The Land Before Time

Following the release of An American Tail in 1986, Don Bluth’s follow-up feature film would be The Land Before Time in 1988 in a continued partnership with Stephen Spielberg. This time, however, the film was further co-produced by George Lucas, in notably his only collaboration with Spielberg outside of the Indiana Jones series. The Land Before Time has since notoriously spawned a long-running franchise of direct-to-video sequels (13 as of this writing) and a short-lived TV series, all of which are inexplicably musicals in stark contrast to the original film. While I was aware of this franchise as a kid, the only one I wanted to see above all the others was the original The Land Before Time, which I finally got the chance to see for myself after receiving a Blu-ray copy as a Christmas gift. While the film is really good on its own merits, I found it to be an improvement over An American Tail in many areas.

An American Tail

Although Don Bluth’s directorial debut, The Secret of NIMH, didn’t do well financially, with a box office of $14.7 million against a budget of $7 million, it attracted the attention of Stephen Spielberg, who collaborated with Don Bluth and Universal to produce An American Tail. Despite production troubles, which included creative differences and Spielberg learning just how complicated animation actually is, the film, notably co-produced in Ireland, released in late 1986 and made $104.5 million on a budget of about $9 million, which made it the most successful non-Disney animated film at the time. Critics were mixed on the film at the time, but its popularity would increase over the years, namely from those who watched it as children and retained fond memories of it. We never watched it ourselves until over thirty years later, which gave us more a fresh perspective and the opinion that while the traditional animation is still impressive to this day, the story is a bit choppy.

Anastasia (1997)

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.