Don Bluth

Twelve resignation letters reached Walt Disney Productions on September 13, 1979. One belonged to Don Bluth, who turned 42 that day. The others came from Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy and nine more animators who followed him out of the building in the middle of production on The Fox and the Hound. The Los Angeles headline counted eleven quitters; with Bluth it was twelve. The dispute, as Wikipedia summarizes it, was over artistic control and over how the studio trained new animators. Nobody was fired. A dozen people with the best jobs in American animation chose to leave them, and the company they formed that week had no film, no distributor and no money.

Bluth had been through the door before. Disney hired him in 1955 as an assistant to John Lounsbery on Sleeping Beauty; he quit in 1957, later calling the work "kind of boring", and spent two and a half years in Argentina as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He went by boat, a 30-day trip, and told Deseret News in 2022 that as far as he knew he was the last missionary to leave that way. Back home he ran a small theater in Culver City, finished an English degree at Brigham Young University, illustrated a 1964 harp maintenance manual with cartoon harps he called Harpoons, did layouts at Filmation from 1967 and rejoined Disney as a trainee in 1971. By The Rescuers (1977) he was a directing animator alongside the survivors of the Nine Old Men. The trainee had become the heir, and he walked away from it.

Don Bluth Productions proved itself with a short, Banjo the Woodpile Cat, picked up an animated segment of Xanadu (1980), then made The Secret of NIMH (1982) with 160 animators on what Wikipedia calls the first profit-sharing contract in the animation industry. Critics liked it. The box office did not: about $12 million. An industry-wide animation strike followed, and the company filed for bankruptcy. Bluth, Goldman, Pomeroy and Rick Dyer regrouped as the Bluth Group in 1983 and built Dragon's Lair, a LaserDisc arcade game that played Bluth's hand-drawn footage in short branching clips, followed by Space Ace in 1984, in which Bluth also voiced the villain. Then the arcade market collapsed. The Bluth Group filed for bankruptcy on March 1, 1985. Two failures in three years is a bad record for a founder. It did not stop the third try.

The unmade list is as long as the made one. After NIMH, Bluth started an animated Beauty and the Beast; a few scenes were produced in 1984, and Columbia Pictures cancelled it in 1989 on learning that Disney had its own version in work. East of the Sun and West of the Moon lost its financing. Seven more arcade games were planned after Dragon's Lair, with names like The Sea Beast and Devil's Island, and all seven died with the 1983 crash; the Dragon's Lair sequel sat on a shelf until 1991. Two films with Spielberg and George Lucas, The Velveteen Rabbit and Satyrday, never got past planning. And the franchise that did work went on without him: The Land Before Time produced thirteen direct-to-video sequels and a television series, none with Bluth or Spielberg involved. He drew the original. Somebody else collected on the sequels.

Sullivan Bluth Studios started in 1985 with businessman Morris Sullivan as the money, working out of Van Nuys, California, and moved to Dublin during production of An American Tail because Ireland's Industrial Development Authority offered grants and tax benefits; the Wikipedia article on the studio calls the IDA grant the largest in the country's history to that point, given in exchange for a 5 percent government stake. The Dublin plant opened with 85 staff and grew past 300, peaking around 350, and Bluth and his partners taught an animation course at Ballyfermot Senior College, which Wikipedia credits with helping build an animation industry in Ireland. An American Tail (1986), produced with Steven Spielberg, took $45 million in the United States and more than $84 million worldwide, at that point the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film ever released; The Land Before Time (1988) matched it at about $84.5 million. A Church News profile from November 1989 gives the version of events Bluth himself told: the company was in trouble, he sat down and paid two years of back tithing out of his own account, and Spielberg came to him with An American Tail afterward. You can take that as cause or as sequence; Bluth took it as cause. The same profile found him serving as president of the Finglas Branch of the Church in Dublin, about 200 members, while running a studio of several hundred, and quoted him: "Everything I do is centered around the gospel." The partnership with Spielberg ended before All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), which took $27.1 million in theaters and then sold well on video. After that the numbers slid: Rock-a-Doodle (1992) $11.7 million, Thumbelina (1994) $11.4 million, A Troll in Central Park (1994) $71,000, The Pebble and the Penguin (1995) $4 million. The studio declared bankruptcy in October 1992, kept releasing films for three more years, and shut on October 31, 1995. The Dublin facility was renamed Screen Animation Ireland and closed as well.

Fox Animation Studios opened on August 8, 1994, at 2747 East Camelback Road in Phoenix, with Bluth, Goldman and Fox executive Bill Mechanic behind it. It grew to about 380 people. Anastasia (1997) cost $53 million and grossed about $140 million worldwide, the best result of Bluth's career and, per Wikipedia, the film that established 20th Century Fox as a Disney competitor in animation. Then Titan A.E. (2000) cost between $75 million and $85 million and took $36.8 million; Wikipedia puts the loss to Fox at $100 million. The sequence after that:

• Fox laid off about 300 of the 380 Phoenix staff roughly a year before Titan A.E. opened.
• The film opened June 16, 2000; Fox closed the studio ten days later, on June 26, 2000.
• Titan A.E. remains Bluth's last theatrical feature as a director.
• Disney bought most of the Fox library on March 20, 2019, so Anastasia now belongs to the company Bluth left.

The years after Fox were smaller. Bluth had been staging youth theater in the living room of his Scottsdale home since the 1990s; the troupe, Don Bluth Front Row Theatre, moved into a leased space off Shea Boulevard in 2012. He and Ubisoft made Dragon's Lair 3D in 2002, he and Goldman supplied the cinematics for Namco's I-Ninja in 2003, and in 2011 his game company Square One Studios worked with Warner Bros. Digital Distribution on Tapper World Tour, a remake of a 1983 arcade game. A crowdfunding push for a Dragon's Lair feature hit its $250,000 Indiegogo target 14 days after launch in late 2015 and stood above $728,000 by February 2018; the film has not appeared. In 2020 he launched Don Bluth Studios with animator Lavalle Lee as vice president, producing Bluth's Fables, short pieces he writes, narrates and draws in pencil, live-streamed and then posted to YouTube. His memoir, Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life, came out on July 19, 2022, and a picture book, Yuki, Star of the Sea, followed on April 1, 2024. The four studios are the business record. The Fables, drawn by a man in his eighties and colored in Clip Studio Paint, are the part he seems to care about.

"My ministry in this life was what I did. It was the animation." Don Bluth, 2022.