TREASURE PLANET [ 1/2]

Better than OK, but no “Spirited Away.” Running time: 95 minutes. Rated PG (cartoon violence and peril). In IMAX and regular format. At the Lincoln Square IMAX, the Empire, the Village East, others.

——

‘TREASURE Planet,” Disney’s disappointing sci-fi update of the R.L. Stevenson classic, turns Jim Hawkins into a space-surfing juvenile offender and Long John Silver into a robot-armed cyborg.

The animation is also a hybrid: almost quaint-looking, traditionally animated characters plopped into elaborate, sometimes quite stunning computer-animated backgrounds.

And the script is torn between fidelity to “Treasure Island” and devotion to well-worn sci-fi clichés (beginning with the opening shot of a looming spacecraft filling the screen) that will seem fresh only to the very youngest audience members – all accompanied by a booming “Titanic”-meets-“Star Wars” score by James Newton Howard.

Troubled 15-year-old Jim, voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt of TV’s “Third Rock From the Sun,” is given a sphere containing the map to Treasure Planet by a dying buccaneer after pirates burn down the boy’s mother’s inn.

Jim and a canine family friend, the bumbling Professor Doppler (David Hyde-Pierce), book passage on a space frigate helmed by the feline Captain Amelia (Emma Thompson), a sexy puss in thigh-high boots.

Jim is befriended by the ship’s cook, the rascally Long John Silver (stage actor Brian Murray), who now has a shape-shifting pet named Morph instead of a parrot.

Silver secretly wants the treasure for himself, but ends up serving as a father figure for Jim, who was abandoned by his real father.

Their relationship, which is straight from Stevenson, is the best part of the cartoon.

Less felicitous is a contrived romance between Doppler and Amelia – Hyde-Pierce and Thompson don’t have much to work with – and a nattering C3PO clone named BEN (Martin Short) whose shtick, while sometimes hilarious, distracts from the action-filled climax.

“Treasure Planet” – the first feature being released simultaneously in IMAX and standard format – will please kids, but it’s light years behind the sophistication of writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements’ “Aladdin” or “The Little Mermaid,” and far less adult-friendly than two other animated films Disney has released this year, the sublimely crafted “Spirited Away” and the far fresher “Lilo and Stitch.”