I have to agree with Rostron and lizardgirl on this, it’s a high-concept and daring film that’s for sure, but after watching it, I couldn’t really remember much. I don’t know why, there were some pretty spectacular scenes, and the characters were charming. I mean, they’re all very likeable; Jim Hawkins, John Silver, Morph, Doppler, Amelia, B.E.N., etc. But they just lacked that special ‘something’.
For example, the emotional scenes didn’t quite ‘touch’ me, I felt Jim was moping about for most of the movie, instead of taking the initiative like most of the Pixar protagonists. i.e. Most of the time, he just falls into a situation accidentally, or ‘happens’ to discover the next plot point, and so on.
The supporting characters like Doppler, Amelia, and B.E.N. don’t really have much to do except fight off the bad guys. John Silver, although a very interesting and enigmatic bad guy, went ‘soft’ too easily in the beginning. It would’ve been much more believable if he resisted caring for Jim in the beginning, and then slowly gets to like the boy; the pace of their ‘relationship’ in the movie was too fast for my taste. Doppler and Amelia’s, in comparison, was much more realistic.
If there was one ‘great scene’, it was the ending where John Silver leaves Jim. That was well-done, and unexpected, I thought Jim would join Silver on his adventures, or Silver would be reformed into a good guy, but the direction they took for the conclusion was brave and affecting.
Other than that, the good things I can say about the film is that the ‘world’ was pretty imaginative and well-thought-out, the robot highway patrol, the half-moon ship port, the Aladdin ‘cave of wonders’… but the plot just lacked the extra ‘magic’ of the earlier films, and there were few musical numbers to make it memorable. But I liked it. It was ‘pretty’ good.