Don Bluth

He co-wrote the screenplay and it went through a bunch of revisions.

A lot of it was just straight up executive meddling. He was forced to do baby garbage, and so baby garbage he got.

>empire building
Walt-bashing is fashionable, but that's just an unfair way to put it. He was extremely ambitious, but in a positive way: he was 100% invested in getting the most of each medium the company tacked with a lot of focus on innovation and artistic vision, but once it was conquered he needed to go other places.

It's different from current big studios in which the focus is in staying safe while milking everything until its exhausted and spent

It really did feel like it and it honestly rather sucks too, since Mrs. Brisby I think is a really strong character that pretty much has to hold up the movie all by herself and yet everything surrounding her is too weak to help her.

It also makes me realize why I think The Land Before Time is his strongest movie because it didn’t really have or need a “plot” as it was basically a bunch of kids trying to get from point A to point B and the perils that ensued, nothing else really needed.

it's an awful and depressing movie desu

Bluth made 2-3 good movies and the rest are clunkers or overrated trash like ADGTH

You need special business powers in addition to art love to be the next Walt. And special business powers are hard to get and even harder to keep with how amorphous the business landscape is. Business! Business!

So Bluth and Bakshi essentially have the same problem?

> NOT a talented storyteller. He needs either an existing book
I agree with what you mean (he's shit at coming up with stories), but that's not what storytelling is. He's a GREAT (if old-fashioned) storyteller, but he does need to have a story to tell first.

omg thief and the cobbler, that has some of the trippiest animation I've ever seen, especially the chase through the illuminati checkerboard palace.
What I remember not liking about Bluth movies was how all the characters would always stick their massive drooly tongues out-human, mouse and dog alike.

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Nah, they are opposites. Bluth tried to sublimate a particular approach (and got stagnant), while Bakshi was eternally trying to find new approaches (and all of them end up being tentative and primitive)

Basically, being the director isn't enough to get your vision across unmolested. You also have to be the producer. If you aren't the producer, you essentially don't have any control over your creation and can be overruled or replaced at any time.

Bluth generally directed other people's movies for them and added the elements he was told to add, even if they were stupid or made no sense. He didn't have the capital to be his own boss and despite his string of immediate successes in the 80s, he was basically an industry bitch throughout the 90s until CG animation rendered him obsolete.

What kind of movies did Bluth dream of making? Was he a Ralph Bakshi type? Secret of Nihm is his only great movie in my opinion and even that was shaky and has some major weak points.

I must had watched Thumbelina three times in the cinema ages ago.

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We know for a fact Rock-A-Doodle was meant to be more Roger Rabbit-like, and that Troll In Central Park was meant to have a more complex plot.

>What I remember not liking about Bluth movies was how all the characters would always stick their massive drooly tongues out-human, mouse and dog alike.
Bluth has a problem with over-animating. Not to the same degree as, say, Glenn Kennedy (the Kennedy Cartoons guy), but he doesn't know when to dial back the elasticity or gesturing of his characters. So everyone talks by fucking unhinging their jaws and puffing out their huge, massive lips and rolling their tongues around. And their bodies are always swaying and their arms flailing while they're talking. It's certainly a lot of ANIMATION but that doesn't mean it looks good.

>Did his destiny as the Next Walt never get realized because he left Disney, or was he simply not that talented?

What kind of fucking retard do you have to be to think these are the only two answers to that question?

Phil Harris deserved a better send off then Rock a Doodle.

why did they hack down Rock-A-Doodle and stop Bluth from his dream version of Troll in Central Park?

Did the guy want to make darker films for adults and they kept telling him to dumb things down for kids?

>Bakshi was eternally trying to find new approaches (and all of them end up being tentative and primitive)

I certainly have more respect for Bakshi than I do Bluth. Bluth wanted to be the next Walt Disney while at first striving to be more daring with his 80s stuff, only to become Disney Lite in the 90s. He had ambition but without vision.

Bakshi fought tooth and nail throughout his career to try and free animation from the children's ghetto. His first stuff like Fritz and Heavy Traffic were edgy try-hard stuff, but they kicked the door open. Then he moved into trying out other genres like action (Fire & Ice), fantasy (Lord of the Rings) and drama (American Pop) without adding childish elements to them "because it's just a cartoon, bro". Not all those movies came out great, and you can REALLY tell he was struggling on the budget, especially with all that rotoscoping he had to resort to. But there was a genuine drive in Bakshi's spirit to not just do more with animation in the West, but to CHANGE the way audiences viewed animation in general as being a medium and not a genre.

Then he got fucked over on Cool World (it was supposed to be a horror movie) and never made a feature film again. His story has a sad ending same as Bluth's, but at least Bakshi went down fighting while Bluth just did piddly Disney Lite crap until nobody wanted him anymore.

The animated portions were fun, the live-action stuff is where it fell apart. The premise was stupid, but most of the characters were likable.

>Phil Harris deserved a better send off then Rock a Doodle.

Yeah, and Jimmy Stewart deserved a better send off than An American Tail 2: Fieval Goes West, but here we are.

Great observation! Yes I'm thinking about Anastasia now! These human characters, every time they say something open their eyes as wide as possible and puff out their chests and lungs and do exaggerated gestures and it looks weird.

I guess Bluth just liked trying to show off his skills too much, but it just dragged down his finished product.

This podcast discusses his history and some of his failures: soundcloud.com/wizbru/don-bluth

The movie should just have been about the animals trying to find their friend. Why the kid was shoved in is a mystery to me.

They were going for a Princess Bride kind of story where it cuts back and forth between the real world and the storybook characters, but it wasn't handled nearly as well.

I know this will never happen, but it might be interesting to see some of Don Bluth's less successful movies get rebooted. He can still consult on the animation and character designs, but let someone else do the script and the marketing. Give him the budget and resources of a Disney movie, but give him the freedom to go all out with the 2D classic animation.

Dude, he can't even get funding for a Dragon's Lair animated film, much less a reboot of Troll in Central Park.

damn he's still alive and trying to get 2D animation work? Poor guy.

Roger Rabbit's success gave every studio in Hollywood a boner for trying to mix animation with live-action and siphon some of those bucks. That's how Cool World got rewritten behind Bakshi's back into an "adult" Roger Rabbit clone. Also how we got stuff like Rock-a-Doodle and The Pagemaster (both of which came waaayyy too late to capitalize on Roger Rabbit's popularity).

It's kind of like how towards the end of his life, Joe Shuster (the co-creator of Superman) lost his eyesight and was spotted crying and begging outside of a theater that was showing Superman.

>damn he's still alive and trying to get 2D animation work? Poor guy.
It's rough. He did a Kickstarter campaign to fund a short film so he could PITCH a full length traditionally animated Dragon's Lair movie to a major studio. The campaign failed. He then did the same campaign on Indiegogo with a smaller goal and succeeded, but that was 3 or more years ago and he still hasn't completed the short film.

At this point, even if he does produce something to pitch to studios, and even if a studio is interested, Bluth probably wouldn't live long enough to actually complete a feature film.

So much this. I still think that he's severely underrated in animation history as a whole.

>At this point, even if he does produce something to pitch to studios, and even if a studio is interested, Bluth probably wouldn't live long enough to actually complete a feature film.
Don't do this to me user

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Apparently yes.

>Rock-a-Doodle is shit
Stop breathing.

Just very unlucky, and not being good with latest technology (he sucks at social media, and had to be forced to embrace tradigital methods when making Anastasia).

(different user)
It's not shit, just somewhat shitty. And once you read Satyrday (half of what this movie meant to be, other half being Chanticleer), you will rage at the final product.

Amazing animator but shit storyteller

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Bakshi is out of touch with what people wanted to watch. He's too dumb to understand that nobody wants adult animation because it's pretty boring.

Not necessarily, half of his movies had shit scripts, but reasons for that are numerous.

This seems to be a common thing in the western animation industry.
What the fuck do animators have against writers?

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Artists don't like others interfering with their art. A writer is, at least form their POV, "telling them what to do" and they don't like that. A big part of it is that writers can't draw, so who are they to tell someone who DOES know how to draw WHAT they should draw? That'd be like someone who can't cook telling a chef what kind of flavors they like. They aren't trained in the field, so how could they possibly know what does and doesn't taste good?

Chris Sanders (creator of Lilo & Stitch) actually drew a satirical kids book in the 80s on the subject of writers in animation and how much he hates them. He used an airplane metaphor throughout the book, but his conclusion was: Writers are the people who like planes and want to build planes but never learned how planes work. Still, they want to tell they engineers who DO know how planes work what they should be doing to make the planes, which results in planes that don't fly.

tl;dr animators feel that writers get in the way and the written word has no place in a visual medium.

Because when animation first started, they really didn't use a script.

Cartoons didn't start to use scripts/screenplays until waaayyyyy late in the game. Like, the 1970s. Up until them, there was no such thing as an "animation writer". Everything was board-driven and the artists were the ones who came up with the plot, the characters, the dialogue and everything went from their brains to the boards with no script in-between.

This worked fine for 5-minute shorts, but to try and tell anything more complex, board-driven storytelling wasn't a good fit. Watch Snow White & the Seven Dwarves. It's basically a series of vignettes pasted together. The Prince doesn't have a name or a personality and only appears at the beginning to say hello and at the end to resolve the conflict. But what DOES Snow White & the Seven Dwarves have? A five minute sequence where the dwarves wash their hands and get into slapstick hijinks along the way.

Even all the way up to 70s Disney movies like The Aristocats, you can see the shortcomings of trying to tell a complex feature length narrative through board-driven storytelling. That movie is nothing but a bunch of almost unrelated shorts stapled together, most of which do nothing to further the plot, and every character is underdeveloped.

Script-driven animation is still a "new" concept to the medium and didn't become a big thing until 1980s TV cartoons. As such, most animators, who are not trained in writing and are mentored by the old guard, continue to reject the idea of scripts being used in animation. The resurgence of board-driven shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe and Star Vs, have further cemented the "NO WRITERS ALLOWED" attitude in the industry.

Writers are autistic about their vision. Frank Tashlin and the novelist for the Phantom Tollbooth got booty blasted at Chuck Jones for changing their works when adapting their works.

The novelist of Charlottes Web also disliked the songs added to the HB cartoons.

>and the written word has no place in a visual medium.
That is a load of horseshit and why most of the industry is full of lazy incoherent garbage and ironically exactly what Sanders is describing in reverse.

SU is a prime example of "animators taking the wheel" resulting in a confused slapdashed mess of a story that thought it was smarter than it actually was, and really could've benefited from someone who knows a thing or two about pacing and character development.

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Most Animators are like Sanders though. Only Walt was sane enough to reign them in.

>he resurgence of board-driven shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe and Star Vs, have further cemented the "NO WRITERS ALLOWED" attitude in the industry.
Because when I think of a well crafted story, I sure do think of Star Vs.

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He's saying Steven Universe and Star Vs. are shit because there's no writer. Everything is done by animators.

There's simply too much "Muh complex vision" in cartoons, anime, and video games

Japanese animators and manga artists hate writers and editors too. Dragonball used to be editorial driven till Buu Saga.

There's also the shit going on with Tomino and Sunrise during Gundam

Weren’t a lot of the Hanna-Barbara and Filmation shows more script driven? They certainly needed something else besides the animation to help them along

Not nearly as much, especially since most anime are adaptations of manga or Light Novels
So the writing processes is essentially nearly done, and all the animators have to do is present it to the screen in an interesting and faithful way

They'r also more willing to let certain writers take the wheel when necessary. You're sure as fuck not gonna see a One Piece project get off the ground without so much as Oda's blessing overseeing it first.

>Dragonball used to be editorial driven till Buu Saga.
And boy oh boy, did Dragon Ball sure improve in narrative and pace once Toriyama took over and ousted the editors during the Buu Saga.

Torishima was a pretty good editor who gave Toriyama good ideas. Everything went to shit because Kondo had no idea how to communicate to Toriyama.His other editor was hands off up until Majin Buu appeared, then went "Oh shit nigger! What are you doing?!"

Every film he did had a script, the good ones at least 2 drafts of such. You're a faget.

Christ...

Writer based animation is what got us into this awful age of modern unanimated garbage.

Endless scenes of talking heads doing their witty stand-up routines at each other.
One quick
>"oh oops this show was supposed to be animated"
-scene with awkward, stiff and choppy action maybe sometimes... And then back to talking heads and shot-reverse-shots.

"Show, don't tell" is fucking dead.
They are writing fucking books, not audio-visual scripts.

You still pissy about not being able to make Bolt Chris?

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Are you implying Walt Disney was talented? At art or animation?

Say what you will about Walt, but the man knew how to draw.
Likewise he knew how to see what he drew, and what to do and not to do, he wasn't afraid to let anyone fuck with his "baby" if it meant it was going to be a hit down the line

*sell what he drew

Not that user but let's put it this way. A guy like Ub Iwerks was a talented animator, maybe the best in his field. As uncle Walt said once, his job was to ensure everybody did his best and to give them a common goal. Walt Disney was the orchestra director

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did you just described hanna barbera cartoons?

You're right with Thief to some extent, it has a very thin story that is used to justify some of the greatest animation ever made. But man did the audience I saw it the workprint with fucking loved it, especially the Thief.

Nah this just wrong, the man could fill the animation talent on every field but he wasnt the businessman that walt was you cant even compare him on that field

Those were awful.
Fun character designs and lots of clever cost-cutting tho.
Actual comedians and radio personalities in charge of the witty dialogue too instead of failed english majors, but still the start of the death of the medium.

Actually Walt was pretty bad with finances, that's why he left them to Roy and even them his company was at the verge of bankruptcy more than once because Walt's dreams were too ambitious and often stupid children didn't get it. There's an interview with Bob Clampett where he claimed to met Walt when he was young and he was shocked when Walt said money was like manure, it's used to make things grow. Clampett was a notorious self-promoter and many things he told never happened but Walt saying that doesn't sound so farfetched

>money was like manure, it's used to make things grow.
I wonder how much electricity he's generated spinning in his grave at the state of Disney today.

I don't understand the context of this image.

To be fair, modern Disney isn't too afraid to spend money either.

The twisting thorns and branches that tree grows are quite scary tho...

Most of the spending has been on established IPs instead of taking a risk and making something new, though.
When will people realize that Disney is basically EA?

He does really well, when someone else is in charge. Which he really fucking hated. But the second he was finally the guy at the top and no one else was above him reigning him in, he became incredibly lazy and made pure shit.

All of a sudden Land Before Time, and American Tail turned into Troll in Central Park and Princess and the Pebble. He is an amazing animator but a really shit storyteller and has no eye for forming a functioning movie. He needed Spielberg above him telling him what works and what doesn't

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Even then a lot of the Disney movies still had a complete narration to draw from. The original fairy tale or a book to pull everything from. They just had to translate it all to screen.

They hate them for "stifling their creativity" but a writer at least has a better understanding of keeping the narrative going and making sure the whole things works out and makes sense.

Animators are more concerned with making it look good, making sure the colors are right, making sure the characters are on model or within parameters, etc. Then they pay attention to the story making sense when cobbled together.

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Being honest, Anastasia is a guilty pleasure purely for the "Once upon a December" sequence. But after that....I think Bluth wrongfully assumed people knew who the fuck the Romanovs were, while simultaneously coming up with a bullshit plot device involving Rasputin.

Great comparison, except they get less flack from EA because "nostalgia!!!", honestly.

But seriously Disney is coasting with serviceable movies at best, while constricting the blockbuster market to be wholly dominated by paint-by-numbers movies..

you would think some Communist commander with a Stalin 'stache would have been a better villain for the movie. He would still be hunting for that one romanov that got away so many years ago. He could have had talking and singing hunting dogs sniffing out the trail.

Hanna-Barbara for such a household name, was infamous for having a shit animation budget and was woefully understaffed for much of it's prime.

Not sure if scripting was specific to it's foundation, but the money didn't go towards animators.

oh god Boris and Doris the singing Bolshevik doberman hunting dogs

Considering the very beginning was about the Bolsheviks, yeah, anyone other than a dead mystic that for all intents and purposes was friends with the Romanovs would have been a better villain against the Imperial line.

Hate to say, love Christopher Lloyd, and liked "in the dark of the night" as a musical number, but Rasputin took what could've been a serviceable interesting film and made it another generic Disney knockoff.

this sound exactly like Hideo Kojima games, i hate how all fucker think the writing is genius but in fact is just lazy convulated mess "with a meaning", same with Kingdom Hearts.

It's depressing but not at all awful, fuck you.

I don't know whats with all the Don Bluth hate in this thread. His movies are messy, but every single one of them has more soul and passion behind it then any Disney flick. Anastasia even has a better soundtrack then a lot of the Disney renaissance films.

All Dogs go to Heaven is nearly a masterpiece. And his art is/was great.

Watching people say Don Bluth lacks talent is pretty comical.

Not every life will turn out how you expect simply because of merit. Tastes change, people change, desires change and events alter the courses of everything beyond human control.

Disney wasn't always the driving force behind every good storytelling decision in every movie with his name on it.

Bluth does better with strong collaborators... but generally so does everyone.

If you expect Bluth to be both a savant animator and savant storyteller, then I say your expectations are too high. But to say Bluth didn't become disney because he wasn't that talented is a very strange way to phrase it.

It is pretty hard to break out of prison the same way twice.

I'd say his general career success is testament to his talent. He's had some bombs and he's had some great hits. To get even one good hit is hard enough for most people to ever achieve.

Bakshi went down fighting because he didn't have a good writer, editor, or listen to people with common sense. He's bad with money and bad with people, which is why most of his stuff except for Lord of the Rings flopped.

There's a demand for animation to be more than just children's entertainment, but making things deliberately crude or sticking to pop culture aren't the way to go.

Modern audiences are too autistic to watch Don Bluth Movies. They're technical masterpieces and not exposition heavy. Moutbreathers can't understand why The Land Before Time is good and attribute it's quality to the death of the actress.

I mean. just the fact that he rose so high while at Disney is testament to his talent as well. It isn't like that company was full of low talent nobodies.

It is fair to say he didn't become Disney 2.0, but it isn't like the guy hasn't had a strong legacy in animation. And just having that is pretty rare.

Don Bluth lacks the ambition to become Disney 2.0 and pretty much okay with people watching his films.

The only iconic characters made by Don Bluth are Littlefoot, Fivel, The Dinosaurs, Anatasia and Rasputin.

Stalin was a Georgian Immigrant and a Manlet who relied heavily on Propaganda to make himself look good.

Rasputin works better as a villain because he was a mega chad who can brainwash women with his cock, and was a tough guy to kill. Plus, he'd understandably be bitter and pissed about the royal guards trying to execute him.

Reminder that Bluth was going to make a Hitchhiker’s Guide movie and what would become Ice Age before Titan AE flopped hard
The latter I’m okay with since the first Ice Age is a classic but the former is kind of depressing
Speaking of Anastasia, I feel like Bartok would have benefited from being Anastasia’s wittt sidekick. He’s a fine character in concept but I don’t remember the film using him that much. His snarky attitude could have bounced off Ana’s more naive nature or whatever
Fritz made mad cash though. It made 90M domestically and was one of the highest grossing films of the year, which is great since the budget was less than a million

>90M
It was probably the crowtits.

The movie was good.

Anastasia had a dog sidekick already.

I wonder what could have happened if Coolworld went the way Bakshi wanted?

Walt Disney was great at marketing, but he exploited a lot of artists like Ub Iwerks. Iwerks is the one who came up with Micky Mouse's design and he did the animation for Steamboat Willie.

And yet, something like Aqua Teen which is basically voice actor driven is more hilarious than storyboard-driven shows like OK KO.

Aqua Teen and Mike Tyson Mysteries are hilarious because both shows have great line delivery that compliments the limited animation.

In a just world the statue of Iwerks would stand over Walt's like Bender's over Amenthotep.

>not talented

Ding ding ding.

Amazing animation, awful stories.

And a hard on for Dom Deluise.

Nigga what, Land Before Time, An American Tail, We're Back a Dinosaur, Antastaia, and All Dogs Go to Heaven were great Stories.

Even Fivel goes West was a god tier story.

>Land Before Time
Story was Spielberg and Lucas, Bluth was mostly animation.
>An American Tail
Too dark.
>We're Back a Dinosaur
Not Bluth.
>Antastaia
Only good because he gave up and copied Disney. Ha.
>All Dogs Go to Heaven
WAAAY too dark.
>Fivel goes West
He didn't have any part in that. Probably why its better than the first one.

Anastasia was too down to earth to be a princess movie. Like the Grandmother became bitter after her family got murdered by fucking peasants and Anastasia longs to learn about her identity. Once Upon a December and In the Dark of the Night had actual substance to the songs and weren't pop tunes.

People like you are the reason animation is soulless and santized.

Even though American Tail is too dark, it tackles the subject of immigration in a way that's realistic.

I wonder what role dom would have played in the land before time if he wasn't hired by Disney.

Holy shit, he's still alive.

is this an edit?

Don Bluth is still alive because he got out of the industry before it sucked away his soul. The guy likes animation, but doesn't like the ruthless money side of it.

She was cute tho.
Also a real Strong female lead who doesnt need a butt double

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See Remember Flip the Frog? Me neither

youtube.com/watch?v=TCt7xQ4kRRM

I don't understand the American boner for the monarchies. The Romanovs were ruthless dictators and they couldn't even defend mother Russia from the Germans. They even failed to win the Russo-Japanese war

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Nobody actually wants that stuff. For more recent examples of failure, look at Tintin, Rango, Beowulf, that one owl movie. All of those were unsuccessful.

>Rango considered a failure
What makes you think that?
Loyalists. Not even once.

>>Rango considered a failure

It made a small profit and it got really good reviews. If you compare it with something like Frozen though, everything is going to look like a failure.

man Wizards had a lot of the problems talked about in this thread, especially in the plot, movie just kinda falls apart for most of the last half right up until Avatar and Blackwolf confront each other

very true, it's a shame his most visible advocate in the animation industry today is John K

>The animated portions were fun, the live-action stuff is where it fell apart.
that can be said about almost every single film of that nature besides Roger Rabbit, after all we all know Osmosis Jones would be better if all the Bill Murray scenes got cut out, and Space Jam has like 10-20 minutes of real world scenes that could have honestly either been dropped completely or at least trimmed heavily

>Only Walt was sane enough to reign them in.
and it's also why his direct interest in animation bottomed out during the 50's outside of a brief resurgence during the making of Mary Poppins

>Walt Disney was great at marketing, but he exploited a lot of artists like Ub Iwerks. Iwerks is the one who came up with Micky Mouse's design and he did the animation for Steamboat Willie.
before Ub left Disney to start his own studio, he had enough ownership of Disney the company that if he had stayed he would have been incredibly rich a couple decades down the line

>shitting on Feivel Goes West

That movie is a man's movie get your shit together

agreed, honestly while the first American Tail is the better animated one, I'd say Feivel Goes West is the overall more enjoyable film