Best Don Bluth Film

my kids were watching anastasia for the first time today and that film is insane. it's about an undead rasputin trying to murder a woman w/ amnesia who may be anastasia. rasputin's curse is the direct cause of the russian revolution. then, these two con artists decide to present her to her grandmother as the surviving anastasia so they teach her all these intricate details about palace life so she can pass - when it would've been much easier to be like, "hey look this woman look like a romanov, we found her in an orphanage, she is the same age anastasia would've been and oh yeah she has this necklace that we're pretty sure belongs to your family."

of the above i think i rate them

an american tail (of course) > secret of nimh > all dogs go to heaven > land before time > rock-a-doodle > anastasia - i've never seen titan a.e. but at the time i got a bunch of titan a.e. stickers from a supermarket vending machine and put them on my locker bc i thought they looked cool.

I remember a line four blocks long for Anastasia in 1997. I couldn't get in. Don't remember if I ever actually saw it.

I remember The Secret of NIMH scaring me and An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven bumming me out. I don't know if I ever saw Pete's Dragon or not. Don't know the others.

An American Tail

I loved Pete's Dragon as a kid, that dragon was v lovable

Weird, weird body of work -- but to his credit, he's just all over the place enough.

The thread of sentimentalism that does thread through his work can be a bit wearying on the whole, but it is almost an alternate timeline for Disney if Disney himself had still been around. The early 80s gamer that is me would have to vote for those two -- inspired choice to include them both! -- but really, Secret of NIMH has so long been a favorite of mine that I can't pick anything else. It's not the book but it's a great riff on it in any event.

Titan AE I suppose I'll finally have to see one day.

American Tail is p unfuckwithable imo

i had always thought he made ferngully but it turns out that was only don bluthesque

Yeah I admit I was looking for Ferngully on there! Urban legend or something.

Remembrances of NIMH still terrify me to this day. I voted out of fear, like a good Republican.

American Tail is good but I reviewed the plot summary on Wikipedia and I clearly forgot 80-90% of that movie

sort of has to be NIMH or An American Tail. haven't watched the latter since theaters tho, I should finally revisit for this poll!

Titan AE was a blast but I was drunk at the time. One of those movies that I hesitate to watch sober for fear of finding it crap.

american tail and land before time were such a huge part of my childhood it's really hard to judge them objectively -- even at the time they seemed way bigger and more beautiful and scary than any disney films i'd seen. i even had a fievel talking stuffed toy (similar to teddy ruxpin) who recited the entire story of the film. and pretty much every line of dialogue of land before time is burned into my memory forever. in retrospect they're both pretty traumatic films, just scene after scene of young children getting separated from their parents/friends and falling into the ocean or nearly getting burned up by lava or something. secret of nimh is even scarier of course, but didn't see that till much later. think the last one of these i ever saw was rock-a-doodle, what a strange film that was.

ferngully rules

Was Rock-a-Doodle good at all? The 80's were his best years. Went with NIMH.

my favorite misheard line is from American Tail.

My little brother was obsessed with the movie from about age 4 and watched the video pretty much every day. When Tony is walking through the streeets looking for Fieval and calling "FILLY MOUSEKEWITZ!" "FILLY MOUSEKEWITZ" my little brother thought he was saying "SILLY MONSTER WORDS!" "SILLY MONSTER WORDS!" and would say it back to the tv

became a family joke for a long time afterwards

Saw all dogs go to heaven last year as a "this was great when I was your age" with my niece

It was really, really bad :(

i had always thought he made ferngully but it turns out that was only don bluthesque

― Mordy, Thursday, August 10, 2017 11:56 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

same, but "we're back" (not that i'd vote it, that was a "my little sister plays this every day and i hate it now" movie). also, pagemaster

all dogs has THE most insane plot for a children's movie

This Siskel & Ebert review of An American Tail is all time (wait for Gene's zinger at the very end):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXbQDC61jrI

lolll

love this guy, even though nothing he did was really 100% classic. But he was v unusual and odd and kind of daring and a key part of my childhood. I remember being completely fascinated by Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, just sooooo different from any other video game up to that point. The idea that you could play a game that looked like an awesome cartoon and had an actual story and visual jokes was just mind-blowing.

And Pete's Dragon - which I re-watched recently w my dad and my kids - is so bizarre. Central California coast subbed in for New England, absurdly non-stop comedy drunkenness, a weird feminist subtext, child-slavery. V v strange for a Disney film. Kind of have to vote for it even though American Tail is probably better.

Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and the Land Before Time are pretty unimpeachable. I was the perfect age for those three to have maximum impact. I saw American Tail and Land Before Time in the theater and those are some of my best childhood memories. Very difficult choice for me.

NIMH was a big childhood fave of mine, up there with Watership Down for having parts that actually felt menacing.

Weren't The Land Before Time and Oliver and Company released almost simultaneously, and thus sort of positioned as rivals at the box office (this being the time before movie theatres were flooded with animated films, as they are now)? It would explain why, despite it coming out during the period where my parents still took us to basically every family film that was released, I never saw it (and I did see O&C). Was Disney at all bitter about Bluth jumping ship and becoming their main animation rival at the time, and deliberately releasing their event film alongside Bluth's?

You're right -- same date in 1988.

hard to imagine that there wasn't loads of bad blood there

There's a small chunk of Non Disney animated films of the 90s that I probably would have mistaken for Don Bluth films if I didn't know better, like Fern Gully, We're Back!, Swan Princess, and The Pagemaster.

The Pebble and the Penguin (1995)

I think we rented this once and something about it burned its way into my conscience in a way that I still think about it now and again. Apart from that Land Before Time was always a fave.

30 years on, American Tail remains one of the few non-WWII movies with Jewish lead characters I can recall. (Meet the Fockers? Fievel Goes West?)

Also, I won tickets on a LBC Radio phone-in to see the All Dogs Go To Heaven premiere in Leicester Square, which literally seemed like the first ever good thing that had happened in my life at the point. Princess Margaret was there but Dom DeLuise wasn't so :/

30 years on, American Tail remains one of the few non-WWII movies with Jewish lead characters I can recall

I don't think yr trying very hard. Off the top of my head: A Serious Man, Kissing Jessica Stein, the majority of Woody Allen's films, Bugsy, Sex in the City, the Hebrew Hammer, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Then She Found Me, Funny People, the Big Lebowski (lol convert), The Passion of the Christ (more lolz), Casino, Pi, American Pie, Drive, Liberty Heights etc etc

maybe the only movie about the pre-war immigration of Jews from the pale? (avalon is sorta *about* it but not in the same kind of direct way)

But how does Meet The Fockers fit into that?

Mordy closer to the mark, I think

i've never seen this so i don't know if it actually shows the old country, the actual immigration and america or is like avalon and takes place post-immigration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hester_Street_(film)

Rocka dooooooooooooooooooooooodle

I was thinking about movies where all the main characters are Jewish. (Should've said, not counting Woody Allen, obvs.) But yeah, duh Levinson and Serious Man. Maybe there should be sons kinda Bechdel test: not comics, not gangsters, not New Yorkers.

xp btw i have a very soft spot for rockadoodle in my heart highly underrated

saw it in the theatre and taped it off HBO as a kid

movies where all the main characters belong to a single identifiable ethnicity are pretty rare. there's the black film market - Tyler Perry etc. - and that's about it.

xp

My amstrad 128 conversion of "escape from singe's castle" was pretty boss iirc

voted "Dragon's Lair" cos my memories of seeing that in the arcades as a kid and being like, what the heck kid of game is that? and then this rad super fluid animation - not that Hannah Barbera crap - of dark and comedic fantasy. so lovely!

https://media.giphy.com/media/sRxHidrKvhoQw/giphy.gif

i have great memories of many of these movies. i need to go and rewatch them. there's just not enough time to watch all the great things.

kind of game

https://media.giphy.com/media/eK6eviEijLLwc/giphy.gif

https://media.giphy.com/media/9TJUjZYOV1OTu/giphy.gif

https://media.giphy.com/media/kzYFrivlCC4vu/giphy.gif

I get to play Dragon's Lair and Space Ace about once a year and tbh I never get any better but if I'm lucky there will be some super-nerds who can get through the whole game and that's always fun to watch

people's usual complaint is that these games were impossible/too hard/money-eaters - which is totally true - but man look at that design work

Well one thing's for sure, he knew his audience at the time -- 13 year old dorky straight dudes who might have seen a Playboy once. (Hi.)

yes Daphne was a mega babe

Weren't The Land Before Time and Oliver and Company released almost simultaneously

Interesting since I def remember seeing both Land Before Time and All Dogs Go To Heaven on the Disney Channel around 1990/1991.

kinda sad to me that this guy has not directed a movie in almost two decades.

I've been buying that fantastic They Drew How They Pleased book series which features preparatory artwork by major Disney animators. It'll be interesting to see if they include Bluth once they get to his era, given that he apparently gutted the animator pool when he left to form his own thing.

All Dogs Go to Heaven was surprisingly dark for a kid's movie

"The Small One" has good animation but is super slow and has a groaner of an ending -- the donkey ends up being bought by mary and joseph.

Jesus

Secret of Nimh was great, and by far the most memorable to me, so I chose that. I know it was based on a book (Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh) but it's still quite an outlier in terms of children's entertainment in that it is an adventure told from the pov of an "average" mother. And she does not break mom form to become a more typical hero either. She has to be brave and courageous, but does not use might, she's scared at times, and is gentle and nurturing, even to a stranger (Jeremy the bird). I suppose the argument could be made that a naive, suddenly widowed wife is not such a different plot device from the typical Disney orphaned child thrust into adversity, still, it seems different and good.

Secret of Nimh was great, and by far the most memorable to me, so I chose that. I know it was based on a book (Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh) but it's still quite an outlier in terms of children's entertainment in that it is an adventure told from the pov of an "average" mother. And she does not break mom form to become a more typical hero either. She has to be brave and courageous, but does not use might, she's scared at times, and is gentle and nurturing, even to a stranger (Jeremy the bird). I suppose the argument could be made that a naive, suddenly widowed wife is not such a different plot device from the typical Disney orphaned child thrust into adversity, still, it seems different and good.

love this guy, even though nothing he did was really 100% classic.

Nimh was the only one of the films that I saw as a kid, and I loved it.

Dragon's Lair completely blew my mind when it came out. Had no idea of the Blyth connection before now.

*Bluth

I co-designed a series of Don Bluth art books back in 2002 - 2005 at Dark Horse Comics:

https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/12-662/Don-Bluths-The-Art-of-Animation-Drawing
https://www.darkhorse.com/Books/12-664/Don-Bluths-The-Art-of-Storyboard

Anyway, as much as I love these movies, I voted for Dragon's Lair which totally ruled my world in 1983.

American Tale, NIMH, All Dogs, and Land Before Time (which I can't disassociate with Pizza Hut, they had a promotion) were in heavy VHS rotation as a kid. Haven't seen any in years, but NIMH is the one that has stuck with me the most.

I spent a dollar on the Dragon's Lair game once in an arcade and died immediately because I didn't know how the hell it worked and it ruined my day.

as much as i 'should' vote for space ace because it occupies the most of my brain, fuck that game forever for the nightmares it gave me

haha wait waht

ah BORF IS HERE!

"I'll save you Kimmmmeeeeeeeeee"

I remember only the line "There's Borf's ship! AHHHHHHHH" which I heard about a dozen times trying to play a PC or CD-i port of it at a store in the 90s. Whatever thing you had to do right after that, I couldn't do, so it was back to that line, ad infinitum.

haha I can get a little farther than that but I generally die when the green warthog things start chasing you

Some bits not included in these movies.

Jawbreaker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uUMPoynRc
A short piece he did to try to get funding for a TV series. http://dragonslairthemovie.com/jawbreaker-story/

Don't Walk Away
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQUIF-3hl84
Animation added to Xanadu in post-production. Bluth felt like he got away with murder on this one, since it had nothing to do with the movie. http://dragonslairthemovie.com/xanadu-dont-walk-away/

Mary
https://vimeo.com/15509751
Scissor Sisters liked his bit in Xanadu and got him to do this. Animation starts around 2:05.

Write-in vote for "Mary."

saw a trailer for ROCK-A-DOODLE before a screening of WIZARDS last night. that movie still looks pretty awful

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All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989) 0

otm

I don't think yr trying very hard. Off the top of my head: A Serious Man, Kissing Jessica Stein, the majority of Woody Allen's films, Bugsy, Sex in the City, the Hebrew Hammer, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Then She Found Me, Funny People, the Big Lebowski (lol convert), The Passion of the Christ (more lolz), Casino, Pi, American Pie, Drive, Liberty Heights etc etc

Doesn't Levenson's Avalon count?

See mordy's post

I feel like Titan AE could have been a lot better if the main human characters were animated with different aesthetics - something is just off.

An American Tail was robbed

Wow, Rock A Doodle sounds really fucking weird.

Rock-a-Doodle is really fucking bad, iirc. Like, when I was fourteen and took my four-year-old sister to see it and neither one of us had well-developed critical faculties, we were both kinda like 'this sucks, yo'.