How Don Bluth Traumatized a Generation of Kids
The Land Before Time. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
For anyone who wasn’t born in the 80s, Don Bluth was a one-time Disney animator who left to start his own company in 1979. During the 1980s and 90s, until he was finally and mercifully stopped by the iron fist of old age, he made a string of achingly beautiful animated films that, I think it goes without saying, absolutely traumatized the shit out of a generation of kids.
A Don Bluth film can be easily identified by a few key traits. One, the animation has a classical hand-drawn style, as one of Bluth’s reasons for splitting off from Disney was to try and keep traditional cel animation alive. I’m not really sure how to describe it, but Bluth animation feels less polished than, say The Lion King, and somehow more like its spilling out into the world - or being crushed by it. The second, and really easiest, way to know you are watching a Don Bluth film is that something extremely traumatic will happen to a central character - their parents will die, or their dog will die, or they will turn into an animated rooster version of Elvis, etc.
What I’m trying to say here, is that Don Bluth films are dark. Character designs are some times quite grotesque - not in a disgusting way, but in an unnatural and thus more subtly disturbing way. The stories these films tell are also dark. There’s none of this happy fantasy trope bullshit you find in animated Disney films of the same vintage. The world of Don Bluth was a magical one, but it was a darker sort of magic.
The first film to come out of Bluth’s studio was The Secret of NIMH, about a little universe of hyper-intelligent semi-mystical rats created in a lab experiment. Because it is a Don Bluth film, the plot device is that a widow named Mrs. Brisby has a sick son and they are all about to die a horrible death unless an owl and a bush full of rats who can use electricity help them out. I suppose compared to his later output, there is nothing sweepingly traumatic about this story but the animation has a certain indescribable quality that hints at the darker forces of the world.
Bluth found major box office success in 1986 with An American Tail, a story set in 1885 which is chock full of kid friendly themes and images such as anti-Semitic mob violence, sweatshops run on child labor and of course what would come to be Don Bluth’s defining plot device - a young child being separated from his family and then subjected to multiple terrifying experiences. Bluth partnered with Steven Spielberg to make the film, which was distributed by Universal, their first animated film since the 1965 release of what I can only assume was a masterpiece called Pinocchio in Outer Space.
The thickest part of the 1980s is when Bluth really hit his stride, following An American Tail with The Land Before Time in 1988. The Land Before Time is, objectively, the saddest movie ever made. And it was pitched squarely at kids. Within the first few minutes we see that this fantastical world of the dinosaurs is on the brink of destruction, subjected to famines and earthquakes and the murderous apathy of the food chain.
Our main character, a precocious little dinosaur named Littlefoot, watches as his mother takes her last breathes right before his very eyes and then invests all of his trauma into a leaf that he carries around with him like Wilson from Cast Away. As if the trauma of a child becoming an orphan isn’t enough, the movie toys wth us further having Littlefoot mistake his own shadow for his dead mother, and run toward it with all the hope and anticipation of a Holy miracle, only to find it was all a mirage.
The Land Before Time is a haunting, achingly beautiful film. It doesn’t juse resonate with some deep, primal emotions - it is convulsed by them. To this day, I can’t watch the movie without tearing up at more than one spot. The animation is quintessentially Bluthian, earthy and vivid and bulging with emotion in a way that slips the confines of the frame. This movie exhales tragedy with every breath. It was certainly bold for a children’s film to go this dark, but that’s what they did. There were numerous merchandising tie-ins with this film, inclduing a Pizza Hut spot inserted into the home video release which for some reason I can still remember.
The Land Before Time was followed by All Dogs Go to Heaven in 1989. It starts off, as all whimisical children stories do, with our main character (a dog named Charlie) being murdered. He then goes to Heaven, where he steals a pocketwatch and when the watch stops ticking he will be sent straight to Hell. He then befriends an orphaned little girl who has been kidnapped and - you guessed it - coerced in forced labor by an evil dog who owns a casino. Charlie forms a deep bond with the orphaned little girl, only to die at the end when she needs him most. Classic bedtime story material.
Bluth rang in the 90s with Rock-a-Doodle, which as I alluded to above is a demented fairy tale where a little boy gets sucked into a nightmare version of reality in which a rooster thinks he is Elvis. It didn’t make its budget back, and around this time Disney began its animation renaissance, overtaking Bluth with big blockbuster hits like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, which copied Bluth’s MO of killing a parent and traumatizing the character but giving it that smooth Disney razzle dazzle so it didn’t force the audience into an existential crisis as they stared into the meaningless abyss of their own lives.
He then had a couple of flops like Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park and The Pebble and the Penguin, before returning to form in 1997 with Anastasia - a film about an orphan, the Russian revolution, and a murderously imagined dark wizard version of Rasputin who has an albino bat minion named Bartok. Released by Fox it made $140 million. I think I saw it once as a kid, but it didn’t leave too much of an impression.
The last really notable entry in his filmography was Titan A.E, an ambitious space opera starring the voice acting talents of Matt Damon and released in 2000 that made heavy use of computer generated graphics, combined with 2-D animation. It did not make its budget back, but it’s not as bad as some people remember. At the very least, it tried to push the boundaries of what was technologically possible with animation at the time, putting it in the same category as other ambitious animated experiments like Beowulf. Also, Matt Damon’s character is an orphan, otherwise how could this possibly be a Don Bluth film?
Bluth pushed a darker idea of what animation could be and what it should be deployed in service of. His films had silly musical numbers and somewhat rote moral messages; but they also engaged with the brutal essence of life - loss, despair, tragedy and all these distressing human emotions that we sometimes try to hide from kids. His animation style was heavy with real feeling, sometimes ugly or grotquese but to watch a Don Bluth film is to experience something visceral and elemental. Bluth may have made films that were dark and scary, but that was really a quintessential parts of the 1980s experience wasn’t it? There is no better lesson than to learn that life can be scary and grotesque but also haunting and beautiful.
