Word: fievel
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This type of success story is familiar, written by everyone from Frank McCourt to the directors of the animated movie Fievel Goes West. In this version, though, the sequence is slightly different. It begins, of course, with your customary immigrant to the United States. She is a girl born in Eastern Europe, now a teenager, and unable to really speak English fluently...
Such acclaim breeds competition, and in the past year half a dozen non- Disney animated features were released (Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, Cool World, Rock-a-Doodle, Bebe's Kids and Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland). Some of these had charm to spare; others were what industry analyst Art Murphy calls "spinach pictures -- family films that are good for you." Popeye eats spinach, kids don't; the six films together managed just over half the take of Beauty and the Beast. It all proves the difficulty of matching either Disney's financial commitment...
...note of welcome social progress. After a half-century's domination by Wasps like Mickey and Mighty, the world of animated film is happily invaded by a Jewish mouse. He is named Fievel Mousekewitz, and the tale told by An American Tail is of his arrival on these shores a century ago as an immigrant from czarist Russia...
...does he have troubles. Swept out of his family bosom and overboard from the ship carrying them to the New World by an Atlantic storm, Fievel bobs into New York harbor in a bottle. Quickly he discovers that American streets are not paved with cheese and that whoever said the golden land was free of cats was, well, exaggerating. Not to worry, though. Fievel (whose voice is supplied by eight-year-old Actor Phillip Glasser) is fully as brave and resourceful as any homogenized Disney rodent. And he is capable of exposing his most vulnerable feelings as few animated critters...
...Fievel's adventures on his way to reunion with his family are fully consonant with what we 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...
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