Profile of Don Bluth on Famous Like Me

Donald Virgil Bluth (born September 13, 1937) is a former Disney animator who, along with fellow animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, set out on his own 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.

Career

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's first production was a short film titled Banjo the Woodpile Cat as a demonstration of its ability, and this led to work on an animated segment of the live-action film Xanadu (1980) and its most noteworthy film, 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, a sequel which was very rare in arcades.

His next two films, An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988), did well in theaters. (Each 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 All Dogs Go to Heaven, Rock-A-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park, and The Pebble and the Penguin had dropped significantly in the quality of their story and art, as well as their 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 disasterous Titan A.E. in 2000. Both of these films were produced at Fox Animation Studios, which 20th Century Fox established as a Disney competitor, but shut down in 2000 after the release of Titan A.E.

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 truly animated feel.

In 2004, Bluth produced an animated scene for the music video "Mary", by the Scissor Sisters. The band had 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.

Currently, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman are seeking funding for a film version of Dragon's Lair.

Trivia

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.

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