Don Bluth

Don Bluth
Donald Virgil Bluth (born September 13, 1937) is an American filmmaker and animator. He is best known for directing the animated films The Secret of NIMH (1982), An American Tail (1986), The Land Before Time (1988), All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), Anastasia (1997), and Titan A.E. (2000), for his involvement in the LaserDisc game Dragon's Lair (1983), and for competing with former employer Walt Disney Productions during the years leading up to the films that became the Disney Renaissance. He is the older brother of illustrator Toby Bluth.
Early life and Disney years
Bluth was born in El Paso, Texas, to Emaline (née Pratt) and Virgil Roneal Bluth. His maternal grandfather was Rey Pratt from the Pratt family, whose own father Helaman Pratt was an early leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as a grandfather of George W. Romney and great-grandfather of Mitt Romney. He is of Swedish, English, Irish, Scottish, and German descent.
As a child in El Paso, he rode his horse to the town movie theater to watch Disney films. Bluth later said, "then I'd go home and copy every Disney comic book I could find". At the age of six, his family moved to Payson, Utah, where he lived on a family farm. Bluth has stated that he and his siblings do not communicate with each other as adults. In 1954, his family moved to Santa Monica, California. There, Bluth attended Brigham Young University in Utah for one year. Afterwards, in 1955, he was hired by Walt Disney Productions as an assistant to John Lounsbery for Sleeping Beauty (1959). In 1957, Bluth left Disney, recalling he found the work to be "kind of boring". For two and a half years, Bluth resided in Argentina on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He returned to the United States where he opened a local theater in Culver City, producing musicals such as The Music Man and The Sound of Music.
Bluth returned to college and earned a degree in English literature from Brigham Young University. In 1964, Bluth illustrated Affairs of the Harp, a harp maintenance manual by Samuel O Pratt, with dozens of anthropomorphic cartoon harp characters he called "Harpoons". In 1967, Bluth returned to the animation industry, and joined Filmation working on layouts for The Archie Show and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. In 1971, he returned full-time to Disney as an animation trainee. His first project was Robin Hood (1973), in which he animated sequences of Robin Hood stealing gold from Prince John, rescuing a rabbit infant, and romancing Maid Marian near a waterfall. For Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too (1974), he animated Rabbit alongside John Lounsbery. During production on The Rescuers (1977), Bluth was promoted to directing animator alongside the remaining members of Disney's Nine Old Men. He then worked as an animation director on Pete's Dragon (1977). His last involvement with Disney was the 1978 short The Small One. Meanwhile, he produced his first independent film, Banjo the Woodpile Cat.
Independent years
1981–1985: Early critical success
For The Fox and the Hound (1981), Bluth animated several scenes of the character Widow Tweed. During production, creative differences between Bluth and studio executives had arisen concerning artistic control and animation training practices. On his 42nd birthday in 1979, Bluth resigned from the studio to establish his own animation studio, Don Bluth Productions, along with Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy, and nine fellow Disney animators. To this end, Don Bluth Productions demonstrated its ability in its first production, a short film titled Banjo the Woodpile Cat, and this led to work on an animated segment of the live-action film Xanadu (1980). The studio's first feature-length film was The Secret of NIMH (1982). Bluth employed 160 animators during the production and agreed to the first profit sharing contract in the animation industry. Though only a moderate success in the box office, the movie received critical acclaim. Later, with the home video release and cable showings, it became a cult classic. Nevertheless, due to the modest gross and an industry-wide animation strike, Don Bluth Productions filed for bankruptcy.
His next film would have been an animated version of the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon, but the financial resources were drawn back and it was never made.
In 1983, he, Rick Dyer, Goldman, and Pomeroy started the Bluth Group and created the arcade game Dragon's Lair, an on rails game which let the player choose between simple paths for an animated-cartoon character on screen (whose adventures were played off a LaserDisc). This was followed in 1984 by Space Ace, a science-fiction game based on the same technology, but which gave the player a choice of different routes to take through the story. Bluth not only created the animation for Space Ace, but he also supplied the voice of the villain, Borf. Work on a Dragon's Lair sequel was underway when the video arcade business crashed. Bluth's studio was left without a source of income and the Bluth Group filed for bankruptcy on March 1, 1985. A sequel called Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp was made in 1991, but it was rarely seen in arcades.
An adaptation of Beauty and the Beast was also planned to be directed by Bluth in 1984, but the project was canceled by Columbia Pictures upon discovering that Walt Disney Pictures had plans for their own adaptation.
In 1985, Bluth, Pomeroy, and Goldman established, with businessman Morris Sullivan, the Sullivan Bluth Studios. It initially operated from an animation facility in Van Nuys, California, but later moved to Dublin, Ireland, to take advantage of government investment and incentives. Sullivan Bluth Studios also helped boost animation as an industry within Ireland. Bluth and his colleagues taught an animation course at Ballyfermot Senior College.
1986–1995: Affiliation with Steven Spielberg
Teaming up with producer Steven Spielberg, Bluth's next project was An American Tail (1986), which at the time of its release became the highest grossing non-Disney animated film of all time, grossing $45 million in the United States and over $84 million worldwide. The second Spielberg-Bluth collaboration The Land Before Time (1988) did even better in theaters and both found a successful life on home video. The main character in An American Tail (Fievel Mouskewitz) became the mascot for Amblimation while The Land Before Time was followed by thirteen direct-to-video sequels and the animated series (none of which had any involvement from Bluth or Spielberg).
Bluth ended his working relationship with Spielberg before his next film, All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), and was not involved with An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991), the first film produced by Spielberg's new Amblimation studio. Although All Dogs Go To Heaven only had moderate theatrical success, it was highly successful in its release to home video. He also directed films, such as Rock-a-Doodle (1992), Thumbelina (1994), A Troll in Central Park (1994), and The Pebble and the Penguin (1995), which were all critical and box office failures.
1997–2000: Work at Fox Animation Studios
Bluth scored a hit with Anastasia (1997), produced at Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona, which grossed nearly US$140 million worldwide. In a positive review of the film, critic Roger Ebert observed that its creators "consciously include[d] the three key ingredients in the big Disney hits: action, romance, and music". Anastasia became Don Bluth's most commercially successful film and it established 20th Century Fox as a Disney competitor until 2019, when Disney purchased the company.
Despite the success of Anastasia, Bluth resumed his string of box office failures with Titan A.E. (2000), which made less than $37 million worldwide despite an estimated $75 million budget. In 2000, 20th Century Fox Studios shut down the Fox Animation Studio facility in Phoenix, making Titan A.E. the last traditionally animated film released by 20th Century Fox in theaters until the release of 2007's The Simpsons Movie. It also stands as Bluth's most recent theatrical film as a director.
2015–present: Return to animation
In October 2015, Bluth and Goldman started a Kickstarter campaign in hopes of resurrecting hand-drawn animation by creating an animated feature-length film of Dragon's Lair. Bluth plans for the film to provide more backstory for Dirk and Daphne and show that she is not a "blonde airhead". The Kickstarter funding was canceled when not enough funds had been made close to the deadline, but an Indiegogo page for the project was created in its place. Two months later, Indiegogo campaign reached its goal of $250,000, 14 days after the campaign launched. As of February 2018, the total exceeded $728,000.
A live-action Dragon's Lair film starring Ryan Reynolds was announced to be released in 2020, but it ended up being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bluth was listed as a producer.
In 2020, Bluth launched a new animation studio called Don Bluth Studios with animator and vice president of the company Lavalle Lee, founder of traditionalanimation.com. His goal is to bring a "renaissance of hand-drawn animation", in the belief that there is an audience demand for it. His first project is called Bluth's Fables, an anthology of short stories written, narrated, and drawn by Bluth. The stories are intended to stylistically resemble Aesop's Fables and nursery rhymes. The studio's productions are live-streamed first, and then uploaded to YouTube. Bluth's Fables is done with pencil tests and then traced and colored in Clip Studio Paint.
Unproduced projects
Throughout Bluth's career, there were many projects that ended up unproduced or unfinished due to studio closures, his severed partnership with Steven Spielberg, or the video game crash of 1983. Many art designs, filmed animation tests and videos of these unfinished projects still circulate online.
Unproduced films
The earliest of Bluth's unfinished film projects is a Disney-produced animated short film adaptation of the fairy tale The Pied Piper of Hamelin from the early 1970s.
After The Secret of NIMH, Bluth began developing an animated feature film adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. While a few scenes were produced in 1984, the film's production was officially cancelled in 1989, when Don Bluth and the film's distributor Columbia Pictures heard the news of Disney beginning work on their own animated adaptation. That same time, Bluth began developing an animated adaptation of East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Ultimately, the film was never made due to a loss of financial backing. Following Don Bluth's partnership with Steven Spielberg, 1986's An American Tail was released as Bluth's second film instead. During production of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Bluth also animated a demo reel of Jawbreaker, a proposed television series by Phil Mendez of a boy who finds a magical tooth. The series however, was not greenlit.
After acquiring the rights to The Beatles songs in the mid-1980s, Michael Jackson approached Bluth with a film idea called Strawberry Fields Forever. The film would have had animated Fantasia-style vignettes featuring Beatles songs, similar to Yellow Submarine. Bluth agreed to the idea, and even planned to produce the film in computer animation. Had the film been made, it would have predated the ground-breaking 1995 Pixar film Toy Story by about eight years. The project fell through when surviving Beatles members denied permission to use their images in the animated film. Only a scene of test footage featuring a group of "Beatle's gangsters" survives.
Two more films were planned during Bluth's partnership with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The first film was an animated adaptation of The Velveteen Rabbit, a story about an abandoned toy rabbit in pursuit of its child owner. The second film was Satyrday, based on a story by Steven Bauer about a young boy in a fantasy world who defends the moon and sun from evil forces. Some of the film's concepts were later realized as the 2014 French animated film Mune: Guardian of the Moon. After his partnership with Spielberg ended, Bluth began planning another film titled The Little Blue Whale with screenwriter Robert Towne. The planned film was about a little girl and her animal friends who try to protect a little whale from evil whalers.
Other unrealized projects also included plans for an animated short film centered around a magical talking pencil starring Dom DeLuise, animated film adaptations of the books Quintaglio Ascension, The Belgariad, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The latter productions were canceled following the box office failure of Titan A.E. and subsequent closure of Fox Animation Studios. In 2005, a live-action Hitchhiker's film was released by Touchstone Pictures.
Unproduced games
Following the success of Dragon's Lair in 1983, Don Bluth began plans for seven more arcade games: "The Sea Beast", "Jason and the Golden Fleece", "Devil's Island", "Haywire", "Drac", "Cro Magnon", and "Sorceress". Due to the budgeting issues and the 1983 video game crash, these projects were abandoned. The sequel to Dragon's Lair, Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp, would be shelved until its eventual release in 1991.
Blitz Games planned a video game adaptation of Titan A.E. for the PlayStation and PC in fall 2000 in North America, following the film's summer release. Development on both platforms had begun in March 1999 under the film's original title Planet Ice, and an early playable version was showcased at the 2000 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. In July 2000, a spokesman from the game's publisher, Fox Interactive, announced that development on the title had been halted largely due to the film's poor box office performance which was "only one of many different factors" that led to its cancellation.
A sequel to the 2003 game I-Ninja was planned, which had input from Bluth. Work on the sequel started soon after the first game's release, but its studio Argonaut Games had some economic problems and eventually closed down in October 2004. The few aspects remaining from I-Ninja 2 development are some concept drawings.
A project called Pac-Man Adventures was originally planned in partnership with Namco around 2003, but was scrapped due to financial problems on Namco's part leading to their merger with Bandai in 2007 and whatever development assets were left over was made into Pac-Man World 3 with no involvement from Bluth.
Recent work
In 2002, Bluth and video game company Ubisoft developed the video game Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair, an attempt to recreate the feel of the original Dragon's Lair LaserDisc game in a more interactive, three-dimensional environment. Reviews were mixed, with critics both praising and panning the controls and storyline, but the visuals were noteworthy, using groundbreaking cel-shading techniques that lent the game a hand-animated feel. , Don Bluth and Gary Goldman were seeking funding for a film version of Dragon's Lair. After apparently sitting in development for over a decade, the project raised over $570,000 via a successful crowdfunding campaign in January 2016.
Bluth and Goldman continued to work in video games and were hired to create the in-game cinematics for Namco's I-Ninja, released in 2003.
In 2004, Bluth did the animation for the music video "Mary", by the Scissor Sisters. The band contacted Bluth after having recalled fond memories of the sequence from Xanadu.
In 2009, Bluth was asked to produce storyboards for, and to direct, the 30-minute Saudi Arabian festival film Gift of the Hoopoe. He ultimately had little say in the animation and content of the film and asked that he not be credited as the director or producer. Nonetheless, he was credited as the director.
In 2011, Bluth and his game development company Square One Studios worked with Warner Bros. Digital Distribution to develop a modern reinterpretation of the 1983 arcade classic Tapper, titled Tapper World Tour.
As an author
Bluth has authored a series of books for students of animation: 2004's The Art of Storyboard, and 2005's The Art of Animation Drawing. His memoir, Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life, was released on July 19, 2022.
As a theater director
In the 1990s, Bluth began hosting youth theater productions in the living room of his Scottsdale, Arizona, home. As the popularity of these productions grew and adults expressed their wishes to become involved, Bluth formed an adult and youth theatre troupe called Don Bluth Front Row Theatre. The troupe's productions were presented in Bluth's home until 2012, when their administrative team leased a space off Shea Boulevard in Scottsdale and converted it into a small theater.
Filmography
Filmmaking credits
Animation department
Video games
See also
Sullivan Bluth Studios
Fox Animation Studios
References
Further reading
External links
The Dot Eaters entry on Bluth and the development of Dragon's Lair
Remembering NIMH An interview with Don Bluth Studios about the making of The Secret of NIMH
Don Bluth & Gary Goldman: Long-running Fun An interview with Don Bluth and Gary Goldman
Don Bluth Interview Part 1 and Part 2 about his influences and the making of Dragon's Lair
Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum Art Database
1937 births
Living people
20th-century American artists
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American screenwriters
21st-century American artists
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American screenwriters
American animated film directors
American animated film producers
American animators
American expatriates in Ireland
American film directors
American film producers
American male screenwriters
American Mormon missionaries in Argentina
American people of English descent
American people of German descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Scottish descent
American people of Swedish descent
American production designers
American storyboard artists
American video game designers
American video game producers
American video game directors
Animation screenwriters
Animators from California
Animators from Texas
Animators from Utah
Artists from El Paso, Texas
Artists from Santa Monica, California
Brigham Young University alumni
Film directors from California
Film directors from Texas
Film directors from Utah
Film producers from California
Film producers from Texas
Filmation people
Inkpot Award winners
Latter Day Saints from California
Latter Day Saints from Texas
Latter Day Saints from Utah
Mass media people from El Paso, Texas
People from Payson, Utah
Film people from Santa Monica, California
Screenwriters from California
Screenwriters from Texas
Screenwriters from Utah
Sullivan Bluth Studios people
Walt Disney Animation Studios people
Video game artists