20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954 film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954 film) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a 1954 American Technicolor adventure film and the first science fiction film shot in CinemaScope. The film was personally produced by Walt Disney through Walt Disney Productions, directed by Richard Fleischer, and stars Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre. It was also the first feature-length Disney film to be distributed by Buena Vista Distribution. The film is adapted from Jules Verne's 19th-century novel "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". It is considered an early precursor of the steampunk genre. The film was a critical
Science fiction accuracy, especially "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (1870) which predicted the modern nuclear submarine. In 1887 the novel "El anacronópete" by Spanish author Enrique Gaspar y Rimbau introduced the first time machine. Many critics consider H. G. Wells one of science fiction's most important authors, or even "the Shakespeare of science fiction”. His most notable science fiction works include "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (1896), "The Invisible Man" (1897), and "The War of the Worlds" (1898). His science fiction imagined time travel, alien invasion, invisibility, and biological engineering. In his non-fiction futurologist works he predicted