Don Bluth

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Donald Virgil Bluth (born September 13 1937) is an American animator and independent studio owner.

He was born in El Paso, Texas and became one of the chief animators at Disney. Along with fellow animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, he set out in 1979 to start his own animation studio, Don Bluth Productions. His style is rougher and more lively than that of Disney films, and his films tend to have a mystical element to them.

At Disney in the 1970s, Bluth was an animator on Robin Hood, The Rescuers, and Pete's Dragon. His last involvement with Disney was the 1978 short The Small One; he drew a few scenes for The Fox and the Hound, but left early in production and brought several other Disney animators with him to form a rival studio. This new studio 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) and then to its first feature-length animation, The Secret of NIMH (1982). Many consider this film to be Bluth's masterpiece.

Teaming up with Rick Dyer, Bluth created the groundbreaking arcade game Dragon's Lair (1983), which let the player control a cartoon-animated 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; and Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp, a sequel which was very rare in arcades.

His next three films, An American Tail (1986), The Land Before Time (1988) and All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), did well in theaters and became animation classics. Each movie launched a line of sequels, most of which were released direct-to-video, and none of which Bluth worked on. But by the end of the decade and through the 1990s, Bluth films such as Rock-A-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park, and The Pebble and the Penguin had dropped significantly when it came to box office returns.

Bluth scored another hit with Anastasia (1997), which grossed US$140 million worldwide in part because it used well-known Hollywood stars as its voice talent and stuck closer to long-proven Disney formulas: a sassy and resourceful princess driven to become more than she is, a cruel and conniving villain who uses dark magic, and a comic-relief sidekick. However, this was followed by the financially-disastrous Titan A.E. in 2000. Both of these films were produced at Fox Animation Studios, which 20th Century Fox established as a Disney competitor. In 2000, after the studio's third film Bartok the Magnificent (which was released direct to video), Fox shut down the studio.

A recent attempt to capitalize on Dragon's Lair nostalgia by releasing the computer game Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair (2002) was unsuccessful; the game was panned by critics as being flat and uninteresting, despite groundbreaking cel-shading techniques that lent the game a hand-animated feel. Don Bluth and Gary Goldman are currently seeking funding for a film version of Dragon's Lair.

In 2004, Bluth produced an animated scene for the music video "Mary", by the Scissor Sisters. The band contacted Bluth after having recalled fond memories of the sequence from Xanadu.

Bluth has also authored a series of books for students of animation: 2004's The Art of Storyboard, and 2005's The Art of Animation Drawing. Additional books are planned.

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Trivia

Many of Bluth's animations depict shapeshifting: for example, the sequence showing the ordinary rat mutating into superintelligence in The Secret of NIMH, the princess becoming a monster in Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp, Dexter growing suddenly from child to adult in Space Ace, the characters turning into birds and fish in Xanadu, and the queen turning into a dragon in Bartok the Magnificent.

In the 1990s, Bluth began screening his films to test audiences. His film Thumbelina tested significantly better with audiences when it was screened with a Disney logo at the start.