Digenis.org

Remember way back when Disney made good animated movies?

Okay. So maybe it wasn’t that long ago. I think the last great animated movie they put out was Mulan. The only good movies since then have been the computer animated ones (Toy Story, Monsters Inc), and in my opinion they were only exceptional due to the CGI wizardry of Pixar.

In 2001 Disney released Atlantis. I saw it for the first time this morning, even though I have been meaning to see it for a while. The movie never looked too exciting, but the fact that the main character was a linguist/cartographer sparked a smidgin of interest in me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to enjoy the movie all that much as most of my time was spent in mocking laughter and wincing at the pure BS they were calling linguistics.

I had heard a while back that Disney had hired Marc Okrand, creator of the Star Trek Klingon language, to develop an Atlantean language. “This can’t be all to bad,” I thought.

And his contributions weren’t bad at all. He developed an Atlantean orthography and also wrote the few segments of Atlantean dialouge. However, I can’t help but wonder if Dr. Okrand himself winces as he sees the way that langauges are used in the film (the single Latin alphabet character to Atlantean character correlation, the fact that the Atlanteans who have been isolated for thousands of years can speak contemporary French, Spanish, and English, etc.)

But what should I expect? It’s just a cartoon. A cartoon from a company symbolized by a talking mouse. Should I expect to see things as they really are? Of course not.