Don Bluth Entertainment

Sullivan-Bluth Studios

Industry	Animation
Founded	1985
Founder	Don Bluth and Morris Sullivan
Headquarters	Van Nuys, California, USA Dublin, Ireland
Key people	Don Bluth Gary Goldman
Products	Animated feature films

Sullivan-Bluth Studios was an animation studio set up by animator Don Bluth. It was known for its work on movies such as An American Tail and The Land Before Time. In earlier incarnations, under the names Don Bluth Productions and Bluth Group, it produced movies such as The Secret of NIMH and the animation for video games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.

Early history

In 1979 Don Bluth, an animator and animation director at The Walt Disney Company, along with 11 other animators, left the studio shortly after production began on The Fox and the Hound, citing as his reason that Disney was “not really making art any more”. Bluth and fellow animators John Pomeroy and Gary Goldman had been working for five years prior to leaving Disney on a project of their own, Banjo the Woodpile Cat. Upon leaving Disney they and the other defecting animators formed the independant studio Don Bluth Productions, working out of Bluth's garage just 18 miles from the Disney studios, and made the completion of this short film their first project. Banjo the Woodpile Cat was first aired on ABC in 1982.

The studio's first commission was to produce a two-minute animated sequence for the song “Don't Walk Away” in the live-action musical Xanadu. The brief sequence might ordinarily have taken four or five months to produce; Bluth's studio completed it in under three. The studio then started work on its first feature film, an adaptation of the Newberry Award-winning children's book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Backed by Aurora Pictures, The Secret of NIMH started production in 1980 and was completed in 1982. Though generally well-received, with praise for the richness and fluidity of the animation, some critics found the narrative unsatisfying. The Secret of NIMH returned only a modest box office performance,[1] which was blamed on both distributor MGM/UA's poor promotion, and competition from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which had been released the previous month. Between this and the industry-wide animators strike in 1982, the studio found itself in financial trouble and was forced into bankruptcy.

Reforming under the name Bluth Group, the studio's next project was to produce the animation for Cinematronics' arcade video games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, which were released in 1983. The games were very successful, attracting considerable attention for the animated visuals quite unlike the simplistic graphics of other games of the era, but were criticised for their limited interactivity. The collapse of the video game industry in late 1983 and early 1984 halted production on the sequel Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp, and the game remained uncompleted until 1991.

Sullivan-Bluth

Soon after this, Irish American Morris Sullivan began working with Bluth to form Sullivan-Bluth Studios. With the aid of the Industrial Development Agency (IDA Ireland), he helped arrange the studio's move to Ireland. They brought young Irish people to LA to train with Bluth's team which had grown to include people from many countries. The studio's first projects, An American Tail and The Land Before Time, were developed and financed through Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment. The principal animation for An American Tail was completed in Los Angeles, while other parts of the process such as ink-and-paint were completed in Ireland.

The studio completed most of its move to Ireland at the end of 1986 to complete The Land before Time in 1988. Both films were so successful that many credit them with the rebirth of feature animation and certainly Disney woke up to the fact that audience demographics had changed and quickly rejuvenated their own studio to counter this new competitor.

Decline

The last film in Ireland in a studio with Don Bluth's name was made before the studio was bought by a Hong Kong Media company which in turn was bought by part of the Rupert Murdoch media conglomerate. Eventually the story goes that Murdoch found he owned an animation company in Ireland and instead of closing it down his company engineered a move back to the US of most of the talent along with Don Bluth into a new division of 20th Century Fox, Fox Animation Studios, in Phoenix, Arizona. The old studio in Ireland, under a new name, produced the sequel All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 in conjuction with MGM, after which Fox pulled the plug and the biggest animation studio in Ireland closed its doors.

Don Bluth continued with Fox to complete the film Anastasia (1997), a video spin-off Bartok the Magnificent (1999), and Titan A.E. (2000), an ambitious space epic which performed poorly at the box office and resulted in the studio's eventual closure.

Filmography

Laserdisc Video Games

• Dragon's Lair (1983)
• Space Ace (1983)
• Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp (1991)

Feature Films

• The Secret of NIMH (1982)
• An American Tail (1986)
• The Land Before Time (1988)
• All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989)
• Rock-a-Doodle (1991)
• Thumbelina (1994)
• A Troll in Central Park (1994)
• The Pebble and the Penguin (1995)

Short Films

• Banjo the Woodpile Cat (1982)

(Years given are dates of release, not completion of production)

References

• The Animated Films of Don Bluth by John Cawley
• The New York Times - Don Bluth - Filmography
• Animation in Ireland by Maeve Clancy
• Fantastic Films June 1982 article on The Secret of NIMH and interviews with Dorse Lanpher and Don Bluth

External Links

• Don Bluth's Classical Animation Academy