There is pretty much just one name that means a cartoon is going to be good and it rhymes with Malt Bisney. Anything else and you’re taking your life into your own hands. Ezra found that out the hard way back in 1989 when, for the first time in his young life, he hated a movie.
Now he shares that hate with you, the Don Bluth animated picture All Dogs Go To Heaven. The songs are lame, the plot disjointed, and the characters weird (note: not all of us agree that weird characters are a bad thing), but this mess doesn’t stop us from being our buoyant, likable selves (note: not all of us are likable).
One plus is that the girl is animated really beautifully, and the voice actor makes her sound adorable.Hey, don’t forget about Studio Ghibli. I’d say they’re better than Disney.Don Bluth did work for Disney for a long time, and it’s clear he wanted his animation style to differ from the Disney house style. But he went too far into grime and darkness. I haven’t checked in a while, but I remember liking “An American Tale.”I actually really like “The Secret of NIMH.” It sort of reminds me of the animated version of “Watershed Down.” Now THAT’S pure nightmare fuel for a little child, but a pretty great movie.
Truth be told, I watched this movie as a kid only because I watched the television show it was based off of – but there was one thing that put me down in listening to this – brought up by the fact that it was brought up that this movie was really dark, and that Burt Reynalds seemed to be ‘not quite phoning it in’Originally, he was not going to be advertised as much as being in this movie, instead, the voice actor for the little girl, Judith Barsi, was going to be promoted. You might also remember here from what you considered a better Don Bluth movie, as Duckie from Land Before Time.Unfortunately, shortly before the film was finished, she and her mother were murdered by her father. Details are really bad, so I will not go into it – but a quick wikipedia search can find the details if you want to be THOROUGHLY depressed. She was ten. In response, Burt actually made a rather stand up decision – saying that they could use him in more advertising space to hopefully promote the film better, and actually recorded what I considered a kind of decent song for use in the credits, Love Survives. It’s not disney masterpiece, yeah. But it’s still an interesting, if sad case of cinema.Also, while Don Bluth’s movies were hit and miss at best, you can’t fault him for animation – or the fact that he genuinely seems to be a really upstanding fellow. He runs a theatre out of his HOUSE, and even before his kickstarter, has reached out to podcasts to actually discuss his work. In fact, one of those was an Animation Podcast, which may just be the disney one you’re looking for. While it does touch on other animated films, that was their main focus as far as I remember – and they got a lot of people who worked in different areas of the business, Don Bluth included, to talk with them. Really interesting.
Katlyn, this is an awesome comment. After we stopped recording, we talked at length about Judith. It’s unbelievably terrible. Her voice acting and character design were a definite high point of this film.As mentioned, I loved the darkness and the animation. I’m going to look up some of those Bluth interviews because my question about why it’s so hard to make animated films was a genuine one. It’s crazy to have one company be so much better at it than anybody else.
The absolute worst Disney movie is “Treasure Planet”. A space version of Treasure Island with a animated 90’s ponytail with the hair shaved underneath Jim Hawkins voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt and 2 PAINFUL characters: a robot voiced by Martin Short & unknown animal voiced by David Hyde Pierce. It is the ONLY Disney movie that has taken me more than one sitting to make it through. It took 3. You’ve been warned.
Sold!