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Originally Posted by Mr. Marshmallow
You made some very excellent and dead on points with Bluth there Jekyll. But I think the fact he actually took the chance to include dark elements in his films he DID escape his Disney "past life" if you will. Nearly all of his films involved something very serious or something very dark that toons normally don't have.
I mean Titan A.E., All dogs go to Heaven, even An American Tail taking the whole subject of immigration and putting a toon perspective on it I thought was a genius and very original idea. "Fievel Goes West" by the way was my favorite Bluth film, even though I didn't care too much for the first one.
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Thank you.
I've always felt that An American Tail might have worked marginally better if they hadn't insisted on making it a musical. It's kind of hard to explain, but it didn't seem like the songs really fit all that smoothly into the narrative, and the transition from regular narrative into most musical numbers struck me as somewhat forced and jarring in that film. I don't remember too much about the sequel, but if I recall correctly it did at least contain a rather slick tribute to the theme from "Rawhide".
Also, I think that the way in which the cats and the mice are each portrayed within the original film are pretty good examples of the highly polarised nature of Mr. Bluth's work...the mice were generally a little too cutesy and twee for my tastes, while the cats were frequently depicted as so scary and monstrous that for much of the time they ceased to even look like cats. For me it's not a happy mixture.
Incidentally, was Ferngully: the Last Rainforest even a Don Bluth film? I thought it was made by 20th Century Fox in the early 90s, before Bluth joined their ranks.