- Animation Age Ghetto: A major contributor to the commercial failure of the movie. Some of the commercials try to avoid showing any traditional animation at all. The filmmakers themselves were seemingly unsure of who their target age group was. They have cutesy cartoony characters like Gune that are clearly aimed for kids, but they also have visible bloodshed, Fanservice including brief nudity, and rather graphic onscreen deaths. This is arguably what happens when you get the director of The Land Before Time and Anastasia to direct a script by the writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
- Ass Pull: Korso's betrayal. Several critics noted it comes out of nowhere midway through the film with seemingly no purpose than to have a more human antagonist than the Drej and contradicts much of his behavior beforehand.
- Awesome Music: The
whole soundtrack, including the orchestral music by Graeme Revell. Even kind of counts in the ice field scene (where there is no music at all), as the absence of music makes the scene far more tense and effective than anything that could have been put in. - Captain Obvious Reveal: The creepy, demonic-looking winged aliens on the planet Sesharrim didn't wipe out the Gaoul—they are the Gaoul. It's treated as a surprise reveal, but the set-up for it is pretty obvious: we're told beforehand that nobody knows what the Gaoul actually look like, the winged aliens are apparently among the only lifeforms on a mostly empty planet, and they never actually do anything to threaten our heroes before Korso jumps to conclusions and draws his blaster on them.
- Catharsis Factor: After everything the Drej did to humanity, and anyone who got in their way while hunting the survivors, seeing them wiped out by Titan as it uses their energy to create a new Earth is oh so satisfying.
- Complete Monster:
- The Drej Queen leads her race of malevolent Energy Beings in a wholesale genocide of humankind out of a xenophobic hatred of humanity's capacity for imagination. After firebombing Earth into nothingness, the Queen hunts down any surviving humans over the course of many years, the Drej menacing anyone in their way as they hunt their prey. When she learns that young human Cale Tucker is planning to find Titan, a space station capable of reviving Earth, the Queen torturously captures him and jettisons his partner Akima Kunimoto into space, hoping to prevent Titan from being used. The Queen also makes a deal with treacherous human captain Joseph Korso to lead her to Titan so she may destroy it and seal humanity's doom, before going behind Korso's back and trying to accomplish it her own way so the Drej can shut him out of the deal.
- Preed is a slimy, condescending Akrennian who at first merely seems to be the Token Evil Teammate of Korso's crew. Preed is actually far worse; having joined Korso in a scheme to sell out the planet-creating Titan to the Drej, and with it humanity's last hope of avoiding extinction, Preed proves to have none of Korso's morals or tragic backstory. Betraying everyone he ever called an ally, Preed shoots Akima through the shoulder, tries to blow up Gune and Stith, and finally turns his gun on Korso and tries to kill him as well as Cale and Akima, all with smug, gloating relish.
- From the novelization by Steve Perry & Dal Perry:
- Queen Susquehana is the absolute monarch of the Drej and a genocidal nightmare of an alien. Leading the Drej in genocidal campaigns against entire planets, Susquehana's ultimate goal is to spread the light of the Drej all across the galaxy and exterminate all non-Drej life throughout. Learning that the technology of the Titan still exists even after Earth's destruction, Susquehana sends waves of Drej to find and eradicate the technology whilst destroying all those who seek it, eventually making it a point to spitefully obliterate every surviving human colony herself and drive out all those remaining into the deep edge of space to perish. Susquehana also slaughters several of her own kind, some of them upstart assassins—but others killed purely due to Susquehana's own paranoid fits. An Absolute Xenophobe obsessed with establishing her cruel legacy among her species and sinking to depths unreached even by the previous Queens of the Drej, Susquehana perfectly embodies the reasons why the Drej are feared and reviled by every denizen of the galaxy.
- Preed, a slimy Akrennian barely tolerated even by the others onboard the Valkyrie, makes a name for himself as a backstabbing snake as his true colors unfold throughout the novel. Contacted by Susquehana with the promise of a monetary reward for finding the Titan, Preed and his compatriot Joseph Korso betray the other members of the Valkyrie to the Drej. Preed quickly establishes himself as the viler of the two between him and Korso, nearly shooting his way through an entire crowd of innocent colonists to get to Cale and Akima and displaying open, sadistic relish at the prospect of doing so. Once at the Titan itself, Preed turns his gun against Korso and reveals his intention to simply murder all of his former allies and sell out the Titan to the Drej, dooming any chance humanity has to repopulate—and then kicking back and watching as the Drej massacre everything in their path, comfortable with the death of almost all sapient life in the galaxy so long as he gets to stay alive.
- Crazy Is Cool: Gune is undeniably loopy, but that apparently helps him a lot in his scientist/navigator duties.Cale: I'll tell you a secret: This guy's nuts!
Korso: And I'll tell you another: He's never wrong. - Creepy Awesome: Preed. He definitely qualifies as 'creepy,' but factor in his one-liners and eventual Manipulative Bastard tendencies, this is what you get.
- The Gaoul, although ominous during their initial appearance, prove to be phenomenal dogfighters and incredibly determined to help Cale's party elude the Drej.
- Cult Classic: Has a small, but slowly growing, group of devoted fans. Being the final film made by the legendary Don Bluth certainly helps.
- Ensemble Dark Horse: Gune, despite being a sidekick level side character is more popular than both the main heroes and the villains. This is for all of the reasons mentioned and because he is the only really Bluthy character in the whole show.
- Genius Bonus: Korso telling Cale to exhale when they're exposed to the vacuum of space. Most people now know that humans don't just explode in that environment; far fewer are aware that, if there's air in your lungs, the loss of external pressure in space would cause it to expand and rupture the lungs from the inside.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- A Space Opera co-written by Joss Whedon which got screwed over by Fox? Where else have we heard that?
- Ditzy wide, goggle eyed Gune looks strikingly similar to a certain prehistoric mammal John Leguizamo voiced two years later.
- Matt Damon voices protagonist Cale Tucker, stranded in space destined to find a new planet for human kind. Fifteen years later, Damon would star in The Martian where he plays an astronaut stranded and struggling to survive on Mars.
- The film revolves around a blonde haired man, whose deceased father is voiced by Ron Perlman, trying to save the universe following the destruction of the Earth. Sounds strikingly similar to the first season of Final Space.
- You can now actually recreate the way the Drej destroy Earth in this movie in the game Universe Sandbox.
- Ho Yay: Some scenes between Cale and Korso have this vibe.
- Moral Event Horizon: Preed graduates from Plucky Comic Relief to all-out evil when he shoots Akima through the shoulder as she and Cale are fleeing the ship. As if that wasn't enough, he leaves Stith and Gune with a communicator wristwatch that turns out to actually be a bomb which nearly kills Gune. It's ultimately satisfying to see the treacherous creep get his in the end.
- Obvious Judas: Let's be real here, it was not surprising at all to find out that Preed was a traitor.
- One-Scene Wonder: The nameless guard who averts The Guards Must Be Crazy in an awesome fashion. It helps that his dialogue was written by Joss Whedon.
- Popular with Furries: If the volume of fan art is anything to go by, Stith is immensely popular compared to the rest of the cast.
- Special Effects Failure: Producer/Director Gary Goldman and Don Bluth openly complain about the time-and-budget crunch imposed by Fox at points in the DVD commentary, most notably involving a CG cliff shown near the end of the film that was done in literally the last two weeks of production.
- The film's frame rate stutters in video-game fashion whenever its 2D characters are put into motion in three-dimensional environments.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Many audiences expressed wanting to see more of humanity’s bitter state in space. While we see some aliens showing some discriminatory behavior in the beginning of the movie and a population of humans living in a makeshift colony, there isn’t enough seen to make Cale’s determination to save the race feel genuine, especially when being buried in cynicism when it came to saving the humans for most of the movie. The few non-main human characters we do see in the movie do not even seem to be as downtrodden as their situation as an endangered species would imply.
- Uncertain Audience: One of the main reasons people didn't see the film was because the film itself wasn't sure who the target demo was—kids, teens or adults. Even the VHS reflected this uncertainty—on it you had a trailer for the first X-Men movie, followed by a promo for Digimon.
- Unintentional Period Piece: This was Don Bluth's only film with a soundtrack filled with contemporary rock music, which, until then, he opposed out of fear that it'd date the movie. He wasn't wrong, as the soundtrack definitively pins the movie in the year 2000, although the orchestral score (around an hour of it) by Graeme Revell was released in 2014.
- Visual Effects of Awesome: Sure there is plenty of CGI. But there's no denying the overflow of pure epic that is the Titan destroying the Drej and forming a new planet. Or the destruction of Earth in the beginning.
- Said scene where New Earth is formed? That was animated by a certain Blue Sky Studios, who would later go on to make Ice Age after Fox Animation Studios was shut down.
- The Ice Rings of Tigrin sequence; no less than Roger Ebert called it one of the most virtuoso sequences of animation he'd ever seen.
- What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite being rated PG, there are still some pretty scary elements (for example, Preed's Family-Unfriendly Death, etc.) that could scare younger viewers.
- Woobie Species: Humans could be seen as this, as Earth was destroyed by the Drej, making humans galactic drifters.
