author's 'futuristic visions'. Along with the atomic submarine, he foretold the day when colonialism would give birth to implacable Terrorist revengers.
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5. The on-screen title has no comma in the numeral, but the '20' is in a larger font, perhaps making one unnecessary. When '20000' looks so wrong in print, you can't go by the actual title card all the time. The movie was such a success, that besides the many other Verne visualizations that followed in its wake, other pictures mimicked its title to perhaps catch some of its magic: The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Around the World Under the Sea. By the way, a 'League', according to the dictionary, is 4.8 kilometers, or about 3 miles.
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6. Goff's work becomes especially noteworthy when one notes the patchy work on submarine designs seen elsewhere. The super-sub Seaview of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (which 'borrowed' Peter Lorre for a similar role), looks rather cool, like a finned Cadillac ready to tour the ocean bottom, but the Fox effects people could do little more than just shove it through the water and hope it would go straight. In many takes it leans to one side, and the poorly-animated diving planes move like a bad toy. Going even further down, the vessels of The Atomic Submarine look as if they came out of a cereal box. Only Toho's Atragon has some measure of majesty to match Harper Goff's work, and it is more of a 'transformer' toy, flying through the air and drilling through the Earth. I like those wooden decks though, they're a nice touch.
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