Don Bluth Entertainment

Sullivan-Bluth Studios is an animation studio that was set up by animator Don Bluth. It is known for its work on movies such as The Secret of NIMH, An American Tale, the Land Before Time and Titan A.E., as well as video game visuals.

Early history

Don Bluth set up a studio when he left The Walt Disney Company in 1982 to finish his own project, Banjo the Woodpile Cat.

Bluth gathered a core of animation enthusiasts, many from Disney, who worked at his home in Los Angeles 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 distributor and financer MGM left the film without backing and his fledgling studio was back to square one.

The studio's next project was to produce the animation for Cinematronics' arcade video games Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, which were released in 1983. They were acclaimed for their stunning visuals, but simultaneously criticised for their limited interactivity. The collapse of the video game industry in the same year 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. He helped arrange an eventual move to Ireland involving the Irish Industrial Development Agency. They brought young Irish people to LA to train with Don's team which had grown to include people from many countries. The studio's first projects, An American Tail and Land Before Time, were developed and financed through Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment. The main 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 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.

Work

Sullivan-Bluth's Ireland studio continued through several re-organisations and name changes to animate a number of films, including:

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 Fox Studios, Fox Animation, 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. Fox Animation did not continue and that was the last feature film produced by Don Bluth.