Best Don Bluth Film

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!

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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

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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'.