Directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise ("Beauty and the Beast," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"), "Atlantis" takes us back to 1914 when a bright-eyed, idealistic young man, the grandson of a great explorer who found a map of Atlantis, succeeds in raising foundation money to search for the lost continent. After a dazzling prologue featuring the big bang which caused this fabled land to be lost near the coast of Iceland, we watch Milo Thatch (voice of Michael J. Fox) emerge behind his oversized glasses to join a group in search of the buried land. They include a cook who is awfully fond of bacon grease, Cookie (Jim Varney); an expert with explosives who, as one character remarks, looks as though he had just come out of a Turkish prison, Vinny (Don Novello); a robust physician adept at chiropractic manipulations of the neck, Sweet (Phil Morris); a mole (Corey Burton) who is considered like a pet but is adept at digging; and good-looking but cynical Helga (Claudia Christian) together with the commander of the group, Rourke (James Garner).

Zipping along in a submarine-like object that could have come out of Jules Verne's most celebrated sci-fi novel, they engage soon enough in battles; first with the largest lobster ever discovered east of Maine, ultimately with a couple of members of their own team who break off into a minor civil war with the crew. When they do discover their objective, which could be a Shangri-La if the civilization were not doomed to die out, they meet King Nedakh (Leonard Nimroy) and his heir-apparent, the lovely Princess Kida (Cree Summer). Kida is sharp-looking and playful, giving the impression that "Atlantis" is not going to fall into the Shrekian idea that beauty is unimportant in heroines.

Less talk, more action, appears the credo of Disney's latest, spectacular animated feature, while James Newton Howard's music, which at some times appears ready to compete with the score of "Pearl Harbor," inflects the drama of this heroic adventure. "Atlantis" features subtitles whenever the local dialect is spoken (a language known to the adventurers as gibberish), a concept which could help habituate the small fry to the idea that English is not spoken everywhere and that there just may be a few foreign films in their future that could match "Armageddon" in quality.