Don Bluth

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Don Bluth (2006)

Don Virgil Bluth (born September 13, 1937 in El Paso , Texas ) is an American director , producer and screenwriter , who was best known for his work on numerous animated films , first at the Disney studio and later on himself.

Life

childhood

Don Bluth grew up as the son of an extended Texas family on a farm in Payson , Utah . After seeing Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the age of six , he began to paint with passion and decided, as a child, to try his hand at making cartoons. After the family moved to Santa Monica , California in 1954 , young Don graduated from high school and sent a portfolio of drawings to Disney Studios . His work was recognized and he was hired as a draftsman for intermediate frames in cartoons such as Sleeping Beauty .

Different ways

After a year, Bluth left Disney and served as a Mormon missionary in Argentina for two and a half years . Upon his return he graduated from Brigham Young University in Provo with a degree in English literature and then opened a theater with his brother Toby. After some time, however, Don turned back to the film business, he started as a layout artist at the television production company Filmation Studios and soon rose to head the animation department.

Return to Disney

After three years at Filmation Studios, Bluth returned to Disney in 1971, where after the death of the legendary company founder, the direction for the future was still being sought. After working on the cartoon Robin Hood (1973), he was appointed animation director for Winnie the Pooh (1974) and Bernard and Bianca (1977). In contrast to some thrifty producers, Bluth attached importance to precise, high-quality drawing technology and an intelligent story that the audience should also demand.

During this time I got in touch with the illustrators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy . The three of them developed more and more of their own ideas and soon saw no way of realizing them within the Disney production structure.

In-house productions

In September 1979, Bluth, Goldman and Pomeroy left Disney together and set up their own studio, which in 1982 published the dark literary film adaptation of Mrs. Brisby and the Secret of NIMH . The hit Feivel, the mouse wanderer, produced in cooperation with Steven Spielberg , followed in 1986 .

After the studio was relocated to Dublin, Ireland in November 1986, other cartoons followed, the most famous of which is probably the dinosaur adventure In a Land Before Time (1988). This was followed by the relatively high-profile Anastasia (1997) and the science fiction film Titan AE (2000), which became a catastrophic flop for the studio and production company and led to the closure of the Fox animation studio in Phoenix , Arizona . As a reaction to this, Bluth and colleagues initially switched to the design of computer games, but a few years later they again founded a film company, Don Bluth Films, Inc.

Since the beginning of 2008, Bluth has been preparing the film adaptation of the 1983 computer game Dragon's Lair , on which he himself worked. A start date has not yet been set.

profile

Don Bluth influenced the Disney productions of his time through a previously rarely achieved seriousness and the high value that he placed on the quality of each individual animation. After he said goodbye to Disney, this influence on his own films only increased. Often the viewers have to deal with the sudden and often quite brutal death of an important character and find their way through an extremely harsh, threatening reality (such as after the death of Littlefoot's mother in In a Land Before Time and even more in the generally gloomy Mrs. Brisby and the Secret of NIMH ). That is why film critics occasionally ask whether his films are suitable for children.

Visually, Bluth's work is characterized by a high degree of precision and richness of detail, the movements of the figures are softer and more fluid than average. A characteristic is the strong use of facial movements: the characters, such as the mouse Feivel in the film of the same name, move their faces, blink and wiggle their noses, move their mouths and roll their eyes, which makes them look more lively. While the depiction of cartoon characters is more exaggerated and, due to the violent gestures, often more unfocused than, for example, in Disney productions, Bluth attaches great importance to naturalness when depicting realistic, human figures. Many scenes in which human actors act are therefore filmed with real actors, whose movements are adopted directly ( rotoscopy ) or whose poses that define the movement serve as models for the animators.

Filmography (selection)

Movies
Short films
  • 2009: Gift of the Hoopoe
Various tasks
Video games
  • 1983: Dragon's Lair
  • 1984: Space Ace
  • 1991: Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp
  • 1992: Dragon's Lair III: Curse of Mordread
  • 2002: Dragon's Lair 3D: Return to the Lair

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bluth, Don
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bluth, Don Virgil (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American director, producer and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH El Paso , Texas, USA