Reviews of the Bosch

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 uniqu...

As a kid, I wasn’t so affected by the typical ‘traumatic’ death scenes of animated children’s movies. Mufasa’s death in The Lion King really did nothing for me. Same with Bambi’s mom even -it took until I was older to really appreciate the raw tragedy of that. But the one that did get me, much less popular than those, was the death of Littlefoot’s mother in The Land Before Time , and I still think it is perhaps the most effective death scene of this kind in a movie for kids. Both Simba and Bambi lose their parents entirely all of a sudden, but Littlefoot has to be there as his mother is dying, to take in her final sentiments to him, and it is heartbreaking, especially with the emotionally potent detail in the animation -the gloominess, the perfectly sad features. It honestly still gets me a little bit. I’m just old enough to be part of the generation where the Don Bluth movie most significant to my childhood was The Land Before Time .  My family owned the movie on VHS, and some of...

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 tremendous...

There are few names in the history of American film animation. The biggest undoubtedly has and forever will be Walt Disney -and he didn’t even do that much animation himself. But did he ever know how to brand his products! There were no auteurs at Disney, much as there have been numerous exceptionally talented animators who have worked on and helmed some of the great classics of the form. Bambi is one of my favourite animated movies, yet I had to look up that it was directed by David D. Hand. It’s gotten better in the modern era, with animation directors taking on more personal ownership of their projects, like Brad Bird and Domee Shi, but it is still a rarity in the American industry to have an animation director so independently distinguished. But there was one notable exception, an animation director who for a time was the only force in the medium capable of genuinely challenging Disney, arguably pushing them to be better. And his name was Don Bluth. Maybe you’ve heard of Don Bluth...