Don Bluth Entertainment
| Industry | Animation |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1985 |
| Founder | Don Bluth and Morris Sullivan |
| Headquarters |  Van Nuys, California, USA Dublin, Ireland |
Key people | Don Bluth Gary Goldman John Pomeroy |
| Products | Animated feature films |
| Website | (none) |
Sullivan Bluth Studios was an animation studio set up by animator Don Bluth and several colleagues. 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”.[1] 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 independent studio Don Bluth Productions, working out of Bluth's garage and home in Ventura, California, and made the completion of this short film their first project.[2] Banjo the Woodpile Cat was first aired on ABC in 1982.
After the completion of Banjo, the studio moved out of Bluth's house and into a two-storey facility in nearby Studio City.[3] 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.[4] The studio then started work on its first feature film, an adaptation of the Newbery Medal-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.[2] Though generally well-received, with praise for the richness and fluidity of the animation, some critics found the narrative unsatisfying.[5][6] The Secret of NIMH returned only a modest box office performance,[1] which was blamed on both distributor MGM/UA's poor promotion,[2] 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 filed for bankruptcy.[7]
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. Cinematronics, now in debt and trying to cut its own losses, froze fees and royalties of over US$3 million to Bluth Group, driving the studio once again into bankruptcy.[8] The unfinished sequel to Dragon's Lair, despite having almost all of its animated footage completed, remained unreleased until 1991.[9]
Sullivan-Bluth
During Bluth Group's period working with Cinematronics, Don Bluth met Irish-American Morris Sullivan, a mergers and acquisitions broker and enthusiast of traditional animation, who quickly saw the potential in the studio. When the studio declared its second bankruptcy, Sullivan stepped in to assist, combining his experience of the business world with Don Bluth and his crew's talent to form Sullivan-Bluth Studios (later dropping the hyphen to become Sullivan Bluth Studios).[8] Moving out of the smaller Studio City facility and into a dedicated building in Van Nuys, California, the studio opened in 1985.[2]
In its early days the studio worked on a number of smaller projects such as commercials while seeking a suitable feature film project. In 1984, as the studio was preparing to move to its new headquarters, Bluth was approached by Steven Spielberg with an idea for a feature film about a mouse family emigrating to America, An American Tail. Bluth and Spielberg worked together to develop the story for the film, and production began in earnest later that year. With backing from Spielberg's production company Amblin Entertainment, and distributors Universal Pictures, the film was released in November 1986, accompanied by a major publicity campaign.[10] An American Tail was very successful at the box-office, grossing US$47 million in the US and becoming the highest-grossing animated film on an initial release.[7]
As production on An American Tail neared completion, Morris Sullivan drew plans to move the majority of the studio's operations to Ireland to take advantage of a scheme set up by the Industrial Development Authority encouraging filmmakers to invest in the country by offering grants, tax benefits and lower operating costs.[11] The IDA offered Sullivan Bluth Studios the largest grant in the country's history to relocate to Dublin, in return for a 5% government ownership of the studio.[12] This, along with Sullivan's own investment, funded the foundation of a large and sophisticated new animation studio near Dublin's Phoenix Park. The studio opened with a staff of 85, mostly handling the ink-and-paint process, but expanded to employ over 300 people, including some 100 staff relocated from the California studio. To build up this workforce, the studio brought young Irish people to the USA studio to train, and Bluth helped to set up an animation course at the nearby Ballyfermot Senior College.[11]
During the move to Ireland, production had started on the studio's second Amblin/Spielberg-backed feature, The Land Before Time. The movie had been rushed into its early production stages even before the release of An American Tail.[13] Production was completed in 1988 for a November release.
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
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
(Years given are dates of release, not completion of production)
Notes
- ^ Plume, Kenneth (2000-06-10). "IGN: Interview With Don Bluth".
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ a b c d "Don Bluth Biography". Retrieved 2006-11-28.
- ^ Cawley, Walkout to Independence.
- ^ The Big Cartoon Database: Xanadu
- ^ Canby, Vincent (1982-07-30). "'N.I.M.H' Shades of Disney's Golden Era". New York Times.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ "The Secret of NIMH review". Variety. 1982-07-26.
{{cite news}}: Check date values in:|date=(help) - ^ a b Cawley, Don Bluth Biography.
- ^ a b Cawley, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Spielberg.
- ^ Dragon's Lair Project: Dragon's Lair II
- ^ Cawley, An American Tail.
- ^ a b Clancy Animation in Ireland, National College of Art and Design.
- ^ Cawley, At Home in Ireland
- ^ Cawley The Land Before Time
References
- Cawley, John (1991). The Animated Films of Don Bluth. Image Pub of New York. ISBN 0-6855-0334-8.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|month=ignored (help) - Clancy, Maeve. "Animation in Ireland". National College of Art and Design. Retrieved 2006-11-30.
- 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