Don Bluth didn’t always have a great time working with Amblin and Universal, and though collaborating with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas produced good results, he wanted independence again. By the time The Land Before Time was in production, his whole studio Sullivan Bluth had relocated to Ireland due to various government incentives there and found funding with an independent UK studio called Goldcrest Films. His next movie would ultimately be distributed in the U.S. by United Artists.
That movie would be his strangest to date (but by no means his strangest overall) -a redemption story about a dog gangster in New Orleans with the title All Dogs Go to Heaven. The title apparently came before much of the movie and it took influence from classic Hollywood moral fantasy dramas like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Guy Named Joe -the latter of which in fact was remade the very year of All Dogs Go to Heaven by Bluth’s former collaborator Spielberg as Always. A unique idea at the very least, and given the old-school charm of Bluth’s last two movies there was every chance it could work well -especially with a lead character tailored to star Burt Reynolds, teamed up once again with his close friend and the Bluth team’s established favourite star, Dom DeLuise. In fact the back-to-back successes of An American Tail and The Land Before Time gave United Artists the confidence to release the Bluth film in direct competition with 1989’s Disney movie -just as Universal had done the year before.
Unfortunately, that movie this time happened to be The Little Mermaid. In the previous few years, no doubt in part influenced by Bluth’s success, Disney was getting their act back together and The Little Mermaid was the culmination of that. The comeback they’d been seeking for more than a decade, it wound up being the sixth-highest grossing movie of the year, one of the most successful animated films up to that time, and critically praised from all sectors. Naturally All Dogs Go to Heaven was drowned out, modest success though it was. Thanks to the home video market though, it didn’t fall into obscurity and was in fact very successful on VHS -which I attribute at least in part to its very appealing poster art (a staple of all these early Bluth films honestly).
All Dogs Go to Heaven is the story of Charlie B. Barkin, a German Shepherd racketeer who is killed by a mob boss bulldog called Carface. Being a dog, he goes to Heaven as a matter of course, but steals the pocket watch avatar of his life allowing him to return to the living but with his soul now condemned. Seeking revenge, he and his friend Itchy a dachshund free an orphan girl Anne-Marie, who can talk to animals, from Carface in a scheme to get rich quick on animal betting markets -gradually growing attached to her as he manipulates her loyalty and his morality is tested.
Despite it’s very unique set-up, the movie adopts familiar animation tropes of the era. Particularly the relationship of its animals to an orphan girl feels reminiscent of Disney films like The Rescuers (on which Bluth himself animated) and Oliver & Company from just the previous year (another one that prominently featured a streetwise con artist dog voiced by a major celebrity). The heaven stuff and underground dog society are perhaps not so outrageous, even if it stretches credulity a little to see several dogs in shirts and hats occupying a world with regular humans as well who might domesticate said dogs. It’s certainly more surreal in places than anything Bluth had done previously, and that’s even before it gets to the giant singing quasi-racist alligator.
It is more complicated and quite a bit more discordant than even An American Tail too. And there is no question it is weaker than Bluth’s previous three movies. The settings and characters aren’t quite so distinct -Charlie being the exception of course. It is naturally a comedy and one that opens in media res so that it doesn’t carry much of a gravity in spite of a couple moments of genuine heart. The pace can feel frantic and not all the elements of its world or style come together cohesively. These talking animals don’t really fit next to the human characters or each other -Carface’s sidekick Killer is a terribly elaborate misshapen dog. And you can see that the human characters, even Anne-Marie, are dramatically less expressive than their animal counterparts. I don’t know that it needed to be a musical, and certainly the mundaneness of all of the songs doesn’t help -regardless of how well Reynolds can sing them.
But Reynolds is the movie’s greatest strength, making Charlie into a highly charismatic character. He is also, in his sly fast-talking persona, Bluth’s first real modern character -even if the world around him seems to vaguely be the 1950s. It’s that devil-may-care attitude and con artist smarminess that makes him a fun focal point for the movie, and a good subject to have his soul tested in the way that this movie does. Itchy isn’t quite so developed, but he is DeLuise’s best character for a Bluth movie and part of that comes out of his collaborating with Reynolds. He’s a good foil when he doesn’t have to necessarily be an eager-to-please dimwit. Some of that is still there, but so is a bit of cunning and motivation. The voice cast also includes Vic Tayback, one of the most mobster-looking actors around, as Carface, and Ken Page of Cats and Nightmare Before Christmas fame as the alligator. The significance of Judith Barsi should also be acknowledged as Anne-Marie. She had voiced Ducky in The Land Before Time and Bluth intended her to be a fixture of his future movies. But Barsi shockingly rather infamously was murdered by her own father at the age of ten before either of these movies saw release. And it really makes that last scene between Anne-Marie and Charlie, which is beautifully done anyways, hit that much more emotionally.
Charlie does ultimately redeem himself by letting go of his life clock to save Anne-Marie and in spirit bidding her and Itchy goodbye. It’s a scene that feels genuinely bold and earned -how many kids movies would end on the bittersweet death of the main character?- and where those best classic Disney instincts of Bluth kick in; resembling very much something out of Pinocchio in the stillness and lighting on Anne-Marie’s face, Charlie reflected in her eyes. It’s altogether a really pretty end to the movie, and though the film is more loose in design than Bluth’s prior efforts (which isn’t bad but his old-fashioned Disney comedy animation style feels at times more antiquated than timeless), it has some moments of really good artistry. Most notably that dream sequence of Charlie experiencing a harrowing dog hell -the scariest moment in this otherwise very inoffensive movie for children. There’s a real Fantasia kind of creativity to it. Bits of the movie’s comic animation -particularly at the race grounds, have a fun and playful energy to them. And the characters themselves, Charlie and Carface especially, are very dynamic in their animation -Charlie leaping off the screen in a way few other Bluth characters have.
All Dogs Go to Heaven is not a classic, but it has some the right classic elements and moments that are stronger and more memorable than the whole. Yet they are enough to still make that whole a satisfying experience. Releasing in November of 1989 it was one of the last wide release animated movies of the 1980s, and despite the walloping it took from The Little Mermaid certainly feels more of a nostalgic 80s movie than that one. It was the last film of Bluth’s golden age -his last to feel like it had some of that classic animation magic that Bluth applied to his work so organically.
Independent as he preferred, Don Bluth soldiered on through the Disney Renaissance as they no longer worried about him being genuine competition at the box office. And his movies took a steep dive in quality relative to Disney’s climb. Rock-a-Doodle (1991), Thumbelina (1994), A Troll in Central Park (1994), and The Pebble and the Penguin (1995) were all pretty bad movies, irrespective of some charming animation, that wound up box office bombs and eventually bankrupted their studio. In 1997, Bluth and some of his remaining team -including Gary Goldman, having come to 20th Century Fox to head up a new animation wing, finally caved to the industry pressure of Disney and copied their Renaissance formula for Anastasia -which finally netted another hit- albeit one that kind of required Bluth to forsake his principles. And Anastasia, a remake of the 1956 Ingrid Bergman film, is fine, barring some awkward beats in the animation (Bluth has never quite mastered human characters) and weird celebrity casting choices, but still a far cry from his 80s work. Bluth made a direct-to-video spin-off next, Bartok the Magnificent in 1999, and then one further feature for Fox, the sci-fi adventure film Titan A.E. -beating Disney to the punch by a year or two in both making that kind of a movie and it being a box office dud. Fox then pivoted to CG animation, giving over Bluth’s next stated project to the upstart Blue Sky Studios: it became Ice Age (2002). But Bluth, who wanted nothing to do with non-traditional animation, left Fox and would never make another movie again.
Like cartoonist and artist Bill Watterson, Don Bluth’s integrity to his craft is a vital part of his legacy. He fell in love with and fixated his career on a very particular passion: hand-drawn animation, and he has become one of its staunchest advocates and elder statesmen in this era where it has all but vanished in the American media landscape. Even where you do see traditional-style 2D animation, it is almost certainly made with entirely digital processes. But the magic of animation to Don Bluth was in its tangibility, the fact that what you were seeing on screen was created by human hands. There is something potent in that that other kinds of animation will never be able to touch. And Bluth was a master of it. His artistry, and the movies that came from it, at least during that golden decade, are beautiful, evocative works of art and storytelling. And I think he was vital in both pushing the art form forward and honouring its traditional richness. The Disney Renaissance may not have happened without his influence, and certainly great works of animation since have owed a lot to his movies. He is probably the last great titan of traditional animation, and he and his impact I hope will never be forgotten.
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