Trust us: the film's even weirder than the cover.
Planetata na sakrovishtata (Bulgarian: Планетата на съкровищата) AKA The Treasure Planet is a 1982 Bulgarian animated film directed by Rumen Petkov.
Similar to the 2002 Disney production Treasure Planet, the film takes the basic premise of Treasure Island and transfers it into a science fiction setting.
The hero, an alien named Philip, discovers a star map inside the luggage of deceased astronaut Billy Bones and subsequently finds himself pursued by a group of greedy and ruthless space pirates. Young Philip sets off to follow the star map to the position of a precious treasure.
During his voyage aboard Captain Smollett's spaceship, the Hispaniola, he struggles with the nefarious plots of John Supersilver and the other space pirates. Overcoming magnetic storms and holes in the space/time continuum, the spaceship lands on the Treasure Planet.
There, Philip and Captain Smollett defeat monsters and escape gigantic laser traps in pursuit of their treasure.
This film provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adapted Out: Several characters from the novel, most notably Ben Gunn, are absent in Petkov's film.
- Adaptational Villainy: Supersilver is a thoroughly unpleasant and unrepentant bad guy, with virtually none of the Anti-Villain traits of his literary counterpart.
- Applied Phlebotinum: The treasure turns out to be Flint’s equivalent of Noah’s Ark, containing samples of life on Earth before it became too artificial. In the end, Philip loads the treasure onto the Hispaniola's only escape pod and sends it towards Earth to restore nature. This is rendered as various animals and people literally dropping to the planet's surface from parachutes.
- Aside Glance: Black Dog constantly does it during his scene.
- At the Opera Tonight: Captain Flint's greatest passion was opera, with his personal favourite being Giuseppe Verdi's Nabucco, something that drove the rest of his crew "batty" according to Supersilver. This later serves as a kind of Chekhov's Gun when the crew of the Hispaniola reach Treasure Planet, as it is revealed that playing an excerpt from "Va, pensiero" will enable them to take control of the AI guarding the treasure.
- Bad Boss: Supersilver regularly berates his underlings as well as his parrot.
- Bittersweet Ending: Philip goes down with the ship as it is sucked down the black hole, but successfully manages to restore Earth's ecosystem using Flint's treasure. The original ending shows that he is reincarnation in the Earth.
- The Cameo: Rather prophetically, Mickey Mouse makes a cameo during the film's climax.
- Composite Character: Black Dog has elements of Blind Pew (being the one who hands over the "black spot" to Billy Bones), Squire Trelawney, and Abraham Gray as he pulls a Heel–Face Turn after being rescued from danger by Philip.
- Deadpan Snarker: Supersilver's robotic parrot is capable of speech, and is often quite sardonic.
- Deranged Animation: In addition to an art style best described as "Fleischer Studios on crack", many scenes are rendered abstractly.
- Diabolus ex Machina: Supersilver sabotages the Hispaniola's navigational computer, sending it flying directly into a black hole. Worse, the ship has only one escape pod, whose maximum carrying capacity is 200 kg - the same weight as the treasure itself.
- Digital Destruction: The version that is available on DVD is remastered, but there are a few edits that suffer from being the best cut. Quite a few scenes are edited, but the worst was the ending. After the parade when the Earth is restored, Philip is shown either reincarnated or his spirit roams the Earth. It's unknown if the English dub has this version.
- Face Death with Dignity: After being handed over the "black spot," Billy, fulfilling his duty as a conscientious pirate to drop dead at once according to the pirate code, allows himself to suddenly die, but before that turns his map over to Philip.
- Family-Unfriendly Death: After Supersilver murders Capt. Smollett and sets the Hispaniola on course for the black hole, Phillip shoots Supersilver in the gut with a laser pistol, resulting in Supersilver bursting aflame, slowly bleeding out (with his blood boiling!!), and crawling away in confused agony before he expires.
- Fate Worse than Death: Philip goes down with the ship into a black hole, where time and space are completely twisted and turned upside down and it's stated by Philip himself that he's going to be stuck in an eternal time loop, reliving his life over and over.
- Gaia's Lament: The Earth of Petkov's film is a sterile, graceless concrete wasteland utterly devoid of any natural life.
- Incessant Music Madness: Supersilver's mechanical henchmen perform an elaborate song and dance, which irritates him to no end.
- Limited Animation: As was common with many Eastern European animations during the Cold War years.
- Lost in Translation: In the English dub during the beginning, Philip and Billy just talk about the map and that Billy wants Philip to be on the lookout for any suspicious people, but in the original Bulgarian dub, there's more worldbuilding done about the barren Earth, as Billy brings up cows, grass, mice, etc. but doesn't quite know what they are, while Philip has never heard of these things, showing that the current state of Earth has been going on for quite some time.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: One of the traps set up by Flint functions in this way, holographically projecting one's deepest fantasies in order to throw them off. In Capt. Smollett's case, it's his self admitted weakness for beautiful women that the device uses for this purpose.
- Mecha-Mooks: Supersilver is aided by some mechanical henchmen.
- Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: Black Dog becomes fed up with being treated as little more than a tool by Supersilver, and manages to overpower him and take control of Hispaniola.
- Negative Space Wedgie: While passing through a magnetic storm, the crew of the Hispaniola encounter a rift in space-time that briefly sends them back in time to the 18th century.
- Obfuscating Disability: This version of Pew isn't blind, and only pretends to be when he's trying to get the map from Smollett, who isn't fooled and is able to get him to stand on a board that he can use to send Pew into a trap.
- Pirate Parrot: And a mechanical one, at that, not unlike the one in the Doctor Who serial "The Pirate Planet", though far more mobile.
- Precision F-Strike: In the English dub, "I'm sorry, Commander, but I flunked musical appreciation. They said I was tunefully retarded."
- Public Domain Soundtrack: An electronic rendition of "Ode to Joy" plays over the climactic scenes.
- Shout-Out:
- In the English dub, Capt. Smollett delivers his log entries in a manner very reminiscent of Star Trek, complete with a stardate system.
- In-universe, the AI that guards Flint's treasure is named Nebuchadnezzar, after the main character in Flint's favourite opera.
- Stealth Parody:
According to Petkov, the film was intended as one of both the original novel and some of the odder trends in both Eastern European animation and in Bulgarian society at the time. As such, it has many hallmarks of contemporary Bulgarian humour. - Surreal Humor: All over the place, from Billy being forced to jump rope by Black Dog to random references to Beverly Hills to characters spontaneously breaking out into opera.
- Take That!: The film's portrayal of the future Earth as a depressing concrete wasteland may have been intended as a jab at the prevalence of Brutalist architecture in Eastern Europe at the time.
- Time Dilation: As this Hispaniola descends into the black hole, this begins to take place.
- Toon Physics: Possibly employed in an attempt to emulate the aforementioned Fleischer Studios cartoons. The most prominent example occurs as Billy Bones is being chased by Black Dog.
- Wooden Ships and Iron Men: During a scene where the characters travel through time while braving a magnetic storm, their ship becomes a literal wooden ship of the line, and Robert Louis Stevenson and the original novel are explicitly named.
