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
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 knew nothing about sci-fi. We took it. I figured, space hardware, everybody's seen, and you can call in Industrial Light & Magic and all the pros in the world.
The best studio exec that we worked with was Bill Mechanic at Fox, because he was a listener. He was pliable, flexible.
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.
Computers have taken so much drudgery out of it. Just one to mention, painting the picture. It used to be that everything was wet, everything was with a brush. Everything was wiggle it in water, wipe out your brush, get a new jar of paint, spill the paint, mop it up.
Disney knows that they're in a formulaic rut, and they're trying very hard, I think, to find something that's different. They've got so much money, they can throw it at anything.
Dragon's Lair, for some reason, still commands shelf-life. If you go into a store, they will have Dragon's Lair somewhere in the store. And for 18 years this has been going on. So let's say that must mean there's an audience that wants to see it.
A picture will wind up costing $90 million dollars... Well, animation can't stand that. It can't bear the weight of a $90 million dollar budget, because it can't recoup. Then everybody's surprised when it only pulls in $50-$60 million domestic.
The studios are not hiring right now, and they're beginning to have second thoughts about what they're producing. Even Dreamworks.
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.