Word: bluth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Disney and Don Bluth can lead the way. Walt Disney, after all, created the genre, turning barnyard animals into superstars and a Sunday-supplement curiosity into the movie's most enduring subspecies. Bluth, a Disney renegade, showed his old masters that the cartoon possessed a social vitality for the '80s. Bluth's The Secret of NIMH was a parable on animal experimentation; An American Tail found much to say, endearingly, about melting-pot prejudice; The Land Before Time found love and death among the dinosaurs. Now Disney and Bluth have launched a welcome new Thanksgiving tradition, each producing a feature...
...Dogs Go to Heaven, Bluth takes a vacation from portent and dips into anecdote. Listen for familiar echoes (Little Miss Marker, Heaven Can Wait, even Disney's 1988 cartoon Oliver & Company) in the story of Charlie, a German shepherd who is reprieved from death and befriends a little girl kidnaped by his scurvy old gang. Visually, the picture is swathed in Bluth's trademark golden browns and moody blues. Aurally, it's a reunion of the Burt Pack: Burt Reynolds is the voice of Charlie, Loni Anderson is the moll Flo, the exuberantly flustered Dom DeLuise is Charlie...
...have been taught to believe are the experiences of our immigrant ancestors, and they are imaginatively enlivened by being rendered from a mouse's-eye view. The animation and the backgrounds occasionally fall below classic Disney standards, but the characterizations, both visual and vocal, are entirely endearing. Since Director Bluth (The Secret of NIMH) is a Disney graduate who has been bluntly critical of his former studio's current standards and practices in this field, his mouse may have a subtext to match its soul...
...NIMH), live in an underground palace as glimmering and precise as the Wizard's wonderful Oz. Our heroine, the lady mouse Mrs. Brisby, enlists the rats' aid to save her family from imminent death; she falls down a hole and into a world of effulgent psychedelia. The Bluth artists boast that more than 600 colors were used in the 1.5 million drawings that compose this 82-min. adventure. The eye of a Douanier Rousseau might discern each hue; others can simply open their eyes, and their mouths, in appreciative pleasure...
...longueurs, and moments when the plot trips, like Jeremy, over its own complications. Even here there are vagrant delights: a funny, scary chase scene, hints of death and resurrection, and enough sci-fi elements to keep teen-agers happy. But The Secret of NIMH is more important as Bon Bluth's declaration of dependence on a form of popular art that can infuse every corner of the imagination with its rainbow light. If Uncle Walt were to gaze on his renegade nephews, even he might approve...