Yes it IS another movie post! No I do not have any film history credentials, but I can access Wikipedia and IMDB! Trivia fun for all!
Normally, I wouldn't make myself the spokesperson for a large group of people, but I've decided that animated films of the 80s and 90s can be considered my specialty because (a) my exhaustive and totally scientific research involving asking several friends and students whether they've seen this or that tends to produce affirmative responses and (b) when I consulted Professor Wikipedia for the major children's film releases from this era, I discovered that I own or have seen the vast majority of them. Yes. I am the Gen Y Cartoon Movie Whisperer. Children growing up in a certain period of time, which I'm going to assume ranges from a bit older than me to several years younger than me, have vivid memories of a set of popular animated features, some of which represented the pinnacle of the art for that period of time and some of which were, frankly, mediocre. For one studio in particular, the late 80s was an endless stream of stupid fluff films based on characters that originated in other media, i.e. Television Show: The Movie and Popular Toy: The Movie. But there were two others whose contributions tended to outweigh the other studios - one giant with decades of business behind it, and one maverick studio whose run was brief, but memorable. And if it weren't for a falling-out between the Big Corporation and the Man With A Dream, some of the best animated features from that era might never have happened.
Don Bluth is a native Texan with a certain flair for the creative. After high school, he took his artistic talent to That Giant Studio With The Rodent and got an on-again, off-again gig. He did other projects, including some live theatre, before choosing to commit to the animation game for good. He took up residence at the House of Mouse in 1971 and contributed to such works as Robin Hood and The Rescuers, but found that this work didn't completely satisfy his artistic leanings. So he started moonlighting with two other animators in El Raton's employ, working on this and that little project of their own.
The record gets a little fuzzy here...one source skips this next part entirely, but all the others agree that it occurred. Apparently, Bluth was becoming disenchanted with the Enchanters-In-Chief and thought that the quality of their work was not up to par with their past efforts. There were even rumors that the unit was going to be discontinued altogether. And a cursory glance at the animation division's output over the early 80s - chiefly the fact that there practically was none - seems to confirm that at very least, they had lost steam. So Bluth and his buddies cut ties and started doing their own movies, starting in 1982 with an adaptation of the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. called The Secret of NIMH. It was produced on a tiny budget, but was also modestly successful and critically acclaimed. They then set their sights on video games for a few years, which I imagine set the Happiest Company on Earth at ease. After all, why should a huge production company with so many successes worry about one little rogue studio? But then, Bluth got himself a little collaboration which probably made them nervous, and with good reason...
Bluth had teamed up with Steven Spielberg.
Their first joint venture was a little piece called An American Tail (1986). And its box office numbers edged into Mr. Mouse's territory. And their second work, The Land Before Time (1988) did even better. Suddenly, the company that practically invented the feature-length animated piece had some competition. Although none of my sources say this overtly, I think it's a pretty telling that up until then, House of Mouse's 80s offerings had been lesser fare, such as The Fox and The Hound (1981) and The Great Mouse Detective (1986). By the time 1988 rolled around, you could tell they were starting to up their game with the release of Oliver and Company. Perhaps unfortunately, Bluth broke his collaboration with Spielberg and in 1989, it became pretty clear who was going to win this little Battle of the Cartoons. In this year, Bluth released All Dogs Go To Heaven. Not a bad film, certainly had a unique story and artistic merit of its own, but The Rodent's release from that year...
...was The Little Mermaid. Game over.
Small aside regarding House of Mouse's 80s output - Check out The Brave Little Toaster (1987) and note the clever and unusual use of anthropomorphic objects, particularly where they situate faces on different appliances. Turns out that several of the folks who worked on this one later co-founded Pixar. So we likely have this little gem to thank for some of the later Mouse-Pixar anthropomorphic gems like Toy Story and Cars!
For the next 8 years, Bluth's film offerings were unsuccessful, although I personally liked some of them. Rock-a-Doodle (1991), Thumbelina (1994), A Troll in Central Park (1994) and The Pebble and The Penguin (1995) suffered from a 1990 downsizing of the studio and from lack of funding and marketing in general. Especially in the case of Penguin, it's obvious they had to cut corners. El Raton's Company, on the other hand, spent much of this decade producing major blockbusters such as Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame... In 1997, Bluth had one more hit with Anastasia, but since then has pretty much been doing small animation work and video games.
Even though his run was short, I think Wikipedia is probably not lying to me when it says that we can all thank Don Bluth for lighting a fire under the Little Black Rat's hiney and inspiring them to make some of the best films in their collection. If nothing else, he helped produce a catalogue of films that broadened our aesthetic experience at the movies. There were two big elements of the Bluth films that really set them apart from the other studios: the specific style and look of the animation and the generally darker, more mature content.
First to The Look! The characters and other moving parts of the foreground are solidly outlined and solidly colored in, as though you were watching a moving coloring book. The backgrounds, on the other hand, are gorgeous - they are often highly detailed in the active parts of the scene, with rich colors and subtle gradations in the shading, but murky and ethereal around the edges. One downside to this method occurs when a background element becomes part of the action within a scene, meaning that this one element of the background sticks out like a sore thumb because it's drawn in the same outlines-and-solids style of the characters, yet it's nestled among all of these beautiful and subtly painted background objects. For example, have a look at the climactic fight from The Pebble and the Penguin (you'll need to jump to about 7:35 to see what I'm talking about):
When it cuts to the top of the staircase, can you tell which stair is going to be broken? Of COURSE you can.
This look, love it or hate it, is vintage Bluth. By the time Anastasia was born, he had learned some lessons, most especially the one that says it's generally good for your background paintings and your foreground characters and props to resemble each other, rather than looking as though the characters are borrowing the set from their rich friends. Fortunately, when you're a child, you don't care.
Quick aside for the saddest trivia of all time. There's a darling little actress who appeared as Ducky in The Land Before Time and as Anne-Marie in All Dogs. Go read her Wikipedia article and then have a look at the next paragraph and marvel at the possibility that life imitates art.
And Then There's Content. Don Bluth had a certain philosophy about animated films: kids can handle just about any sort of turmoil for the protagonist, as long as there's a happy ending. As a result, the Bluth films tend to be emotionally dark and gritty when compared to FairyTales-R-Us. And in looking back, it's astounding how much of the darkness either didn't really bug me or bypassed me entirely. For example, as a little child watching An American Tail, did you catch the parallels between the Mousekewitz family being beseiged and Russian Anti-Semitic pogroms of the same time period? Because I sure didn't. Did it bother you to watch Anne-Marie get exploited and Charlie have a nightmare about Hell in between dying twice in All Dogs Go To Heaven? Because I don't remember it bothering me. Did seeing Littlefoot's parents die in The Land Before Time traumatize you for life? I don't think it even traumatized me for the length of the good-bye scene. But within those three movies alone, there's a laundry list of events that a lot of parents would blanch at: Anti-Semitism, imminent physical danger from vicious predators, multiple deaths (one of which issues from murder), illicit gambling, exploitation of a child/orphan, vivid depictions of Heaven, Hell and the afterlife. Taking Rock-a-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park and Anastasia into account adds natural disaster, binge drinking, suggestive apparel, kidnapping, imprisonment, massacre and occultic magic. Most children's films carry some form of the Great Moral Of Life: Sometimes Things Will Suck, But You Can Overcome Them. It just so happened that in the Bluth catalogue, things tended to suck a little worse.
One of my earliest memories of life altogether comes from when I was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, living in a tiny house with my mom and then-stepfather. I hadn't quite gotten the hang of reading yet, so Mom was reading aloud the opening credits of The Land Before Time for me. (I guess I got curious!) I distinctly remember her saying the name "Don Bluth" and seeing those particular letters on the screen and making the connection that these here funny shapes represent that funny name. I remember making the connection when watching An American Tail and All Dogs, seeing the commonality of animation style and recognizing the name "Don Bluth" in their credits. But I don't remember thinking his films were bummers in particular. They were just movies I loved and watched constantly alongside House of Mouse's more popular counterparts. As the length of this post demonstrates, I really enjoy going back as an adult and looking at the story behind the story. It's really cool to me that the movies I loved to watch between birth and age 12 or so had so much to do with spurring each other along. My memory contains a whole fun repertoire of songs, lines and stories, all because one animator became unhappy with his job.
Kinda cool, huh?
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