An American Tail (1986)

12 October 2019

I grew up in the 80s, and I remember the films that period of time where there were studios other than Disney making animated films. Nothing was as powerful a force as the films of Don Bluth, the former Disney animator, which gave us a couple distinct films of that era: Anastasia, All Dogs go to Heaven, The Secret of NIMH, and An American Tail (distributed by Amblin in 1986).

This film has a few things going for it: the first is a very simple story about a mouse family immigrating from America, "where there are no cats" -- starting out with such an obvious fallacy that any child can understand it, and it's presented directly to the audience (in song nonetheless). The second is a lot of charming characters that kids can grasp onto: Tiger the vegetarian cat (voiced by Dom DeLuise), Henri the pigeon saying to "never say never" (Christopher Plummer), or even the main character Fievel (Phillip Glasser), with a distinguishable hat that he grows into over the course of the film. They're very basic characters that as a child I could identify with and relate to very easily. The animation at this time was on par with Disney, arguably exceeding expectations as Disney tried to recalibrate itself for most of the 1980s (eventually doing so with The Little Mermaid in 1989).

As I've gotten older and the themes have become more adult to me, it isn't lost on me how the naivety and innocence of youth is reflected in this film, and Fievel is forced to grow up after [temporarily] losing his family. Bluth's films usually followed adult themes but sugar coated them for theaters... from above: politics, the alterlife, displacement/eviction, and immigration respectively. Watching it in today's world, the tone of the american dream also sounds a little bittersweet, as this immigration hope 7/10

29 November 2008

N/A 10/10