Don Bluth and Universal Amblimation

The Common Room Other Animation
#1

Here’s an effort to sort out the intertwined history of Don Bluth on film (minus the video games), Amblimation, and Universal Cartoon/Animation Studios. Any amplifying (or corrective) comments from anyone who has seen and enjoyed these are most welcome.

[b]Don Bluth /b

Banjo the Woodpile Cat (short)
“Dont Walk Away” animated segment from Xanadu (youtube.com/watch?v=q6IaURfFpLQ)
The Secret of NIMH

[b]Sullivan Bluth Studios/Don Bluth Entertainment /b

An American Tail (Amblin Entertainment and Universal)
The Land Before Time (Amblin Entertainment, Lucasfilm, and Universal)
All Dogs Go to Heaven
Rock-a-Doodle
Thumbelina
A Troll In Central Park
The Pebble and the Penguin

[b]Amblimation /b [some staff moved to DreamWorks Animation after Amblimation shut down]

An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (Universal)
We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (Universal)
Balto (Universal)

[b]Bluth at Fox Animation Studios /b

Anastasia
Bartok the Magnificent
Titan A.E.

[b]Universal Cartoon Studios /b

sequels to The Land Before Time, An American Tail, and Balto

Universal Animation Studios (2006-10)

Curious George films and sequels to The Land Before Time

One interesting element is how there’s a sense of “Disney grudge” here that might have fed into the whole DreamWorks thing. Another thing that pops up on the Internet is how many viewers mistake Richard Rich for Don Bluth, especially regarding The Swan Princess and Thumbelina. Perhaps that’s understandable because Bluth and Rich (as well as Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy) worked together on the Disney short The Small One before they all got out of Mouse City. Anyway, for completeness’ sake, here are the features by Rich, NOT Bluth, from 1994-2004:

The Swan Princess (and its two sequels)
The King and I
The Scarecrow
The Trumpet of the Swan
Muhammad: The Last Prophet

#2

You had me at Don Bluth!
I love his stuff so much! I have VHS copy of Banjo the Woodpile cat. It’s on youtube all well. Very cute but slightly racisit. There are two cats who are potrayed to be african americans and you can tell by their big lips. Its a cute little short thou.

We have the world’s largest arcade here that has copies of his video game works, including the posters that I wanna steal so bad!
I wish he would still make movies, in his style and imagination.
He did’nt care if something may scare a kid, I mean heck, look at All Dogs! It had death, booze, smoking, gambling, hell, you name it!
I collect his movies, old VHS copies to be exact.
His movies are worth seeing…no matter how odd they may seem. eyes Troll in Central Park

#3

Zenoah: Of Bluth’s films I’ve only seen Thumbelina and Bartok, but I’ve long had The Secret of NIMH on the “to watch” list. Thumbelina certainly is odd, perhaps due to the rotoscoping. Assuming Bluth wanted to capture the magic of old-school Disney, he did a pretty credible job:

youtube.com/watch?v=C9dud8gFRT8

Here’s an interesting article from 1982 that not only mentions Bluth’s unmade “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” but also has time-capsule-ish mention of some guys named John Lasseter and Glenn Keane (whozzat?):

query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.h … gewanted=3

Interesting that Bluth included darker elements like “death, booze, smoking, gambling” but apparently is a member of the Church of LDS. And he’s not the only one–Richard “Swan Princess” Rich is also mentioned in the following link, as is Mark Swan, who worked at Disney and with Bluth, then made his own “princess” feature, The Princess and The Pea:

ldsfilm.com/misc/lds_anime.html

But it’s like these guys, especially Bluth, were trying to recreate Disney magic but were also trying to be not-Disney…or maybe that’s reading too much into it. Funny how swans keep popping up among these guys, though.

#4

You have’nt seen NIMH!?

My dear fellow you MUST!
Dont go for the DVD, they take away from the nostalgia the VHS’s bring.
I have a copy I can lend you, or check a local thrift store.

#5

I’m not a Don Bluth fan, but I appereciate what he’s contributed to animation.

#6

Fievel Goes West was one of my favorite animated films in the 90’s. I actually remember liking it more than Don Bluth’s original film cause I thought the first one was kind of depressing, while Fievel Goes West was more lighthearted and fun (plus it had this ongoing gag of Tiger being harassed by dogs). And who didn’t think that this was a beautiful song:

[url]Linda Ronstadt: Dreams to Dream - YouTube

I was also impressed by the animation quality that Amblimation put into the sequel. It would have been interesting to see what things would have been like if Steven Spielberg’s animation studio hadn’t faded out of existence. Even though they only made three films they seemed to show an awful lot of potential, but their lifespan was just cut tragically short.

As for Don Bluth, about all I can say is that he was a great animator himself. I have seen a lot of his films as a kid like Rock-a-Doodle, A Troll In Central Park, and Anastasia but I just never seem to remember connecting to them that well. The only ones I can really think of connecting to the most were The Land Before Time (though all those sequels may have contributed to that when I was too young to understand the difference in quality) and An American Tail (and again, Fievel Goes West may have helped also). But I think if I were watching one of his films now it would be a bit different.

#7

I know what you mean about nostalgia. The vast majority of the home collection, especially animation, is on VHS. Disney features in white clamshells, hooray! The main driver for format would be content–in other words, is there an original, unedited version of NIMH that is only available on VHS? Right now, NIMH on DVD for $4 with Free Super Saver Shipping from Amazon seems a no-brainer.

It could be that the answer to the Spielberg animation “what if?” is a hypothetical DreamWorks minus Katzenberg.

One curiosity is what went into Amblimation’s decision to do We’re Back! while Universal Cartoon Studios did Land Before Time sequels. Maybe Spielberg wanted dinos to parallel the Jurassic Park effort? Also, was any dino animation in We’re Back! recycled from Bluth’s original film?

#8

I really loved Anastasia, Feivel Goes west, and the original Land Before Time when I was little. That’s all I have to say, though.

#9

Which I’m sure some people here would consider “DreamWorks for the better”, but I’m not one to say.

I read that the development for both We’re Back! and Fievel Goes West started in 1989 (one of their projects was even a musical adaptation of Cats, which they never got to complete cause of the studio shutting down). I did think that the ferocious carnivore version of Rex at the very beginning looked remarkably like something out of The Land Before Time, like a relative of Sharptooth or something. For Don Bluth not having any part in any of the Amblimation films, that particular scene seemed to be trying to look somewhat faithful to his style of animation.

And I just have to say that the one surprising thing I learned about that movie was that the small alien guy’s voice was Jay Leno on helium. I never would have guessed.

#10

That’s interesting. So looking at the chronology, Bluth/Spielberg had a November '88 release of The Land Before Time that did well, then they somehow parted ways, with Spielberg/Amblimation developing ideas for more dinosaurs and more Fievel in '89. It’s always strange when creative folks get together, find common ground, then figure out a basis for parting ways. Oh, well. But it does seem like maybe Bluth moved onward from work he had already done while Amblimation reworked the known successful concepts.

Well, it’s fun to dig around for facts and let the speculations slosh around. For example, was Mark Dindal anywhere near Amblimation’s Cats idea in a way that led to Cats Don’t Dance? Looking back the other way down the timeline, Dindal would have been around at least Richard Rich, and maybe Bluth, during work on The Fox and the Hound. It’s too bad that more researchable articles aren’t around from the pre-Internet days. These folks are all so intertwined!

#11

The Cats that I mentioned was the famous musical [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(musical)[/url], and Cats Don’t Dance was supposed to be based on stray cats that would be outside the studio backlots of Warner Bros. in the old days, so no.

And mostly the reason that people split up from partnerships in the entertainment world is because they get to a point over time where they have conflicting viewpoints in their creative ideas and one of them is no longer happy working with the other, so they take their work elsewhere. Aardman and DreamWorks is one example, but I know there are probably many others I could list if I took the time to think of them all.

#12

Flik-E: Roger that, I was wondering if the 1939 setting of Cats Don’t Dance was a nod to the 1939 publication of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, especially Gus the Theater Cat, which apparently figures into the Cats musical (never saw it, only Wiki’ed it). Sometimes one idea leads to another and an initial concept morphs into something else, but a kernel of commonality remains…e.g., theatrical cats. And David Kirschner is yet another link between An American Tail and Cats Don’t Dance.

On another note, it’s a fair guess that Spielberg was a driving force behind the formation of Universal Cartoon Studios, assuming Back to the Future: The Animated Series kicked off that studio. Here’s a link that might hold some clues:

closinglogos.com/page/Univer … on+Studios

So it’s possible that Amblimation started to wind down after We’re Back! fared poorly, and Universal Cartoon Studios became the custodian of all the Fievel and Land Before Time sequels. That’s a lot of mileage out of two Bluth films.