20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954 film) financial risk to the studio should it flop. Upon the film's original release, "The New York Times" film critic Bosley Crowther gave it a generally positive review by stating that, "As fabulous and fantastic as anything he has ever done in cartoons is Walt Disney's "live action" movie made from Jules Verne's '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.' Turned out in CinemaScope and color, it is as broad, fictitiously, as it is long (128 minutes), and should prove a sensation—at least with the kids." In his 1967 biography "The Disney Version", the critic, Richard Schickel, stated that James Mason was "superbly
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea errors, sometimes dramatically changing the meaning of Verne's original intent (including uniformly mistranslating French "scaphandre" — properly "diving apparatus" — as "cork-jacket", following a long-obsolete meaning as "a type of lifejacket"). Some of these mistranslations have been done for political reasons, such as Nemo's identity and the nationality of the two warships he sinks, or the portraits of freedom fighters on the wall of his cabin which originally included Daniel O'Connell. Nonetheless, it became the standard English translation for more than a hundred years, while other translations continued to draw from it and its mistakes (especially the mistranslation of the