Hacker Cinema
An American Tail
1986 · Film · 80 min
Directed by Don Bluth
AdventureAnimationComedyDramaFamily
A young mouse named Fievel and his family decide to migrate to America, a "land without cats," at the turn of the 20th century. But somehow, Fievel ends up in the New World alone and must fend off not only the felines he never thought he'd have to deal with again but also the loneliness of being away from home.
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3 comments on Hacker News
I kind of appreciate the gamer-style review of Mulan, just, like, not having as much difficulty or leveling up in the live-action version. Putting it in that way makes a meaningful point and is something that can actually be fixed. What can't be fixed, unfortunately, is Disney's enslavement to China. The classic Disney narrative was at one time was aimed at selling the American Dream. Which, bullshit as it may have turned out for most pepole, at least vaunted (can you use that as a verb?) the advancement of the underdog and, like, bootstrapping peasants or immigrants into responsible leadership by their talents. (It was a Universal film, but "An American Tail" was the only movie my parents took us to see TWICE in the theater when I was a kid). I think you could trace the decline in meaningful storytelling to a political posture in China that is deeply at odds with anything that smacks of peasant uprisings, or power to the people, which in spite of its corporate undertones in production Hollywood writers actually used to somewhat be allowed to champion. Remember that even though these are huge multinational corporations, most actual screenwriters were for all functional purposes extreme liberals or communists up until they were killed and replaced with regurgitating AI bots in the mid-2000s.
If you didn't grow up with Bluth's work and only know his studio's output from the later years (the unyielding torrent of direct to video Land Before Time sequels)...you really owe it to yourself to watch his studio's earlier stuff. It came at the moment where he had just struck off from Disney, disenfranchised by the output of the other major animation houses, and has his clearest vision.
The Secret of NIMH is, IMHO, one of the finest animated movies ever made, but An American Tail, the original Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven are all masterpieces in the own and couldn't really be matched in terms of narrative and animation excellence until the early Pixar movies. They definitely have a distinct aesthetic and a certain style of animation and storytelling unique to the production house.
They lost their way somewhere, I think it was Rock-a-Doodle, and the studio just started hemorrhaging money and losing connection with their audience. Their last two major gasps were Anastasia, a beautifully animated film with a poorly targeted audience demographic and Titan A.E., an ambition mixed-media project, which apparently ran out of money (among other problems) during production and resulted in some hilariously bad computer generated graphics at the end but I think stands up better than Disney's Treasure Planet response.
In the end, the studio floated themselves on cheaply produced, but child friendly, direct to video sequels of The Land Before Time, which is notable as being an unbroked series of sequels dating from 1988 to 2016 which at least has had the advantage of being a series of characters I can share with nieces and nephews who also grew up with the same characters...almost like Star Wars.
Immediately reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Tail - although a children's movie even back then it striked me as odd that names were Americanized.