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
If you go back to-I think it was Hunchback, then there was Hercules-those picture were sagging. They were in a formula groove. The audience knew that. The box office fell off, but it came back up with Tarzan.
You know what, the second Dragon's Lair game... I think very few people saw it. And Dirk and Daphne did get married and they had children. They have 13 kids. And she still looks great!
We've written a song for this game, which is a bubble-gum song and is only to be listened to once, I think.
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.
When I think about how fat the studios have become, I laugh. You have 24 people in the layout department-we're fat with personnel. All the rules and attitudes change in that kind of environment.
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.
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.
With movies, you are always in search is a good story, one that everyone will relate to and love. I love finding those stories and creating a visual world to tell the story.
Reese Witherspoon. She's sophisticated enough that you just like her. You like her and she's smart.
How can you have a director that doesn't go to work with the crew every day and talk to them?
I think we have to bottom out. When the studios jump out of the ring, perhaps the artist can get back in.
The studios will go wherever they smell money. It's like sharks to the blood.
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.
It just seems like the whole, overall animation world is trying to go where maybe animation doesn't belong.