By Kevin Bowen

It should surprise no one that Mark Hamill has a small voice role in the new 3-D animated space saga Battle for Terra. A festival circuit veteran Hamill owes a significant debt to that classic generational touchstone Star Wars, subsequently Lucas-a-fied and renamed A New Hope.

The similarities range from the shape of the spaceships to the shape of the story. It can be found in small details such as the sound design, or the wear-and-tear on the vessels of the future; the grime of Star Wars’ spaceships was an innovation to the gleaming space-age surfaces of earlier sci-fis.

It also can be seen in the film’s binary moral dimension. The “bad” guys are militaristic space-faring humans, armed with a gigantic super-weapon, bent on invading, clearing and transforming a faraway planet. The “good” guys are the peaceful, slug-like occupants, whose homes among the skyscraping toadstools might as well be the Ewok Village.

Good animation must do more than touch our imagination, it must make us want to reach out and touch its imagination. For the first half hour, as Director Aristomenis Tsirbas’ film explores this strange sky planet and its array of beasts and attractions, Battle for Terra hits this mark successfully. However, as the bright-eyed innocent story thins out into a familiar atmosphere, it loses that touch. 

As the title states, the conflict arises over the billowy cloud world of the planet Terra. Humans have wrecked the Earth and are now hobo-ing around the universe in search of new home. The planet of our heroine, Mala, and her fellow creatures has the misfortune of possessing real water. Resembling a banana slug, or perhaps a cream-colored turtle without a shell, Mala (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood) is the alien equivalent of a teenager, a dreamer having to suppress her desires to see beyond her own world.  Not to worry: Soon she will see more than she might have wished.

Mala’s species follows a strict religious line that has kept the peace for centuries but denies its citizens knowledge. When a giant object appears in the sky and blots out the sun, they see it as the coming of a deity. After a squadron of fighter ships descends, they are met with terror but also as angels coming to take them to a different plain. When Mala’s father leaves with the captured, she befriends a downed human pilot (Luke Wilson) and his quirky robot (David Cross), that promises to help her find her father. 

What results is an adventure on the Earthling’s mammoth mother ship as they try to find the Princess… er, Mala’s father. The humans store on this ship a giant device that will “terraform” the planet, making it suitable to human life, but only after killing off the native species. Worried about the crumbling ship, a jarheaded general (Brian Cox) wants to deploy the machine on this new planet, leaving its inhabitants gasping for air.

As sci-fi goes, “Battle for Terra” falls into the category of space Western-opera, as it takes place at the intersection of rival species, features a pair of star-crossed lovers, and is heavily ray-gun-dependent. But by placing a science fiction movie in this category, we’re admitting that it is short on thematic heft.

The film does offer dark social commentary, while dealing with genocide. Unfortunately, that commentary has little to say.  Its message, that humans are capable of the greatest cruelty, is hardly a nuanced or unexplored view of humanity.  These concepts might be new to children, who may be the target audience. Thus, “Battle for Terra” might be considered a first-time primer for basic sci-fi concepts. Yet it lacks the quality of a film like Wall-E, to use an animated sci-fi example, which serves something viewers of all ages.

“Battle for Terra” was originally shot in 2-D but later upgraded to 3-D.  It is a pretty film, but in a clean, straightforward. Unlike this spring’s animated 3-D success “Coraline,” it doesn’t indulge in darkened, distorted images. This is a film of colorful shapes sweeping through endless blue sky and the deepest black of space.

The best part of “Battle for Terra” is its imagery, which carries a full plate of cleverly imagined creatures. You may also like the retro sense of mechanical design, such as the human mother ship, which resembles the inner anatomy of a clock, or the winged devices the Terrans use to fly. This is a futuristic world that still runs on fulcrums and corkscrews. Space travel might be the territory of Hawking, but “Battle for Terra” gives us the comfort of Newton.

If only “Battle for Terra” could defy that pesky law of gravity, but like other films, it starts in the sky only to end up disappointed on the ground.