Background and career
Donald Virgil Bluth ( BLOOTH; born September 13, 1937) is an American filmmaker, animator, video game designer and author. Bluth came to prominence working for Walt Disney Productions before creating his own film studio in the early 1980s. He is best known for directing the animated films The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Anastasia, and Titan A.E., and for his involvement in the well-known Laserdisc game Dragon's Lair. An animation studio under his name hired many animators away from Disney, and Bluth's films were a major competitor to Disney during the Renaissance under CEO Michael Eisner.
Bluth was born on September 13, 1937, in El Paso, Texas, to Emaline (née Pratt) and Virgil Roneal Bluth. His maternal grandfather was Rey Pratt from the Pratt family, and his great-grandfather Helaman Pratt was an early leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as a grandfather of George W. Romney and great-grandfather of Mitt Romney. He is of Swedish, English, Irish, Scottish, and German descent. As a child in El Paso, he rode his horse to the town movie theater to watch Disney films. Bluth later said, "then I'd go home and copy every Disney comic book I could find". At the age of six, his family moved to Payson, Utah, where he lived on a family farm. Bluth has stated that he and his siblings do not communicate with each other as adults. In 1954, his family moved to Santa Monica, California. Bluth attended Brigham Young University in Utah for one year, and then returned later to complete a degree in English.
After graduating high school, Bluth was hired in 1955 by Walt Disney Productions as an assistant to John Lounsbery for Sleeping Beauty. In 1957, Bluth left Disney, recalling he found the work to be "kind of boring". For two and a half years, Bluth resided in Argentina on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He returned to the United States where he opened a local theater in Culver City, producing musicals such as The Music Man and The Sound of Music. Bluth returned to college and earned a degree in English literature from Brigham Young University. In 1964, Bluth illustrated Affairs of the Harp, a harp maintenance manual by Samuel O Pratt, with dozens of anthropomorphic cartoon harp characters he called "Harpoons". In 1967, Bluth returned to the animation industry, and joined Filmation working on layouts for The Archie Show and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. In 1971, he returned full-time to Disney as an animation trainee. His first project was Robin Hood, in which he animated sequences of Robin Hood stealing gold from Prince John, rescuing a rabbit infant, and romancing Maid Marian near a waterfall. For Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too, he animated Rabbit alongside John Lounsbery. During production on The Rescuers, Bluth was promoted to directing animator alongside the remaining members of Disney's Nine Old Men. He then worked as an animation director on Pete's Dragon. His last involvement with Disney was the short The Small One. Meanwhile, he produced his first independent film, Banjo the Woodpile Cat.
For The Fox and the Hound, Bluth animated several scenes of the character Widow Tweed. During production, creative differences between Bluth and studio executives had arisen concerning artistic control and animation training practices. On his 42nd birthday in 1979, Bluth resigned from the studio to establish his own animation studio, Don Bluth Productions, along with Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy, and nine fellow Disney animators. To this end, Don Bluth Productions demonstrated its ability in its first production, a short film titled Banjo the Woodpile Cat, and this led to work on an animated segment of the live-action film Xanadu. The studio's first feature-length film was The Secret of NIMH. Bluth employed 160 animators during the production and agreed to the first profit sharing contract in the animation industry. Though only a moderate success in the box office, the movie received critical acclaim. Later, with the home video release and cable showings, it became a cult classic. Nevertheless, due to the modest gross and an industry-wide animation strike, Don Bluth Productions filed for bankruptcy. His next film would have been an animated version of the Norwegian folk tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon, but the financial resources were drawn back and it was never made. In 1983, he, Rick Dyer, Goldman, and Pomeroy started the Bluth Group and created the arcade game Dragon's Lair, an on rails game which let the player choose between simple paths for an animated-cartoon character on screen (whose adventures were played off a LaserDisc). This was followed in 1984 by Space Ace, a science-fiction game based on the same technology, but which gave the player a choice of different routes to take through the story. Bluth not only created the animation for Space Ace, but he also supplied the voice of the villain, Borf. Work on a Dragon's Lair sequel was underway when the video arcade business crashed. Bluth's studio was left without a source of income and the Bluth Group filed for bankruptcy on March 1, 1985. A sequel called Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp was made in 1991, but it was rarely seen in arcades. An adaptation of Beauty and the Beast was also planned to be directed by Bluth in 1984, but the project was canceled by Columbia Pictures upon discovering that Walt Disney Pictures had plans for their own adaptation. In 1985, Bluth, Pomeroy, and Goldman established, with businessman Morris Sullivan, the Sullivan Bluth Studios. It initially operated from an animation facility in Van Nuys, California, but later moved to Dublin, Ireland, to take advantage of government investment and incentives. Sullivan Bluth Studios also helped boost animation as an industry within Ireland. Bluth and his colleagues taught an animation course at Ballyfermot Senior College.
Teaming up with producer Steven Spielberg, Bluth's next project was An American Tail, which at the time of its release became the highest grossing non-Disney animated film of all time, grossing $45 million in the United States and over $84 million worldwide. The second Spielberg-Bluth collaboration The Land Before Time did even better in theaters, and both found a successful life on home video. The main character in An American Tail (Fievel Mouskewitz) became the mascot for Amblimation while The Land Before Time was followed by thirteen direct-to-video sequels and the animated series (none of which had any involvement from Bluth or Spielberg). Bluth ended his working relationship with Spielberg before his next film, All Dogs Go to Heaven and was not involved with An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, the first film produced by Spielberg's new Amblimation studio. Although All Dogs Go To Heaven only had moderate theatrical success, it was highly successful in its release to home video. He also directed films, such as Rock-a-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park, and The Pebble and the Penguin, which were all critical and box office failures; however, Rock-a-Doodle would find greater success on home video.
In the 1990s, Bluth began hosting youth theater productions in the living room of his Scottsdale, Arizona, home. As the popularity of these productions grew and adults expressed their wishes to become involved, Bluth formed an adult and youth theatre troupe called Don Bluth Front Row Theatre. The troupe's productions were presented in Bluth's home until 2012, when their administrative team leased a space off Shea Boulevard in Scottsdale and converted it into a small theater. Bluth scored a hit in 1997 with Anastasia, produced at Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona, which grossed nearly US$140 million worldwide. In a positive review of the film, critic Roger Ebert observed that its creators "consciously include[d] the three key ingredients in the big Disney hits: action, romance, and music". Anastasia became Don Bluth's most commercially successful film and it established 20th Century Fox as a Disney competitor until 2019, when Disney purchased the company. Despite the success of Anastasia, Bluth resumed his string of box office failures with Titan A.E., which made less than $37 million worldwide in 2000 despite an estimated $75 million budget. In 2000, 20th Century Fox Studios shut down the Fox Animation Studio facility in Phoenix, making Titan A.E. the last American-made traditionally animated film released by 20th Century Fox in theaters to be fully animated and not a live-action/animation hybrid until the release of 2007's The Simpsons Movie. It also stands as Bluth's most recent theatrical film as a director.
