SUN SCORE

***

The Disney cartoon feature Treasure Planet is shot through with ingenuity. It outlandishly, cleverly moves Robert Louis Stevenson's seminal swashbuckler Treasure Island to outer space. The movie's affection for its source may be enough to get youngsters to crack open the original.

Treasure Planet unrolls in a parallel universe where space-traveling humans and other creatures inhabit the culture and architecture of 18th-century England, with a bit of 21st-century America thrown in.

The space ships look just like nautical ships, except the sails billow out with solar energy instead of wind. The galleon that speeds to Treasure Planet, which contains "the loot of a thousand worlds," is called the RLS Legacy. Filmmakers Ron Clements and John Musker live up to Stevenson's legacy. I disliked the promiscuous, farcical anachronism of their Hercules, but in Treasure Planet they've found a way to blow fresh air into blazing, old-fashioned heroics.

Stevenson's pirates were always colorful predators. So it makes sense that in Treasure Planet the epitome of this mad menagerie is a cold-blooded spider-lobster named Scroop (Michael Wincott). In one neat stroke, the filmmakers make the scalawags' peg-legged leader, John Silver (Brian Murray), a cyborg; in another, the crackerjack skipper who faces down these mutineers becomes a long-legged female feline named Captain Amelia (Emma Thompson). This sly cat walks alone, except for her righteous, granite-like second-in-command Arrow (Roscoe Lee Browne) and the intellectual canine Dr. Doppler (David Hyde Pierce), who proves himself less Goofy in deed than in appearance. (Stevenson fans will note that Doppler is a comic hybrid of Squire Trelawney and Dr. Livesey.)

Jim Hawkins (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) remains human - some might say too human. Directors Clements and Musker (whose previous high point was Aladdin) strain to amp up the father-son bond that develops between Hawkins and the lovably duplicitous Silver. So they make Hawkins a moody adolescent drawn to rebellious acting-out after his father abandons him - unlike Stevenson's good boy, whose father dies of illness in the opening chapters.

Yet, for the most part, Hawkins' characterization here is dynamic and unsentimental. Hawkins capers on a "solar surfer" as a budding extreme sportsman. And this sporting streak fits Stevenson's depiction of the boy as an audacious human being, capable of daring action on behalf of his friends, and vulnerable to that charming miscreant Silver.

The story remains refreshingly the same. Tottering buccaneer Billy Bones (Patrick McGoohan) enters Mrs. Hawkins' Benbow Inn, and young Jim ends up with his treasure map. A friend of the Hawkins' family (in the movie, Doppler) outfits a treasure-hunting ship but unknowingly hires, with the exception of the captain and first officer, a pirate crew planning to take control of the voyage and seize the treasure for themselves.

The filmmakers understand how Stevenson's image-crazy style conveys an opening out into new worlds: Key images take over the action, then melt away to reveal new turns and vistas in the narrative. Almost all the crucial, highly visual set pieces from the novel - Jim overhearing sabotage while he hides in an apple-barrel, or scurrying from an attacker up a mast - find fitting equivalents in Treasure Planet.

The Disney team brings humor as well as panache to capturing their characters in action, such as when Mrs. Hawkins daydreams nostalgically about a childish Jim bringing home a pet, then sees the teen-age Jim lugging in the horrific Billy Bones.

The script by a backfield of writers (including Clements and Musker and Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio of Shrek) doesn't condescend to a kid audience - it assumes children might like the sound of a word like "palaver," even if they don't understand it. And it gives the superb vocal cast words they can savor.

Thompson hasn't been this much fun since 1993's Much Ado About Nothing; as Captain Amelia, she both salutes and satirizes rectitude. Her superiority makes her growing crush on Hyde Pierce's floppy Doppler all the more charming, especially since he's the sort of tongue-tied pedant prone to Freudian slippage, like saying "anatomical" instead of "astronomical."

And Brian Murray's Silver has a gusto that matches the fat-man's grace. The team is at its best when depicting Silver and Jim's friendship; in one comic-poignant moment, Jim rests his head on Silver's mountainous gut.

To achieve entertainment without insulting the audience's intelligence or pandering to topical concerns is a challenging goal that only a handful of today's moviemakers are wise enough to follow. Robert Frost once wrote, "Let the sound of Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement." Frost meant that as an insult, but Stevenson - and Walt Disney himself - would have felt complimented.

Treasure Planet

Voices Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brian Murray, Emma Thompson, David Hyde Pierce, Martin Short

Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker Released by Disney

Rated PG

Time 96 minutes