An American Tail

Don Bluth does well with mice. The Secret of NiMH was his breakthrough, and remains a very strong movie. But perhaps his biggest cultural hit was An American Tail – though I’d have to say there’s stiff competition from dinosaurs.

Another one I haven’t viewed for many years, as a child much of the significance of this movie went over my head. I didn’t have a clear idea of the imagery immigrants to the States expected in the late 19^th century, let alone understand a thing about Russian Jews. To a child, those nuances probably don’t matter so much. But they’re very interesting as an adult.

An American Tail does absolutely everything better than All Dogs Go to Heaven. The animation is much better, with Fievel (or Feivel, sometimes) actually being very cute, and rotoscoped/xerographed elements looking impressive without getting too jarring. The story is compelling and each episode adds to the story. The music is fantastic, especially ‘Somewhere Out There’, and whereas All Dogs Go to Heaven tries to incorporate different musical elements through patronising stereotypes, An American Tail actually pays tribute to different immigrant cultures (though some Irish people might see cause for complaint) and spices up musical numbers with traditional musical styles. It even has a message of not judging based on race despite the mice-versus-cats set-up, with Tiger being quite unlike the rest.

Where An American Tail succeeds is in its multiple narratives. There’s Fievel looking for his parents, the secret plan he sets in motion, a very simple love story on the side, and the tragicomic conceit of the family always missing seeing their son while Fievel’s sister Tanya never gives up hope. Indeed, perhaps the film’s greatest appeal is its contrasts between sadness and hope.

Bluth is also allowed to be playful. Monstrous waves are very much in his style, and he adds in many fun touches like distorting glasses and an inventive sequence with the water sloshing about in a boat.

Maybe I could have done without the final Statue of Liberty sequence, but this is in every way a strong family film and deserves to be remembered every bit as fondly as Disney’s classics.

I very much enjoyed going back to this little story – and even if Bluth is not involved, I’ll be sure to watch Fievel Goes West at some point. 

All Dogs Go to Heaven

I had very few memories of All Dogs Go to Heaven, even though I do remember it being very popular upon release – on the same day as The Little Mermaid. I’d seen it once before, but my memories of it were mixed up with Lady and the Tramp, another dog-centric animation I’ve not rewatched since childhood.

Well, I’m going through Don Bluth movies at the moment – slowly – and next on the list was All Dogs Go to Heaven, his follow-up to the smash hit The Land Before Time. Don Bluth’s weakness tends to be story execution, which is why it works so well when he’s teamed up with another director – like Spielberg. But he famously disliked having to give up control, and was clearly enjoying his freedom with this movie, introducing themes of gambling, decadence and seedy underworld dealings to a family flick. Unfortunately, a lack of strong theming or likeable characters drag the whole thing down.

The film centres on Charlie, a rakish German Shepherd voiced with aplomb by Burt Reynolds who sadly fails horribly as a central character on account of being incredibly hard to like. He’s got the typical character arc of being selfish, irresponsible and manipulative, only to find his heart of gold when push comes to shove, but that happens only in the very final act, leaving way too much of the film centred on his being an unlikeable boor. Fun interactions with Dom Deluise’s Itchy character and even an amusing first trip to the Pearly Gates don’t save the character, his design is bizarrely ugly and unmemorable, and Reynolds’ singing voice is atrocious.

So it falls to the little girl who can talk to animals, Anne-Marie, to be the emotional centre of the film. Adorable as her voice actress Judith Barsi was as Ducky in The Land Before Time and deeply saddening though the poor little girl’s story was in real life, unfortunately Anne-Marie just isn’t interesting. She’s like a pint-sized Snow White, but with even less personality. Her characterisation is bland and her animation is that weird, creepy coquettish-baby thing Disney used to do a long time ago but thankfully gave up well before the 80s.

On the other hand, the animation is the film’s saving grace. It’s often beautiful, inventive and much more experimental that what Disney were putting out at that point. There’s some very impressive work with cars, scenes of Hell and various races. It still looks impressive, though Bluth’s habit of rotoscoping humans often looks jarring here.

The story veers wildly here and there, and the performances, heavily ad-libbed, often confuse. Killer is particularly incomprehensible, and I’m fairly sure his laser gun was written as a regular gun but changed to appease censors.

The music is perhaps the worst of any animated movie I’ve seen, with most of the songs lacking any melody or hook and being delivered with way too many distractions from the on-screen action. ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Dog Down’ and ‘Let’s Make Music Together’ are the saving graces of the soundtrack, though the bubble effect put on Ken Page’s voice was a terrible addition, and his cameo role only made me want to go and watch The Nightmare Before Christmas instead.

Don Bluth was capable of great things, and this movie is well-remembered, but unfortunately it’s not even close to his best, and probably won’t hold up well in years to come. 

The Land Before Time

During a difficult time for Disney, around the same time Oliver and Company was underwhelming audiences, yet before Pixar revolutionised the animated medium, it wasn’t as though animation ground to a halt. In fact, in some ways the pre-renaissance lull in Disney’s output was a golden era for rival studios like Fox and Warner Bros. And in particular, Don Bluth was the torch-bearer of high-quality animation. And one of the most well-remembered of his movies is this one, The Land Before Time.  

It’s The Secret of NiMH that really stamped Bluth’s presence on the mainstream, and it’s probably my favourite of his works. Steven Spielberg got involved for the remarkable success of An American Tail, and George Lucas got on-board too for this, a consciously ‘Bambi-with-dinosaurs’ project that hit the right buttons for mainstream success – kids love dinosaurs, animators can make spectacular volcanic landscapes and baby dinosaurs can even fill any movie’s cuteness quota within minutes.

Rewatching The Land Before Time, it’s in many ways clumsier and less satisfying than the average Disney movie, but it does far more things right than it does wrong. The biggest success is making a core group of characters that are easily understood yet not completely flat, likeable but flawed, and easy to care about despite, well, being terrible thunder lizards. Littlefoot, Cera and the gang are still the benchmark for cute dinosaurs, far more so than those in Dinosaur or even The Good Dinosaur, even though those long eyelashes are just a little weird. The film succeeds when the kids are separated from adult influences, whereupon we largely get a series of character moments, which almost always hit the right notes. Cera being headstrong and clashing with Littlefoot while adorable little Ducky gets upset doesn’t break new ground but fleshes out its characters very neatly. Though Spike and Petrie are lesser characters than the others, Spike a mute, peaceful glutton and Petrie oddly adult in the group of small kids (a role probably meant for Bluth’s favourite Dom DeLuise, if he hadn’t been off voicing Fagin in Oliver and Company), but they fill out the group well. They also reinforce the central message of diversity – despite differences, but acknowledging different strengths and weaknesses, the little dinosaurs overcome the idea that ‘Three-horns don’t play with long-necks’ as they work together, something which I’m surprised wasn’t pushed home more at the film’s climax.

Indeed, perhaps the weakest point of the movie is its ending. Yes, a goal is reached, there are happy reunions and it comes after an exciting escape scene, but there’s no real feeling of closure. The movie poises itself well to wrap up neatly, but it just doesn’t satisfy with its abrupt ending. What do Littlefoot and Cera do after this? Does Cera’s father change? What is said of Littlefoot’s mother? How does Ducky continue her interactions with the rest?

It’s true that there are sequels to answer some of these questions – no less than 13 of the things – but I’m pretty certain their quality will not match up to the original’s, and little of the creative team’s original intentions will be apparent there. But certainly, this was a good piece of animation, and paved the way for All Dogs Go to Heaven and later Anastasia. What should be celebrated is the purity of vision of The Land Before Time, the innocence that just about avoid mawkishness and the lack of cynicism or self-conscious cleverness. It’s a simple message, delivered simply and with striking and often inventive visuals, and while there were parts that could certainly have been improved, particularly at the end, overall this was a very enjoyable, undeniably enduring piece of work. 

Anastasia

Don Bluth’s career reached its apex here. He’d left Disney after The Fox and the Hound, and scored a hit with my personal favourite of his movies, The Secret of NiMH. He’d also teamed up with Spielberg for the highly successful The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven and An American Tail. Then came Anastasia, which was a big hit and is fondly remembered by numerous people only casually interested in animation as one of their favourite Disney films. While this could have been Fox’s big entry into the world of serious, epic animation, however, Bluth blew it with bloated follow-up Titan AE. It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely a flop and Fox didn’t make another animated feature film until sure-fire cash-in The Simpsons Movie.

So in many ways Anastasia is Bluth’s masterpiece – though we shouldn’t write him off yet, as the crowd-funded Dragon’s Lair animation may yet be a big hit. It’s certainly a good animated film – grand in scale, beautiful to look at with strong narrative-driven music. It has its faults but it’s definitely up there with the best and may have the most beautiful backgrounds of any animation I’ve ever seen.

Anastasia deals with a familiar story, a kind of modern fairy tale. After the Russian revolution, Grand Duchess Anastasia is still alive, living with amnesia in a Russian orphanage. She is taken to her grandmother by men who want to defraud her, though eventually the truth shines through. Made in 1997, this film came before the remains of Alexei and either Anastasia or Maria (the other having been in the main grave) were discovered – though in no way claimed to be historically accurate, or demanded to be taken seriously. The plot is lifted in simplified form from an earlier live-action movie, so the film is not the source for the fanciful interpretation of history.

In visual terms, the film has much to recommend it, but is in places uneven. Bluth’s debt to Disney has never been so apparent, especially with squirrels that look straight out of Sword in the Stone and the cute little dog Pooka who looks a lot like Gurgi in true dog form. The facial designs are very Disney and Rasputin here owes a lot to Jafar (who of course owes a lot to Zigzag), unfortunately being just a little too comedic rather than formidable for my liking. He is a little too distant, sending minions to sabotage trains or putting visions into Anastasia’s head when she’s asleep, only appearing for a showdown at the very end and then being rather ineffectual. There’s an echo of Scar in his musical number, too, which is particularly appropriate given JimCummings provides the singing performance.

But the speaking voice comes from Christopher Lloyd, one of several actors clearly having a wonderful time here. Meg Ryan and John Cusack turn in uninteresting leading character performances, but there’s far more fun to be had with Angela Lansbury putting in a bit of class, Hank Azaria mixing a cod-Russian accent with his Chief Wiggum voice for adorable comedy sidekick Bartok the Bat, and Kelsey Grammar hamming it up as affable fat man Vlad.

The romance doesn’t sizzle, the bad guy doesn’t give any shivers down the spine and the songs don’t worm their way into the brain quite enough. The visuals are also undercut a bit by rather strange facial designs (especially Dimitri’s nose) and an overreliance on rotoscoping every time there’s a full-body shot, but these don’t drag the film down far. It’s satisfying, grandiose and rather beautiful, even if it’s not perfect and doesn’t quite have the emotional resonance to make me want to re-watch. After all, last night was the first time I sat through it again since first watching in 1998!

The Secret of NIMH

NIMH, as with An American Tail and very possibly All Dogs Go To Heaven, sits uneasily between being recognised as a classic of animation and falling into obscurity. When Don Bluth directed the successful Anastasia for Fox Animation, it looked like he would be established as the personality in Western cel-based animation, but Titan A.E. was so critically panned Fox Animation shut up shop until The Simpsons Movie, and Bluth has barely been heard of since. Meanwhile, the Disney he abandoned not only maintained their credibility by aligning themselves closely to Pixar but have started to enjoy another return to form with The Princess and the Frog and especially Tangled.

While a generation or two will think back to Anastasia or The Land Before Time and express their admiration, it’s not often you’ll see Bluth celebrated in the media these days, or retrospectives of his films run by the networks. He currently seems to be working on a game for Apple’s iOS, which doesn’t fill me with hope for his return to relevance. His association with computer games is of course rich – his Dragon’s Lair is a quirky but extremely memorable classic, even if a stronger plot and characterisation would have helped – but that was in another time altogether. I truly hope he will get a new film soon, because he ought to be a giant of animation with a few more masterworks in him yet.

The Secret of NIMH was Bluth’s first job as a director, and his first project after leaving Disney, where he had started as an animator on Sleeping Beauty before serving as an assistant director on Sword in the Stone and growing disillusioned around the time of The Fox and the Hound. After animating a short sequence for the film Xanadu, Bluth’s new studio secured funding for this film, which took Disney stylings but with a dark palate and a pleasantly melancholy approach and did fairly good business at the box office – albeit slightly disappointing, directly competing with E.T. It would be Spielberg who later collaborated with Bluth to make some of his best films, but Bluth’s various animation studios would be in and out of bankruptcy negotiations, and while celebrated, he would gain a reputation for missing deadlines and breaking budgets.

The Secret of NIMH was based on the charming book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, with a few extra touches such as the use of a magic necklace and the name change from ‘Frisby’ to ‘Brisby’ to avoid copyright claims – despite ‘Frisbee’ being based on a real name filched from a different company in the first place. It tells the story of a lovely warm-hearted mother mouse trying to get her home moved out of the path of the farmer’s plough to save her sick son, with the help of a clownish but fiercely loyal crow (the first of many performances by Dom DeLuise for Bluth). Her quest takes her to the rats of NIMH, whose intelligence has been boosted by scientific experiments and who steal electricity from the humans, and who agree to help her – but the plan is one she will have to help with, and many things can go wrong…

The film certainly looks of its time, but it is also beautiful, and while at first it seems that the magical elements don’t fit well and have been introduced to make the plot work more easily, reading the book you find out that they were really not necessary and have been added mostly for a bit more visual spectacle - though personally I feel this could have been better-accomplished with more naturalism. Still, there are high emotional points, the ending works and the characters are great.

The first step in an interesting sideline of American animation and a sweet, satisfying film, I feel that The Secret of NIMH should get the attention it always deserved, and one day will be regarded as a flawed but very likeable classic.

Awful sequel impressions here.