Looking back on the career of former Disney animator Don Bluth can be an interesting experience. While he did manage to do well early in his solo career, his reputation started to decline after All Dogs Go to Heaven failed to compete against Disney’s The Little Mermaid, as well as his follow-up feature Rock-a-Doodle being not as well received. When Fox attempted to compete against Disney (years prior to the merger) by opening up their own animation department, Fox Animation Studios, Bluth was brought at the helm and his career found a bright spot with the studio’s first film, the acclaimed Anastasia (1997). Unfortunately, the failure of their second theatrical film, Titan A.E., led to the entire studio shutting down and Bluth to all but fall off the face of the Earth. Along with Anastasia’s acclaim came the long-standing misconception that it was Disney film due to sharing a number of elements with their output at the time; while it actually is a Disney film now by virtue of their ownership of Fox, it is, for all intents and purposes, a Fox Animation Studios film and not an entry in the Disney Animated Canon. This confusion is what eventually led to me watching Anastasia out of curiosity, though it was pulled from Disney+ by the time I got around to it and I had to watch it on demand through Starz, and I ended up enjoying it more than I anticipated.
