Don Bluth Entertainment

Disney animation Alumnus Don Bluth left Disney in to finish his own project "Banjo the Woodpile Cat" in 1982. He gathered a core of animation enthusiasts, many from Disney, who worked at his home in L.A. to complete it and then went on to work on their first feature film "The Secret Of NIMH" the same year. A studio change at distributer and financer MGM left this classic film without the backing it deserved and his flegling studio was back to square one. Next he was able to get what appeared to be a plum project to put classical animation into arcade video games and there followed work for "Space Ace" and "Dragon's Lair" in 1983 & 84. They were visually stunning and caused a sensation but the gameplay was a dissappointment. The video game bubble burst not long after their introduction and the distributor of the game went out of business.

After this an Irish American, Morris Sullivan, began working with Don to form a partnership with Don to form Sullivan Bluth Studios and helped arrange an eventual move to Ireland invloving the Industrial Developement Agency there. They brought young Irish people to LA to train with Don's team which had grown to include people from many countries. His first 2 new projects Developed and financed through Steven Spielberg and Amblin. They were "An American Tail" and "Land Before Time". "Tail" was completed with the main animation in L.A. in 1986 while other parts of the process like ink and paint were set up in Ireland. The studio completed most of it's move to Ireland at the end of 1986 to complete "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.

Sullivan Bluth Ireland continued through several re-organisations and name changes to animate a number of memorable films:

  All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989)
  Rock-A-Doodle (1991)
  Thumbelina (1994)
  A Troll in Central Park (1994)
 The Pebble and the Penguin (1995) 

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 Rupert Murdoch media conglomerate. Eventually the story goes that Rupert 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 Fox Studios, Fox Animation, in Phoenix Arizona. The old studio back in Ireland under a new name struggled along with A sequel to "All dogs go to Heaven" - "All Dogs II" in conjuction with MGM after which Fox pulled the plug and the biggest animation studio in Ireland closed it's doors. Don Bluth continued with Fox to complete the hit fim Anastasia (1997) , a video spin-off "Bartok The Magnificent" (1999), and Titan A. E. (2000), an ambitious space epic which did not do well. Fox animation did not continue and that was the last Feature film produced by Don Bluth.