Don Bluth Leaves Disney

Disney has never been the only game in town for animation, even during the worst years of US cartooning. There’s always been something else. However, for most of the history of animation on film, Disney has been the place to aspire to. A four-year-old Mormon farmboy from El Paso can dream of working there as soon as he learns what animation even is. And then from there he can become disillusioned and go on to lead one of the most credible revolts against the studio in its history.

The problem, I think, was twofold. One is that, frankly, Disney’s animation was at a low ebb at the time. I like Robin Hood and Pete’s Dragon, but I don’t pretend they’re the high point of Disney animation. Apparently, one of Bluth’s last straws was that they didn’t want to give the main characters in The Rescuers sclera, because painting eye-whites was too expensive. There were also the persistent rumours that they were going to shut down Disney animation altogether. On Bluth’s forty-second birthday, he quit, taking a substantial number of his fellow animators with him.

The other problem is, I’m going to be honest, with Bluth himself. He quit the studios after only a few years because he found working as an in-betweener boring. Which I have no doubt it is, even on what I consider to be the studio’s most magnificent film, Sleeping Beauty. And, true, he would’ve no doubt at least taken a break from the studio to go serve a mission—funnily enough, he ended up in South America for it—but it’s clear from examining his career that he wanted to be the one running the show instead of rising through the ranks.

That said, I will absolutely go to bat for Don Bluth Studio’s first feature, The Secret of NIMH. Based on the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, it was probably the first non-Disney animated feature many of my generation saw. It wasn’t visually distinct from a lot of the Disney stuff we had been getting—well, a lot of the late ‘70s Disney animation looked rather Don Bluth-y, for some reason—but it was a more mature film. Its plot is more complex and its style is darker. It gets compared a lot, favourably, to The Black Cauldron.

Which is the first example people give of “Disney was going for Bluth,” but the timeline doesn’t work. The original Disney movie that came out the same summer as NIMH was TRON. Which he has harsh words for, but I don’t even think they were going for the same audience. NIMH is still for kids, albeit older kids than the Bambi rerelease that year, and TRON is definitely not. The Black Cauldron didn’t come out until 1985 and is clearly a response to NIMH if anything, with its own darker style.

I’ll grant there may have been funding shenanigans, because funding seems to have been one of Bluth’s real downfalls. NIMH was moderately successful—my family saw it in the theatre, even—but not enough to save the studio. Funding for East of the Sun and West of the Moon fell through. Dragon’s Lair was popular but unfortunately came at the ‘80s crash of the video game industry. Any research on Bluth from non-Bluth sources features a lot of “and then the money fell through.” Bluth blames Disney, but ironically, it’s just as easy to blame Spielberg, with whom Bluth would start working.

My younger sister about wore out our tape of An American Tail. A lot of people her age (she was born in 1980) did. And it could’ve been a profitable relationship had Bluth been a little better, reading between the lines, at working and playing well with others. I don’t want to read too much into any of this, not least because Bluth is still alive, but his Wikipedia page merely says he “ended his working relationship” with Spielberg, without details, and none of the interviews I found go into detail. But it means that Bluth had no association with Spielberg for Fievel Goes West; neither were involved in the thirteen Land Before Time sequels or the TV show.

And then Bluth’s studio began its slide from “critically acclaimed” into “my partner literally didn’t know that one of them existed.” (Me: “And then there’s A Troll in Central Park, which is a movie that exists. Him: “It is?”) I know a lot of Millennials are big fans of All Dogs Go to Heaven, a movie I have not myself seen, but asking friends in multiple Discord servers has produced no more enthusiastic results for things like Thumbelina than “I kind of remember seeing it once. I don’t think I liked it.”

Because as easy as it is to blame Disney—though it’s less easy the more you actually line up dates—the real secret is, most of Bluth’s films do not appear to have been very good. I grant you I can’t speak from first-hand experience, here, and I’m certainly not getting paid enough to sit through Rock-a-Doodle, but that’s the only one I’m even a little curious about. Which is mostly because it’s the one that seems to be literally ripping off Disney, inasmuch as it reads as similar to the Chanticleer movie that morphed into Robin Hood, on which Bluth himself worked.

What could have revived Bluth’s fortunes and didn’t is his most Disney-like film, Anastasia. Bluth himself seems fairly bitter about the idea that she’s now a Disney princess, as who can blame him, but even Roger Ebert called out Bluth’s using the Disney formula. Now, I haven’t seen this one, either, because it’s Tsarist propaganda. But it’s Bluth’s first movie since An American Tail that was both popular and critically acclaimed. It’s beloved of Millennials. There’s a bardcore cover of a song from it, the first Bluth song since “Somewhere Out There” that anyone I know knows. (The channel has covered two Disney songs, but there are a lot more Disney songs.) It’s a cultural icon.

The problem is that he followed it with Titan AE. Now, Titan AE isn’t his worst movie. And you certainly can’t blame its box office failure on Disney, which released Fantasia 2000 that summer—which itself failed at the box office. And Dinosaur, which is another one of those “at least it’s better than Wish” movies. If anything, Chicken Run was a bigger threat. Still, the teenage boys it was probably aimed at stayed away in droves, and that was it for Don Bluth’s feature directing career.

The narrative is that Disney killed Bluth. He himself tells a story of meeting Walt and being awed the way Bambi was at meeting the Great Prince of the Forest. And, yeah, I could go through and compare release dates on Bluth’s movies to Disney movies, and there’s probably a certain parallel to a few of them, almost as though there are two times of year that are most common for family movies. But you don’t even have to look up exact days. Bluth is scathing of the Disney Renaissance, and it is arguably true that at least part of it was realizing that the market was out there because Bluth was taking advantage of it and, for the first few years, doing pretty damn well.

But I who have children and love movies have seen maybe half his features, and several of them not since the ‘90s. They have just never seemed good, and they were happening at one of the high points of Disney’s animation department. Why would you see The Pebble and the Penguin when you can see . . . well, okay, that was the year of Pocahontas. But still. A Goofy Movie came out the week before, apparently. That was also the summer of the Dueling Talking Pigs Movies, and at the very least Babe would have been a better choice. Disney didn’t kill Bluth; they didn’t have to.