Though it kind of came and went without much fanfare, someone who did notice and appreciate The Secret of NIMH, was Steven Spielberg -ironically the man behind its biggest box office competitor. But he recognized immediately the talents of Don Bluth and his team, and as a fan of animation sought out the opportunity to produce their next movie. Not only that, he would help develop its story with Bluth and producer David Kirschner -an American immigrant story told through the lens of anthropomorphic animals that recalled the Russian-Jewish migrations of the late nineteenth century that brought Spielberg’s own grandparents to America. He even imposed a few details passed down to him about life in that time and gave the protagonist his grandfather’s original Yiddish name, ‘Fievel’.
But the input was collaborative, even as Bluth occasionally felt suffocated by studio control. And with the resources of Universal behind it thanks to Spielberg’s name, it was a union that worked out tremendously. An American Tail was not only a box office hit on its release in 1986, but became the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film made up to that point. Where Disney was concerned, it out-grossed their release that year, the similarly rodent-themed The Great Mouse Detective. This was the Disney Dark Ages, and while they were used to under-performing at the box office (The Black Cauldron of just a couple years earlier had nearly bankrupted them), it must have really stun to be beaten at their own game by their former employees.
Of course, An American Tail probably benefited from being the most akin to an early Disney movie of all the films Bluth made in this era. Spielberg wanted it to be his Pinocchio, and it certainly was, in both narrative and aesthetics -a kind of moral fable in a far-off time centred on a child lost from his family, with some associated horrors and perils. And like in Pinocchio, those perils are very intense. No sooner does the movie begin on the Mousekewitz family in Russia dreaming of a better life, then their village is attacked by Cossacks (and Cossack adorned cats), and though they escape, their home is destroyed. They board a steamer headed for the United States, only for the youngest mouse Fievel to be swept overboard and seemingly lost at sea. But he does make it to New York, crossing paths with various other immigrant mice and a gang of cats, as he attempts the seemingly impossible task of finding his family -who themselves but for the daughter Tilly, believe Fievel to be dead.
An American Tail is remembered for enough little scenes that it may be forgotten just how episodic the story is, which was the result of some behind-the-scenes crunching that left less room for building a cohesive story. Though Fievel’s quest to find his parents remains the steadfast thrust, around it are several beats meant to characterize the atmosphere of this nineteenth century American immigrant world. He’s welcomed to the country by Henri, a pigeon at the unfinished Statue of Liberty, who is that monument’s avatar incarnate. He then meets a streetwise Italian mouse called Tony, a Suffragette Irish mouse Bridget, a few community leaders, and the villain of the story Warren T. Rat, a con artist exploiting the newcomers for protection money from the local cat gangs. It’s actually surprising how much the movie adapts the economic and civil conditions of immigrant life in New York at that time, dealing with real issues of corruption and liberation in a political sense. If it makes the movie’s flow a little uneven, it at least relays a sophistication unique to animated movies of the time.
Alongside this though are a few more hyperbolic issues -such as being eaten by a cat, which Fievel very nearly is in a distressing scene in which he makes it halfway down the feline’s throat before cartoon Iogic-ing his way out. Fievel also gets tossed about by the sea, stuck in a gramophone, incarcerated by cats, and bullied by orphans. He goes through a lot, and unlike Mrs. Brisby doesn’t have a determined will. He just has the often faint hope his family might find him. And he comes close -throughout the movie we see how near they are but they keep missing each other. It makes their ultimate reunion that much more heart-warming, but it is tragic in the moment. Adding to this is that Fievel may be the most authentic kid character in an animated movie up to that point. You can sympathize with his earnestness and naivety, the motivation that got him thrown overboard to begin with -to impress his dad by catching a fish. The effect of his innocence is that it’s felt so much more the sadness and uncertainty of his situation. And though the movie doesn’t deal strictly with his identity as Russian and Jewish, he is quite clearly defined by his marginalization among the other mice he interacts with in New York.
Young Phillip Glasser does a fine job as Fievel. Warren T. Rat, really a small cat in disguise who is leader of the cat gang, is voiced by John Finnegan, who definitely makes for a good dastardly character in the vein of Honest John the fox from Pinocchio. There actually is an Honest John in this movie, based on the real politician of that era, voiced by Neil Ross, with his German compatriot Gussie the esteemed Madeline Kahn. The big name of this movie oddly enough is Christopher Plummer, unrecognisable as the pigeon Henri; more substantial is Nehemiah Persoff’s performance as Fievel’s Papa, a veritable Tevye in animated form. And once again of course, Dom DeLuise is brought in as Tiger, a comic relief vegetarian cat who befriends Fievel late in the story and appears in the film far less than expected for this sort of stock character.
Bluth’s animation is more boisterous on this film than his last, especially where a character like Tiger is concerned. It is in some ways a necessity, given An American Tail is a musical. It should be remembered that the musical was out of fashion even at Disney during this time, so this was another way in which the movie captured a classic Disney nostalgia. Bluth and his cohort aren’t particularly adept at musicals, as his 90s movies especially show, and even here you get the sense it is a little forced on them. Luckily, the movie has just four numbers, and all but the last -Fievel and Tiger’s premature friendship anthem “A Duo”, are good. “There Are No Cats in America” is an especially fun old-school Broadway kind of number that the animators certainly rose to the occasion for. But while The Secret of NIMH had a killer song in “Flying Dreams”, both the lullaby by Sally Stephens and the full end credits version by Paul Williams, it had nothing on An American Tail’s signature piece “Somewhere Out There”, sung adorably in-movie by Fievel and Tilly, and professionally by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram. It’s a good and powerful song, one of the best of that wave of movie ballads through the 80s and 90s, and is probably still one of the movie’s biggest claims to fame.
In its best moments An American Tail proves worthy of the high emotion of that song. The animation is still rich and artistically deliberate, rotoscoped Giant Mouse of Minsk notwithstanding. All throughout, it is fluid and expressive in that distinct Bluth way where you can feel the sketches underlining everything. And for a movie about the idealism in the American Dream it is not often that jingoistic, except for at the very end where the completed Statue of Liberty winks in a golden haze at the Mousekewitz family.
More than NIMH, An American Tail is the movie that vindicated Bluth in leaving Disney. At a time when the company was at its lowest point, here comes a movie, original, yet built on the classic formulas and animation principles of that studio’s Golden Age, turning a major profit in the 1980s. And resonating with quite a lot of people too. As sure a sign as any it was time for a change.
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