Don Bluth
Don Bluth
Donald Virgil "Don" Bluthis an American animator, film director, producer, writer, production designer, video game designer and animation instructor who is known for directing animated films, such as The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heavenand Anastasia, and for his involvement in the LaserDisc game Dragon's Lair. He is also known for competing with former employer Walt Disney Productions during the years leading up to the films that would make up the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAnimator
Date of Birth13 September 1937
CityEl Paso, TX
CountryUnited States of America
When we originally made the game Dragon's Lair, we had no idea the impact it would have on the game market. It was something new at the time; it was the first of the laserdisc games, and random-access was a brand-new technology.
There's about 260 rooms in the new castle which you go through, but it's all about the game play.
If you look at the game and everything, it's not quite like looking at an animated film, because that's total character. This, this is really movement, but it's got funny little things if you look for the humor. They're actually getting to the character.
Shelf-life for a regular video game usually is about three to five years, and that's it.
But I've been surprised over the years. I mean, someone told me the other day that maybe 360 million people have played this game in the world. That's a lot of people.
We had this laserdisc before, you know, and now you just put it on this little teeny-weeny thing.
We figured out that we were going to have to do CGI and 2-D animation on screen at the same time. Sixty-five percent of the picture is CGI. That's a big mix. When you marry those two, they can either look very foreign to each other, or they look like they belong together.
We didn't know any better, so we rushed in. We did the best you could. On Secret of NIMH, we had two layout people, three background people, and 10 animators. That's how we made the movie.
I'm saddened to see that everyone's pitched out the baby with the bath, in that we say that it can't be one or the other, it could be both. I mean, just because we listen to classical music doesn't mean that we can't listen to jazz.
We've written a song for this game, which is a bubble-gum song and is only to be listened to once, I think.
I can look at one that Warner Brothers just did - The Iron Giant. A really cool movie. I truly enjoyed that movie.
I have been involved with script approval, approvals of character designs and the art direction, on kind of a consultant basis.
Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them-the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome.
Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them - the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome.