The Bluth Factor: The Land Before Time

After reviewing both Rock-A-Doodle and All Dogs Go To Heaven, I thought I kind of owed it to the Sullivan Bluth Studios to take a look at one of their more successful films. The Land Before Time, a tale of five young dinosaurs who set out in search of greener valleys, was one of Bluth’s biggest commercial successes. Despite mixed reaction from the critics, the movie performed well at the box office and furthered Bluth’s goal of providing meaningful competition for Disney. The Land Before Time was released the same weekend as Disney’s Oliver and Company and although the Disney film ultimately won the battle for gross domestic earnings, the Bluth movie had the more successful opening weekend and a higher worldwide gross. Over the years, the movie’s legacy has become somewhat muddied; it is the current reigning champion of direct to home market sequels with no less than twelve to its name, none of which had any involvement from the Sullivan Bluth crew. So twenty-one years after its original release, how does the original film hold up? Surprisingly well.

Littlefoot is a baby brontosaurus*. His family consists of two grandparents and his mother. With no father in sight and the elder dinos presumably past egg-laying age, Littlefoot is introduced by the narration as the tiny herd’s only hope for the future. (He is not the last of his kind, as Roger Ebert has mistakenly stated in both print and television reviews of the film, then pointing out the supposed inconsistency of the narration later claiming that many generations of descendants of all five dinos continued to thrive for years to come. The movie doesn’t go out of its way to make the distinction, but it’s bugged me for years that a famous film critic – for whom I otherwise have nothing but respect – somehow got this wrong when I understood it at age ten.) A food shortage has forced all of the dinosaur herds to travel in search of the legendary Great Valley, a place of abundant vegetation where no dino will ever go hungry again. Life soon becomes even more difficult for Littlefoot when an earthquake separates him from his grandparents and his mother is fatally injured (either by the earthquake or in protecting her son from the rampaging tyrannosaurus “Sharptooth;” the movie doesn’t make it clear which). The newly orphaned Littlefoot must lead his newfound friends – Cera, Ducky, Petrie, and Spike - to the Great Valley or face starvation as food grows more and more scarce,

Littlefoot may not be the most compelling protagonist ever, but he works for the purposes of this story. His plight is sympathetic and his performance – both vocal and visual – is convincingly childlike and appealing. His biggest heroic quality is his concern for the other dinosaurs, which is what keeps him going after he loses his mother and spurs on his progression not only towards the Great Valley, but also towards adulthood, the transition from being taken care of to taking care of others. He is persistent, good at coming up with a plan, and the only one of the dinosaurs who knows the way to the Great Valley, the last fact being chiefly responsible for his status as the group’s leader. The narration outright says at one point that the main reason that the other dinosaurs continue to follow Littlefoot after he is proven very wrong in his belief that Sharptooth is dead is that he is the only one who knows how to get to the Great Valley. This is odd, since the directions for reaching the Great Valley are essentially “go in one direction past two landmarks.” So if the other dinos really thought that Littlefoot was an incompetent leader, they could probably have learned the path to the valley for themselves and ditched him. But Littlefoot is a good leader, even if those qualities don’t come out until later on.

The dinosaurs who follow Littlefoot to the Great Valley mostly fall into the category of “comic relief,” with one exception. Duck the parasaurolophus and Petrie the pteranadon are both intended to provide lighter moments in the story. They are kind of the same character, both very high energy and very small. Ducky is more enthusiastic, ending a lot of her sentences with a happy “Yup, yup, yup.” She is the one character who occasionally becomes more irritating than adorable. Petrie is the more neurotic of the two, due largely to the fact that he cannot fly. Rounding out the comic characters is Spike the stegosaurus. Spike is basically a big puppy dog, mainly concerned with eating and sleeping. He is loyal and capable of helping out when the group needs some muscle, but he doesn’t speak and mostly does what the others tell him to do. The depiction of one of the little dinosaurs as more of a pet than a child doesn’t bother me as much as the same situation with a very similar character did in Disney’s Dinosaur, mostly because Spike is a newborn baby. Ducky discovers him as an egg about to hatch with no other dinosaurs around. So Spike’s limitations could be due to his extremely young age rather than his whole species operating on a lower level than most other dinosaurs.



Little Cera the triceratops is the remaining character in Littlefoot’s tiny herd. She is the “Grumpy” of the film and it’s not just because of her bad attitude. She has the strongest personality of any character in the movie and it gets her into nothing but trouble. She is proud, self-centered, overconfident, and even downright mean to Littlefoot, going so far as to insult his dead mother. Because of this, Cera is the only character who undergoes real change over the course of the film. Littlefoot may have to learn to survive without his mother and Petrie may need to figure out how to fly, but Cera must undergo an alteration of her personality, which includes one or two blows to her sizeable ego. Cera also serves as a good counterexample to Littlefoot’s good leadership. When she convinces the other dinosaurs to follow her down an easier path that Littlefoot insists is the wrong way, she fails to even notice when first Petrie, then Ducky and Spike fall behind and soon all find themselves in dire peril. This allows Littlefoot to be the hero and come to their rescue and Cera’s as well, after she runs into some unfriendly dinosaurs.

The rest of the cast is made up of very secondary characters. Littlefoot’s mother is exactly what you would expect her to be: loving, protective, and self-sacrificing. His grandparents barely have any lines and serve almost no purpose in the story beyond ensuring that Littlefoot will have someone waiting for him when he reaches the Great Valley. The menacing tyrannosaurus Sharptooth is less of a character than a monster. He never talks or shows any interest in anything besides attacking and devouring other dinosaurs.

Part of what keeps The Land Before Time on the right track is its simple, straightforward plot. Littlefoot’s goal is always to get to the Great Valley. He may have to accomplish additional tasks along the way: get his friends out of trouble, escape from Sharptooth, figure out how to go on without his mother, and so on. But from the minute that the food shortage is first mentioned, it’s completely clear that Littlefoot’s main job is to get from point A to point B. He and his friends may have a number of reasons for wanting to get to the Great Valley, reuniting with their families being a big one. But the main motivation for their journey remains as clear as their destination: if they do not make it to the Great Valley, they will die of starvation.



This may sound pretty grim, but the film actually does a good job of keeping its tone from becoming either too bleak or too light. The life or death nature of the dinosaurs’ plight is mostly confined to the narration. The characters talk about being hungry from time to time, but we never see them grow thin or weak from lack of food. On the flip side, the comedy of the movie is kept secondary to the main drama and the more comedic characters all have some part in the story beyond just providing laughs. The emotional touchstone of the film is, of course, the death of Littlefoot’s mother and aside from one cheeseball line of dialogue that threatens to break the mood (“Let your heart guide you. It whispers, so listen closely.”), it’s pretty effecting. Much of this is due to a very understated and sincere performance by then child actor Gabriel Damon. Littlefoot’s lines are appropriately childlike and his grief never becomes over the top. He insists to his mother that she can get up, but his tears and breaking voice suggest that deep down, he knows that she can’t and never will again.

I can remember print ads from when this movie was in theaters quoting a critic who dubbed the film “a prehistoric Bambi.” This wasn’t surprising; most animated films that feature a young animal whose mother dies are going to get compared to Bambi. What did surprise me seeing the film for the first time in years is just how much of the film is an homage to Bambi. While it doesn’t follow the exact same plot as the other film and there are also nods to other classic Disney movies – most obviously the “Rite of Spring” sequence from Fantasia, Bambi was clearly a big inspiration for the artists working on The Land Before Time. There are obvious echoes of big moments, like the death of Littlefoot’s mother and the shot moments before where Littlefoot is searching for her and calls out with dialogue very similar to Bambi’s in the analogous scene from that movie. There are smaller bits that feel very familiar, like the prehistoric creatures that crowd around to observe Littlefoot’s birth the way the woodland animals gathered to meet the newborn prince of the forest, the one visiting beast that looks into Littlefoot’s mouth as he yawns just like Thumper stole a glimpse at baby Bambi’s tonsils, and even the tiny pteradactyls fighting over a berry, which is reminiscent of two baby birds doing the same thing in Bambi. From time to time, a caught a subtle staging device that also seemed to be pulled from Bambi. When Littlefoot and Cera fight while the other dinosaurs watch, the shadows of the two combatants pass over the onlookers, much as the shadows of Bambi and rival buck Ronno fall over Faline while she watched them compete for her. Keep in mind that many of the artists working at Sullivan Bluth Studios at the time were people with a huge amount of respect for the older Disney films and in some cases, people who had left the Disney studio because they felt Disney was no longer making movies of that kind. In this case, the imitation of Bambi is definitely a very sincere form of flattery.



Since all of its protagonists are juvenile dinosaurs, the movie features a high level of cute. Littlefoot and his friends all have eyelashes and cute little round ears, which I kind of doubt are accurate to paleontologist’s view of what infant dinosaurs looked like. Cute is usually a matter of personal taste and in this case, I think the character designs generally stay on the right side of the line between “awww” inspiring and nausea inducing. What bugs me more than the characters’ eyelashes, rosy cheeks, and baby faces is their size. I’ve seen enough artist’s renderings, pseudo-documentaries, and actual fossils to know that baby dinosaurs were tiny in comparison to their gigantic parents. But Petrie is small enough to walk around atop Littlefoot’s head, Ducky is barely half his size, and Littlefoot himself is usually no bigger than his mother’s head. I say usually because there is some inconsistency in the film regarding the characters’ size relative to each other, other dinosaurs, and certain objects. I can understand the desire to make the main characters small to emphasize their vulnerability in the big savage world they must journey through. But all of them are so miniscule that I started to wonder whether the real reason the dinosaurs died out was because they kept accidentally stepping on their own young. Regardless, the artists at Sullivan Bluth Studios did some of their best work on this film, from the appealing scampering of the baby dinos to the huge and majestic adult dinosaurs to the world they all inhabit, at turns harsh and beautiful.



There’s an odd subplot to the film about the rather racist attitude the dinosaurs have towards each other. They tend to keep to their own kind, so much so that shortly after Littlefoot meets Cera for the first time, her father steps in and sternly informs the both of them that “three-horns don’t play with longnecks.” (The films has the dinos use cutesy descriptive terms to identify the various species.) It’s a message that Cera takes very much to heart. The weird thing is that Littlefoot’s own mother is equally in favor of this separation of the species, for no reason other than that it has always been that way. I’m not suggesting that the film implies that this is a good thing; far from it. Part of the point of the film is that Littlefoot bands together with four different dinos, all of different species, in order to find the Great Valley. But I feel like there’s a scene missing towards the end where the adult dinosaurs realize the error of their ways. I’m not asking for a big speech about the importance of dino diversity. I just think Cera’s father in particular should have a moment where he looks at his daughter happily playing with her new friends and realizes that she never could have made it back to her family if she hadn’t joined up with these four other dinosaurs with their various abilities that helped all of them to survive. Ducky’s parents do seem cool with the idea of adopting the evidently orphaned Spike, but since Daddy Topps was the big proponent of this faulty notion, I think he should have been made to see that he was wrong in the end. This part of the story was evidently more prominent in earlier drafts, to the point where the kid dinos initially didn’t get along and had to learn to do so. But in the final film, Cera is the only one who has this problem. The rest of the young dinosaurs are fast friends almost from the moment they meet.

The Land Before Time is not a musical. It’s a surprising choice given the success of Bluth’s previous feature An American Tail and its hit song “Somewhere Out There.” It may have been a decision by Bluth, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas – the last two being two of the film’s executive producers – or some combination of the three that singing dinosaurs would tax the audience’s suspension of disbelief a little too much. Or maybe Bluth, his co-producers Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, or some other member of Bluth’s team wanted to break out of the musical mold. Whatever the reasoning, the film features just one song. “If We Hold On Together” plays in instrumental form throughout the film, but is only heard with lyrics over the end credits, sung by none other than Diana Ross. It is a very pretty song, though it never achieved quite the success that “Somewhere Out There” did. The film’s score is by prolific composer James Horner, whose other screen credits include everything from Titanic to two of the Star Trek movies to Balto, and creates the right balance of emotion and whimsy.



If there’s one main problem that The Land Before Time suffers from, it’s the oddly disjointed feeling of the narrative. Some parts of the film feel more like isolated incidents that don’t quite connect up with the whole. The biggest comes towards the end when Littlefoot, just after leading his friends to a major victory, despairs of ever finding the Great Valley. There’s no transition between these two scenes to suggest why Littlefoot would feel this way after one of his biggest successes and as a result, the events seem strangely unconnected. This could possibly be the result of some of the scenes that were cut from the film. Bluth and Spielberg reportedly had some very different ideas about what this movie should be, some of which resulted in late changes to the film. About ten minutes of footage – mostly featuring the young heroes in danger and Sharptooth being scary – were cut to make the film less frightening for young viewers, leaving the film’s final running time at just over an hour. Including these missing scenes might have made for a smoother storyline, but since those scenes have never been shown to the public, I can only say that the end product has parts that never quite connect up.

The Land Before Time never reinvents the wheel, but perhaps that’s part of the reason why it was successful. The simplicity of the story actually becomes one of its strengths, helping the film to avoid the convoluted plots that caused trouble for many of Bluth’s later movie. By combining the talents of the studio’s artists with inspiration from classic animated films and tying it all to the kid-friendly hook of dinosaurs, Bluth succeeded in making a crowd-pleasing movie that, while not perfect, remains entertaining to watch.


*Yes, I know that technically he's an apatosaurus, but "brontosaurus" is still considered a legitimate generic term for any sauropod dinosaurs. And I just plain like it better. "Brontosarus" means "thunder lizard," which conjures up images of creatures so massive that their footfalls sounded like thunder. That is cool. Aside from lacking many of the hard consonants that make "brontosaurus" just plain sound cool, "Apatosaurus" means "deceptive lizard," a name derived from the fact that it's bones were easy to confuse with those of other dinosaurs. That is lame. So even if it's not technically correct, the ten year old in me is sticking with "brontosaurus."


All images in this article are copyright Universal Pictures.

The Bluth Factor: All Dogs Go To Heaven

Right up until the end, the late 1980s were a good time for Don Bluth. After the disappointing box office performance of The Secret of NIMH and some intriguing experiments in fully-animated video games that ran up against the collapse of the industry in the first half of the decade, Bluth partnered with businessman Morris Sullivan to form Sullivan Bluth Studios. The new studio had two bona fide successes under its belt with An American Tail and The Land Before Time. By the end of 1988, the studio was working on its next feature: All Dogs Go To Heaven. Unfortunately, All Dogs Go To Heaven marked the start of a slump for Sullivan Bluth Studios, in part because Bluth and crew’s desire to get Disney back to producing quality films by providing them with strong competition worked a little too well. The Land Before Time had proved to be a worthy opponent for Disney’s Oliver and Company released the same year, the latter outgrossing the former by only around $5 million. But the following year, Disney the sleeping giant was fully awake and quickly set about stepping on Sullivan Bluth and their latest film. Disney’s The Little Mermaid beat out All Dogs Go To Heaven both critically and commercially. The Bluth film made just $26 million dollars in its US release, compared to Mermaid’s roughly $84 million. It eventually recovered through strong video sales, but the damage was done. Investor Goldcrest Films seemed to have lost faith in Sullivan Bluth’s ability to deliver a crowd-pleasing movie, judging from the number of test screenings and last minute changes their next film was subjected to. That film turned out to be Rock-A-Doodle, which had even less success with critics and audiences than All Dogs Go To Heaven did, forcing the studio to declare bankruptcy.

If it hadn’t been for Disney’s successful return to the animated fairy tales that had made the studio famous, would All Dogs Go To Heaven have been a box office hit? My guess is no. While sharing its release day with The Little Mermaid may have drawn audiences away, All Dogs Go To Heaven had plenty of problems of its own. It’s a confusing, unattractive mess of a film that marked the beginning of a downturn for Bluth’s movies in quality as well as financial viability.

The film gets off to a confusing start, as dachshund Itchy tries to break his “boss” and best friend Charlie out from behind a pipe in an underground tunnel for reasons not immediately clear. The dogs get shot at by unseen assailants in the course of their jailbreak from what turns out to be the city pound. The upbeat music identifies the scene as comedy, the first of several that will treat life and death as laughing matters in a way that never quite works. Then the scene shifts to a grounded boat on the Louisiana bayou in the year 1939. The time and place have very little bearing on the story, so the bit of text identifying them is largely useless. The boat serves as a canine casino, where the patrons are watching a literal rat race and betting on the outcome. The race ends, the few winners claim their meager steak earnings, and the dogs complain that they’re being ripped off. About five minutes in, Charlie and Itchy make their appearance at the club and the threads of plot are slowly tied together.

Charlie is part-owner of the casino. He was on “death row” before Itchy helped him break out, but now he’s back, to the delight of the club’s patrons and the dismay of Charlie’s partner Carface. Carface wants the club to himself, so he decides to get rid of Charlie, permanently. For some reason, he first makes a show of convincing Charlie that he is still a wanted dog and that the first place “they” will look for him is at the casino, so Charlie should take his share of the steaks and set up shop elsewhere. He then takes Charlie to Mardi Gras (one of those few references to the story’s Louisiana setting), gets him drunk, has him blindfolded, and hits him with a car. Sound confusing? It is. We have no idea why Charlie was on “death row” or who “they” are who might come looking for him. The fact that he was at the pound seems to suggest that he was picked up by the local dogcatcher, but why would humans look for Charlie at a dog betting parlor they are presumably unaware of? Charlie claims he was “framed” for whatever his crime was, but we never learn if this is true, who might have framed him, or why. And why does Carface go through all the trouble of giving Charlie a big sendoff when his plan all along is to kill him? Who is Carface trying to fool?



Anyway, Charlie’s death takes place offscreen and we just see the car fly off a pier and into the water. (This scene and Charlie's later nightmare were trimmed down to ensure a "G" rating for the film.) Charlie zooms through some effects animation and is deposited at Heaven’s door. Because Charlie is a dog, he is assumed to be a good and loyal creature and therefore gets a free pass into Heaven. Finding his afterlife completely boring, Charlie manages to keep the canine angel who shows him around Heaven distracted long enough to wind the watch that represents his life and return to the mortal world. In another bit of unnecessary complication, Charlie enters Heaven wearing another watch that Carface gave him as a parting gift. The only difference between the two watches is that one hangs from a red band and the other has a blue band. There is a moment where Charlie exchanges one watch for the other, but since little effort is made to call the audience’s attention to the gesture, the whole thing is just confusing.

Alive once more, Charlie hooks back up with Itchy and starts plotting to take down Carface. He figures that his ex-partner must be running some kind of scheme for the club to have done so well while Charlie was doing time and goes to investigate. Carface does indeed have an ace up his sleeve in the form of a little human girl named Anne-Marie who can talk to animals. (The dogs can only understand other dogs.) Carface has her ask one of the rats which rat will be winning the next race and uses that information to fix the odds. Seeing his opportunity to both ruin Carface and enrich himself, Charlie “rescues” Anne-Marie. He spends most of the remainder of the movie using her pretty much the same way Carface did while trying to convince her – and possibly himself – that he isn’t.



The trouble with Charlie is that he neither particularly likeable nor very interesting. He is a scoundrel. His biggest ambition is to have his own casino and put Carface out of business and he’s perfectly willing to toy with Anne-Marie’s hopes and dreams to get what he wants. That would all be fine if Charlie had some hook that him interesting or admirable in spite of his questionable morals. But Charlie is not smart or charming or even ruthless enough to be compelling. He spends most of his time using Anne-Marie and berating Itchy, his only real friend in the world. He is not so clever in manipulating Anne-Marie that his intelligence becomes an admirable trait. Rather than carefully stringing her along, Charlie only does anything nice for Anne-Marie when she is obviously miserable or outright threatening to leave. I had mistakenly remembered that Charlie “reads” her “Robin Hood” (actually a copy of “War and Peace” held upside-down) as a bedtime story as part of a plan to convince her that he – unlike Carface – will be using at least some of the profits from gambling with her help to aid the poor. But actually, the idea of giving the money to the needy is something Charlie comes up with on the fly when Anne-Marie accuses him of being just like Carface and it is Anne-Marie who makes the connection to Robin Hood.

Charlie’s goals are all short-lived and largely uninteresting. He wants to break out of the pound and within minutes, he’s free. He barely spends five minutes in Heaven before escaping back to Earth. With Anne-Marie to help him sneak into the various human gambling venues and cheat, he’s soon financially well off and the proud owner of Charlie’s Place. (I can’t figure out why Charlie needs the money, since we see Itchy building their new casino out of scrap cars and it’s established that dogs use steaks as currency.) His real problem is that he is a self-centered jerk and for most of the movie, he makes zero progress on that. Nearly an hour into the film, Anne-Marie finds her way to the home and family she has always longed for. Despite the fact that he already has his casino up and running, Charlie callously uses her affection for him to lure her away. With just over fifteen minutes left in the film, Charlie is still acting totally in his own self-interest, with no regard for what’s best for little Anne-Marie. Because Charlie remains completely selfish for so long, Charlie’s change of character is crammed in at the end of the film rather than revealed gradually over time and feels much less genuine for it.



Anne-Marie, unfortunately, is just another cloyingly cute little kid manufactured for maximum amounts of adorable. She looks a lot like a very young Snow White. She is an orphan whose one wish is to have a mommy and daddy of her own. She is less annoying than Edmond from Rock-A-Doodle, mainly because she doesn’t have a lisp and isn’t the film’s lead. But like Edmond, she is too generic to be credible as a real character and not a plot device.

What’s particularly disappointing about All Dogs Go To Heaven is how unattractive the films is. There are some attractive backgrounds with a good amount of detail, but much of the film feels strangely oversaturated, featuring weird and unappealing color choices. As with Rock-A-Doodle the animators’ talents at creating convincing weight and appealing movement are still evident. The effects animations are particularly nice, from the streaks of light and bubble that accompany Charlie on his speedy trip to the hereafter to the soft fog on the docks. But the character designs are mostly sub-par, ranging from blankly cute to outright ugly. The weird Technicolor puppies who show up halfway through the film feel more like something from a mediocre Saturday morning cartoon than characters for a feature. And then you have this, which is supposed to be a horse, in case you couldn’t tell:



The film is a musical and features about five songs; seven if you count the ones that play over the credits. Sadly, there’s not a good number in the bunch. None of the songs are memorable or at all important to the story. The only one that comes close is “You Can’t Keep A Good Dog Down,” which introduces Charlie. It has some entertaining lines, but is hurt by the mediocre singing of Burt Reynolds – the voice of Charlie.



Probably the worst song in the film is “What’s Mine Is Yours,” in which selfish lout Charlie extols the virtues of sharing to the colorful puppies as they fight over the pizza he’s brought them. The song by itself is bad enough, but what really pushes it over the edge is how little sense it takes for Charlie to be singing about how “the more you share, the more the sun’ll shine.” Is he trying to convince Anne-Marie that he really is the generous individual he pretends to be? Does he want to impress Flo, the dog who takes care of the puppies and is a possible love interest for Charlie? Do puppies just bring out the Barney in him? The movie seems completely oblivious to the irony of Charlie trying to teach anyone how to share what they’ve got. The only humor in the song comes from the pups, who completely forget the lesson once the song ends and pounce on the cake Charlie offers them. The scene feels like a late addition, as if someone felt that the film needed a blatantly moral moment to balance out all the gambling and cheating that fill out the rest of it.



Story is the Achilles heel of many of the Bluth films and that’s true here as well. While making no progress on transforming Charlie from a self-centered creep to the good and loyal creature a dog is supposed to be, the plot meanders all over the place and gets stuck at a few dead ends along the way. The most well known of these is the infamous “Let’s Make Music Together” number, thanks to the Nostalgia Chick using it as the source for the term “Big-Lipped Alligator Moment,” meaning a scene that has virtually no set-up, makes no sense in the context of the movie, and is never mentioned again by any of the characters once it’s over. It’s a bizarre sequence in which Charlie and Anne-Marie are captured by a tribe of primitive sewer rats who try to feed them to the previously mentioned big-lipped alligator. The alligator becomes taken with Charlie’s evidently melodious howl and decides to sing a duet with him instead of eating him. True to the definition, neither Charlie nor Anne-Marie ever mentions this bit of weirdness again. Granted the alligator reappears later to save Charlie from drowning, but that doesn’t excuse the utter clumsiness with which the earlier scene is jammed into the plot. A scene that confuses the audience and only makes sense when a later scene makes an aspect of it useful is just bad storytelling.

The Big-Lipped Alligator moment isn’t the only confusing moment in the film. Earlier on, Carface is about to send his flunky Killer to sleep with the piranhas as punishment for letting Anne-Marie escape and end up in Charlie’s paws. He only spares his life when Killer tells him that he has “a Flash Gordon thermo-atomic ray gun” which they could use to take out Charlie. But all the two dogs actually accomplish is shooting up a fruit stand. Charlie does appear to be hit a few times, but he’s fine, presumably thank to the watch. Why does Killer have a ray gun? Did ray guns exist in 1939 Louisiana? Why does Carface feel the need to use a special weapon to dispatch Charlie? What is the point of this plot thread?

(Author's Note: After writing this, I came across this article, which offers some explanation for the baffling "Flash Gordon thermo-atomic ray gun sequence. Originally, Carface and Killer were going to go after Charlie with a much less futuristic tommy gun. But partway through the film's production, there was a shooting at a California school in which automatic weapons were involved. Though they aren't mentioned as a specific influence on the changes to this scene, the need to get the film a "G' rating and the tragic death of Judith Barsi, the young actress who played Anne-Marie who was killed along with her parents in a murder-suicide, may have been factors in wanting to remove scenes of more realistic violence from the movie. So "tommy gun" was changed to "ray gun." It explains some of the thinking, but does not excuse the overall oddness and pointlessness of the scene.)

All through the movie, there is evidence of ideas that just haven’t been thought out well. Why does Anne-Marie go for shopping for the new dresses that cynical Charlie claims will make her more appealing to potential parents, only to spend the rest of the movie wearing her same old tattered clothes? Why bother to introduce the cute puppies and Flo and have a lengthy sequence in which Anne-Marie imagines life with new parents who adopt her, Flo, and all the puppies, and then leave their future completely unresolved? Why does Charlie still need Anne-Marie and her talents even after his casino opens? (The implication is that Charlie only uses Anne-Marie to cheat when gambling against other humans, unlike Carface who used her to cheat his own canine customers, though it’s never really clear.) How can Charlie understand the big-lipped alligator when he can’t understand any other non-canine creature in the film? Why do all the dogs in the city care enough about Charlie to rush to his aide when they hear he’s in trouble? Why do some dogs where clothes while others don’t?



Like The Secret of NIMH, All Dogs Go To Heaven has problems balancing its comedy and drama and making it all feel like one cohesive whole. The movie’s message is that the duration of your life is less important than the good you do with the time you have, and in that context, I guess it makes sense that so many of Charlie’s brushes with death are treated as comedy. But there’s a shadow over Charlie’s return to the land of the living. See, when Charlie left Heaven, he voided the free pass to the pearly gates that he got for being born a dog. He can’t get back into Heaven. In theory he could just keep winding the watch and live forever. But should the watch ever stop, Charlie will die. And if he does die and he can’t go to Heaven, there’s only one option left: Hell. And not a funny, cartoonish Hell full of punishments that only a dog would find horrifying. The Hell revealed in Charlie’s nightmare is a full-on fire and brimstone world of torment that ranks among Bluth’s scariest scenes. I’m not one to say that movies aimed at kids should be completely devoid of anything frightening. The dark edge in Bluth’s films is frequently one of the more interesting aspects of his work. And it too makes a degree of sense. If Charlie being unable to return to Heaven is to mean anything, there has to be a consequence. And since Charlie found Heaven boring, the only possible consequence left is the knowledge that if Charlie dies, he will end up in Hell. But put the comedy and the drama together, and it all falls apart. It just doesn’t make sense to ask the audience to laugh when Charlie almost dies while at the same time telling them that the afterlife awaiting him is one of eternal suffering.



Perhaps the worst failure of story, even worse than the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, is the movie’s climax, which takes place in the sinking burning hull of Carface’s boat casino. It starts out well enough. The watch serves its narrative purpose, forcing Charlie to choose between retrieving it and saving his own life or rescuing the unconscious Anne-Marie from drowning. But then, instead of seeing the rescue of Anne-Marie through to the end, Charlie sets her on a wooden plank and pushes her towards a hole in the side of the boat that is surrounded by flames. As if to underline the precarious position he had left her in, Charlie yells “You can make it, kid!” after her. Did I mention that Anne-Marie is barely conscious at this point? So Charlie spends his final seconds of life not braving flames and waves to make sure Anne-Marie gets to safety, but diving after his watch, leaving Killer – of all possible characters - to steer Anne-Marie to shore where her future family is waiting. That’s it? That’s Charlie’s act of redemption? As with the Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, Killer’s ray gun, and the sharing song, it feels like someone with a little distance from the movie needed to come in, take a look at the story, and say “This is supposed to be Charlie’s big moment of truth, but you’ve got him shoving the kid out the door and going after the watch again. Maybe this would work better if he stayed with her longer, just long enough so that we know that he’s making sure she’s safe before he thinks about saving himself.”

All Dogs Go To Heaven is just problems on top of problems. It has a protagonist who is both unlikable and uninteresting, a plot that spends more time on pointless diversion than getting the main character from point A to point B, ugly character designs, and awful songs. It’s worth a watch only if you’re a die-hard Bluth fan or particularly interested in the history of U.S. theatrical animation. On its own merits, this movie is anything but heavenly.

All images in this article are copyright MGM/UA.

The Bluth Factor: Rock-a-Doodle

After my animated movies meme post went up, I got an e-mail from my dad. He mostly wanted to share his reactions to recent animated films he had enjoyed, such as The Incredibles, The Triplets of Belleville, and WALL-E - which Dad thinks should have won Best Picture. (Have I mentioned that I love my dad?) But it wasn’t all praise. Dad also wanted to chide me for awakening his long dormant and thoroughly unpleasant memory of seeing Don Bluth’s Rock-a-Doodle, a movie which he now remembers as being “god awful.”

I’m making it up to Dad by loaning him a couple of Miyazaki films he hasn’t seen yet. But after reading his e-mail, I immediately decided that I had to rewatch Rock-a-Doodle and write about my impressions. This proved more difficult than I had anticipated. Netflix does not actually have any copies of the film. Pretty much all of my local DVD rental stores have gone out of business. So with no other options, I became the cautiously proud owner of a used collection of The Secret of NIMH, Rock-a-Doodle, and All Dogs Go To Heaven. which may be the subject of a future article.

Despite Dad’s strongly negative memories of the film and my own vague recollections of it being less than stellar, I tried to watch it with an open mind. True, I could remember that it was my disappointment with this film that caused me to swear off any animated films that did not bear the Disney name. (It was not a bad strategy at the time, but I clung to it for far too long afterwards.) But I hadn’t seen it in over fifteen years. Had my father and I been unfair? Was this movie actually a flawed gem like NIMH? Or was it really the cinematic disaster that my dad remembered it as?

The short answer? Dad was right.



Rock-a-Doodle kicks off with the story of Chanticleer, who gets his name from the character in the Reynard the Fox fables and in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Chanticleer is a rooster with an appearance and voice reminiscent of Elvis Presley. (His vocals are provided by country singer Glen Campbell, Elvis having left the building over a decade before.) All of the farm animals believe that Chanticleer’s crow is what makes the sun rise, until one morning when Chanticleer misses his morning crow and the sun comes up regardless. Chanticleer’s barnyard pals mock him and label him a fraud and the crestfallen rooster leaves for the city, where he becomes a singing sensation known as “The King.”

Chanticleer could be an interesting character. He has a relatable problem: he believes his friends don’t care about him anymore and that the talent that made him special may have never even been real. His similarities to Elvis could have made for some entertaining and funny moments, but despite a title and movie poster than feature him prominently, Chanticleer is not the protagonist of Rock-a-Doodle. He is more an object of pursuit. The good guys want to bring him back to the farm and the bad guys want to prevent him from returning to the farm. Because as it turns out, Chanticleer’s crow really did keep the sun shining and the farm has been plagued with torrential rainstorms ever since he left. Realizing that they’re up a dell without a pitchfork, the farm animals set out to find Chanticleer and get him to come home, which takes up the majority of the movie. Chanticleer may be the guy with the power to solve the movie’s central problem, but he has so little screen time and character development that his role is almost reduced to that of the story’s Macguffin, more of a problem-solving device than a true character.



The movie’s actual protagonist is a little live-action boy named Edmond. Edmond lives on a live-action farm filmed with bad lighting and shaky camera work. Coincidentally, Edmond’s farm is also plagued by constant rain and his mother is trying to comfort him by reading him the story of Chanticleer. There is very little to like about the live-action segments of the film. As I said, they aren’t shot very well and the scenes that mix live-action and animation never look convincing, all the more disappointing when you consider that Who Framed Roger Rabbit premiered about three years earlier. The actors who play Edmond’s family turn in mediocre performances. And Edmond, sadly, ends up being one of the film’s biggest weaknesses.

The problem with Edmond is that the film makes him such a little “everyboy” that there is nothing distinctive or interesting about him. We don’t know if he likes to play sports or draw or ride horses, whether he is smart or gentle or kind or helpful. His main feature is that he’s cute and even that is a matter of opinion. For me, there is a very fine line between a character being genuinely cute and being an unnatural, fake attempt at cute, especially when the character is a little kid. The characters that I find cute are cute because they behave in a way that is both appealing and very specific to who they are. In the best cases, the character will do something that strikes me as exactly how a young child would act in that situation. This is not the case with Edmond. Edmond is the result of a child actor and a team of animators trying to hit all of the easiest stereotypical indicators for what is “cute.” Edmond has a cute little lisp (though I know I’m not the only person who finds his speech impediment more annoying than adorable). He gets turned into a cute little animated kitten. He has cute little fears and a cute habit of protesting that he isn’t afraid of anything. His supposed problem is that his family think he is too little to help protect the farm from the storm, a very child-specific, “cute” problem. All of this might add up to adorable for some viewers, but I find it about as authentic as Edmond’s pouty insistence “I am…too one of the big boys!”, the pause giving him time to set his book down on his lap on the word “too” for emphasis. Like the entire performance, it feels staged, not real.

Because Edmond’s character is so unspecific, his problems and the skills he has to combat them are equally vague. Edmond’s main problem is the story’s main problem: the storm that threatens Edmond’s farm and Chanticleer’s farm. But the personal issues that Edmond must overcome are not as evident. If they didn’t exist, that would be one thing. Not every good story has to feature a main character with problems within and without. But the movie keeps hinting that Edmond does have a personal goal that he must reach. It just never makes it clear exactly what that goal might be. Does Edmond want to overcome his various fears? To stop believing that he is too small to do anything important? To win the respect of his family? I don’t know and I’m not sure the movie does either. Instead of seeing Edmond gradually move past his mental roadblocks or have a revelation on how to get past them, the audience gets a confusing scene where Edmond retreats into a mental realm, complete with brain columns and nerves strewn about, where he is haunted by faces and voices from the past hour or so (including his own voice declaring “I’m not afraid of anything.”) Edmond yells “No!” and suddenly emerges with the mental strength to turn the car he’s riding in around and go back to rescue one of his animal pals. It is a confusing and awkward metaphor for Edmond conquering his fears, fears that remain unclear.



OK, so the movie has a powerful character who is not the protagonist and is more of a secret weapon than a personality, and a protagonist who is all but devoid of individuality or special strengths. Edmond can fold a paper airplane, knows where the city is, and maintains an undying faith in Chanticleer, which is all the stranger considering that it’s based on the first few pages of a story that – judging from the way Edmond points to a picture of the villain if the tale and asks his mother who that is – he has never heard before. One of the movie’s problems is the lack of any relationship between its two most important characters. In fact when the two finally meet, about ten minutes before the end of the film, a confused Chanticleer asks Edmond “Well who are you?” The result is that the movie feels like two stories loosely connected by a group of farm animals. Chanticleer’s story, which seems like it would be the more interesting of the two, ends up getting squeezed to the point where one of the character’s major problems – the fact that he no longer has the self-confidence to crow – doesn’t come up until mere minutes before it is resolved. Instead of focusing on Chanticleer’s loneliness and lack of confidence in spite of living the life of a famous rock star, the film centers on Edmond and his ill-defined issues. Despite some attempts to draw parallels between their problems, including a scene where Chanticleer is also haunted by voices from his past, Edmond and Chanticleer just don’t feel connected. The movie pushes aside its strongest character to make room for a weaker one.

Edmond’s lack of any real power or skills makes creating a satisfying narrative difficult, but not impossible. There certainly have been films where the protagonist is neither the hero not a terribly strong character, Disney’s earlier “princess” films among them. But these films made up for their passive protagonists by populating the movie with strong and interesting supporting characters who could drive the plot while leaving the protagonist free to wish and hope and dream. But Edmond is not just the protagonist of Rock-a-Doodle; he is also supposed to be the hero. That means that virtually every other character in the movie has to be less capable than Edmond, and you can just imagine how much fun that’s going to be.



After the Grand Duke – the villain from the Chanticleer story - shows up in the live-action world and transforms him into an animated kitten, Edmond meets up with the animals from Chanticleer’s farm. Chief among them is Patou, the old farm dog. Patou is voiced by Phil Harris, who also voiced Baloo from The Jungle Book as well as a couple of other Disney characters. Casting Harris feels very much like an attempt to connect Rock-a-Doodle to the classic Disney films. The name “Patou” even sounds a bit like “Baloo.” But unfortunately, the man who helped to transform what was originally a bit-player bear into the heart and soul of The Jungle Book could not do the same for Patou the dog. It’s not that there’s really anything wrong with Harris’s performance, there just isn’t enough meat to the role. Patou begins the movie by telling the audience that this is a story from “back before I knew how to tie my shoes,” which sounds like a folksy way of saying “when I was young.” But Patou is a pucker-faced old dog when we meet him. The bit about not knowing how to tie his shoes? That’s actually Patou’s entire shtick. Patou is a dog who doesn’t know how to tie his shoes. It’s never presented as a metaphor for anything, given any emotional weight, or made to have any bearing whatsoever on the plot. Patou claims towards the beginning of the movie that he could have attacked the Grand Duke more effectively if his shoes had been tied, but since he doesn’t trip over the laces or anything and actually quite successful in saving Edmond from the Duke, we don’t have any reason to believe that this is true. Patou also gets tied up in his shoelaces towards the end of the film. But that’s it. Since Patou being unable to tie his shoes has no obvious effect on anything, there is no real reason why we should care whether he learns to tie them or not. Why is this detail in the movie at all? Well, Edmond knows how to tie shoes and if Edmond is going to have a prayer of coming across as the hero of this picture, he needs every chance he can get to show why the other characters need him around.

Oh and were you, like Edmond, wondering why Patou wears shoes to begin with? Is it because some of the other animals also have shoes? No. Is it because he’s already wearing pants and socks and shoes just complete the look? No. Patou wears shoes because Patou has bunions, lots and lots of bunions. The shoes help his feet feel better. There, now aren’t you sorry you asked?

Patou also serves as the movie’s narrator, a role that I’m guessing he was given to make sure that the littlest members of the audience didn’t get lost while trying to follow the story. Patou doesn’t just tell the story of Chanticleer and how he ended up leaving the farm; he pops up throughout the film to explain what’s happening. His comments range from obvious to confusing to spoilers within the movie itself. Why for example, when we can clearly see Chanticleer performing on stage in front of throngs of screaming fans, do we need Patou to interrupt the song to inform us that “Chanticleer had become a star”? I still can’t figure out why Patou feels the need to tell us that Chanticleer “maybe wasn’t the smartest bird that ever lived” when Chanticleer never does anything to suggest that he is all that much dumber than the rest of the cast. Patou’s introduction of Goldie, the pheasant chorus girl who becomes Chanticleer’s love interest, is particularly over-informative. Patou not only tells us that Goldie is jealous of “King” Chanticleer’s meteoric rise to fame, but also goes on to make sure we know that Goldie will turn out to be a lot nicer (which we can see for ourselves later on) and smarter (which is never particularly evident) than she initially seems. The impression that I get from the narration is that I am watching a movie that could not be trusted to tell its own story without having one of the characters constantly stepping in to explain everything.



Heading up the movie’s bad guys is the Grand Duke, the leader of the photophobic owls who have been troubling the farm animals ever since the sun stopped shining. It was actually the Duke who caused Chanticleer’s departure in the first place by sending another rooster to stop Chanticleer from crowing. The rooster calls Chanticleer out for a fight, tussles with him briefly, and is never seen again. Why a rooster? Why not an owl who might actually show up again, since the fight takes place just before dawn? Beats me. Anyway, the fight is what causes Chanticleer to miss his regularly scheduled crowing, which leads to the sun coming up without him. In an incredible stroke of good luck for the Duke, once Chanticleer leaves and ceases crowing, the sun stops shining. The whole “rising when Chanticleer didn’t crow” thing was evidently a one-time snafu. As Patou puts it, the sun “took a look around and decided to go back to sleep.“ I consider this a happy accident for the Duke because I can’t see how the Duke could possibly plan for the sun to rise once without Chanticleer crowing, the other animals to mock Chanticleer, Chanticleer to leave the farm, and the sun to cease shining after that.

The Duke is not a terribly frightening villain to anyone over the age of four. He’s just a pudgy old owl who’s too busy mugging for the camera and enjoying his own sarcastic humor to be truly scary. The Great Owl in NIMH - a supposed “good guy” – is far more terrifying. The one thing the Duke has that makes him a real threat is magic and even that he uses mostly to do things that aren’t really scary, like growing very big or turning Edmond into a kitten or hitting Chanticleer over the head with a magic mallet. In spite of this, test audiences apparently found the red smoke that the Duke emits from his mouth to perform magic too frightening, so in the final film, the smoke is dotted with fluorescent Lucky Charms. (I picked up a copy of Jerry’s Beck’sThe Animated Movie Guide and found that he compared the stars, moons, planet and other symbols that accompany the Duke’s magic smoke to the exact same sugary cereal.) He still maintains a creepy expression in a few shots where he breaths out smoke and he does manage to strangle Edmond before the end of the film, though to some viewers, that may make him more sympathetic than frightening. But for the most part, the Duke is reduced to putting his face very close to the camera in an attempt to elicit the occasional scare.



The rest of the cast doesn’t fare much better than the major players. Edmond has two other animal pals aside from Patou who join him in the search for Chanticleer: Peepers the brainy mouse and Snipes the annoying magpie. Peepers is smart, which for the purposes of this film means that she knows how to drive a car, can pilot a helicopter, uses the occasional big word, and wears glasses. What she can’t do is lead the animals to the city, because then Edmond would have nothing useful to do. The movie tries to develop some kind of particular relationship between Edmond and Peepers. It seems like a good idea: Edmond lacks self-confidence (I think) and is feeling even less capable now that he’s been turned into a little kitten, while Peepers is smaller than Edmond but has no doubt about her ability to do whatever she needs to. And they both have lisps, though hers – provided by the voice of Vixey from Disney’s The Fox and the Hound, Sandy Duncan - is less annoying. But their friendship never develops beyond Edmond whining that he’s too little to do something, Peepers pointing out that she’s not too little, and Edmond going ahead and accomplishing his task without any kind of buildup or struggle. And the speech impediment connection is never mentioned. Snipes the magpie is not so much a character as an assortment of quirks, with a new one tossed in whenever the movie requires something funny to happen. In one scene, he’s suffering from claustrophobia. In the next, he’s gushing about his love of food. The problem is that none of these traits ever gel into anything that feels like a fully realized character. His one consistent trait is that he’s kind of a jerk. He’s the only one of the three animals who accompany Edmond who is actually shown making fun of Chanticleer when the sun comes up before the rooster has crowed. He’s also constantly bickering with Peepers, though we never know why, making their eventually reconciliation a hollow one. Snipes never contributes a thing to the plot. His role is strictly comic relief and since he’s not particularly funny either, he could have easily been cut from the movie altogether.



The Grand Duke has his own entourage to combat Edmond’s scrappy band of critters. . Pinky the fox serves as Chanticleer’s Colonel Tom Parker and is also working for the Grand Duke, though I can’t figure out how the business relationship benefits either of them until the plot makes it necessary for them to know each other. If the Duke really wants to ensure that Chanticleer never crows again, wouldn’t he want his henchmen to focus on killing Chanticleer rather than turning him into a successful singer? And what does Pinky need from the Duke when he has Chanticleer to help him rake in profits? Closer to home, the Duke is in command of of several anonymous owls who are little more than his chorus and his diminutive nephew Hunch, a completely incompetent little owl with a habit of spouting “a” words ending in “-ation”: “annihilation,” “abomination,” “aggravation.” This is – needless to say – not funny, nor does it make an ounce of sense. There is a potentially amusing gag where the smoke from the Grand Duke’s mouth changes Hunch into different creatures whenever the Duke gets angry with him, but since it is only used twice and one of the form Hunch ends up with looks like some bizarre cross between an owl and a pickle, the opportunity for comedy is wasted.



You would think that a movie about a rooster who looks and sounds like Elvis would be a great musical just waiting to happen. Rock-a-Doodle gets off to a good start in this department with a pleasant little song called “Sun Do Shine” that introduces us to Chanticleer and his barnyard buddies. With no fewer than twelve songs in the film – thirteen if you count the reprise of “Sun Do Shine” at the end – you would probably expect to hear a lot of Glen Campbell crooning like the King. But that’s actually not the case. Only half of the film’s songs are sung by Chanticleer and of those, there are only three which can really be counted as complete songs. In addition to “Sun Do Shine,” Chanticleer performs the film’s title song and “Treasure Huntin’ Fever.” Neither are great and the latter suffers from such clunky lyrics as “I got treasure-huntin’ fever for love,” but they do make for some of the movie’s better set pieces. Aside from that, you get one Chanticleer song that is cut off just a few lines in and two that are sung in their entirety, but are all but impossible to hear all the way through. Why? Because Patou talks over all of one and much of the other. “Come Back To You” sounds like a genuinely pretty song, but I can’t say for certain because I can only hear a few snippets behind Patou’s gabbing. “Kiss ‘N’ Coo,” Chanticleer and Goldie’s love duet, has the added distraction of Edmond and his friends watching the pair from a far and discussing their situation, drowning out most of the music that Patou hasn’t already talked over.

Most of the remaining songs are short little ditties, lasting a minute or less. Since they are so brief, they do very little to enhance the film and offer virtually no new information. The Grand Duke and his owls get three awful songs including one where the lyrics are literally “Tweedle-lee-dee, tweedle-lee-dee. They’re running out of batteries.” Perhaps the theory was that if the villains’ songs were terrible, Chanticleer’s would sound that much better. But all it does is bog down the film with yet more pointless musical numbers that are outright bad to boot. Poor Goldie only gets to sing two lines of her solo number before it gets cut off. I’m not sure if the decision was made to avoid having three songs right in a row or to cut down on Goldie’s screen time. Another complaint about early cuts of the film from test audiences was that Goldie was too shapely and seductive looking for a character in a kiddie flick. Since the animators had to go back in and tone down her figure and costume, cutting her song may have been a way of saving them some extra work. Chanticleer’s bouncers have an utterly pointless song. And over the end credits, Patou gets a song about – what else? – tying his shoes.

I certainly don’t believe that animated films have to be musicals. But Rock-a-Doodle seems tailor-made for the musical format, which is why it’s so puzzling that most of the songs are treated like an expendable afterthought. Few of them do anything to advance the story, highlight character emotions, or serve any purpose other than taking up space. Though it is baffling why so little care was put into fitting the songs into the movie, it is understandable why so many of the resulting songs were reduced to background music or all but cut from the film.

I think what surprised me most about this movie is how outright dull it is. Oh sure, there are action scenes and chases and the like. And the animators still know how to pull off some visual excitement here and there. The “Rock-a-Doodle” musical number has some fun with Chanticleer performing atop a giant record player and there’s an entertaining shot where the camera goes through the hole in the center of a record that Pinky is spray-painting gold back to Chanticleer’s performance. The opening shot in the movie has the camera dropping down from above the crowds, racing between haystacks and cornstalks and up a hillside before finally coming to rest on Chanticleer’s face as he crows. It’s technically impressive, but I still can’t shake the feeling that something has been lost between Bluth’s earlier films and this one. Maybe there wasn’t enough time, enough money, or enough enthusiasm, but I just don’t see the little extra flourishes that made NIMH such a visual treat. The character designs are frequently unappealing and the colors often read as garish, a far cry from the subtle tones and dozens palettes per character of Bluth movies past. Stronger visuals may not have saved the film from its story problems, but it would have at least made it fun to look at.



I realize I am not the target audience for this movie and I probably wasn’t when this movie first came out either. The story seems designed to appeal to the ten and under set, if not an even younger age range. So is it really fair of me to be so critical of a film that is not really aimed at me? I think so. Some of my very favorite animated films are ostensibly intended for children or “families,” and yet I keep coming back to them as an adult and enjoying them. Nostalgia is probably a part of it, but the best of them are the ones that continue to entertain or amaze me as an adult, whether through visual from animators who were among the best in the business or stories that still hold up even though I’ve grown older. Of course I realize that a lot of animated films I watch will include the requisite happy ending. But that’s where the ideas of suspension of disbelief and the journey being more important than the destination come in. Even if I know on some level that a particular character is probably not going to die or fail to get from point A to point B, I can still be convinced to care about the story if the film can convince me to care about the character and what he or she is experiencing and feeling while getting from point A to point B. Unfortunately, Rock-a-Doodle never convinced me to care about its characters and I ended up way ahead of the movie, well aware that Chanticleer would get back to the farm and crow, the sun would come up again, the owls wouldn’t eat all those cute little farm animals, and Edmond would neither die nor live out his days as a cat. Not only did I know these things would happen, I didn’t really care. It doesn’t matter to me that Goldie comes to live on the farm with Chanticleer when most of her character is explained through Patou’s narration and never advances beyond “stereotypical blonde airhead.” It doesn’t matter to me that Peepers and Snipes become friends because I never knew why they didn’t like each other to begin with. And it certainly never mattered to me whether or not Patou learned to tie his shoes.

It is possible that children could enjoy Rock-a-Doodle, but I see no reason to show it to them. Kids are no less deserving of intelligent movies with well thought out stories and interesting characters as adults are. To simply forgive the flaws in Rock-a-Doodle - as I have seen some of the film’s defenders do – on the grounds that it’s a movie for kids and kids don’t care about plotholes or story structure is both selling kids short and delivering a slap in the face to every movie that is well crafted and enjoyable for kids and adults alike. As my dad helpfully pointed out, parents have to watch these movies too and the films that can truly entertain viewers of every age have a much better chance of becoming beloved classic that can be revisited again and again. The truly sad thing is that Bluth and the animators who worked with him didn’t set out with the intention to make movies for little kids and little kids only. They wanted to bring back the artistry of the older Disney films while simultaneously taking on darker themes that could potentially make animation palatable to an older audience again. Unfortunately, Rock-a-Doodle accomplishes neither of these goals and is one forgotten film that is best left that way.

All images in this article are copyright MGM.

Famous Firsts - The Secret of NIMH

The Secret of NIMH was the first feature film made by Don Bluth and a group of fellow expatriate Disney animators. Disney, they felt, was putting the bottom line first, sacrificing story, character, and visual flourishes like shadows and reflections to save money. With The Secret of NIMH, Don Bluth Productions sought to bring the traditions and techniques of the classic animated films back to the movie screen. The movie was released in 1982 and was Disney’s first serious feature animation competition in a long time. But NIMH was not a box office smash. Why? There are many possible reasons. A lackluster marketing campaign did not help. The film was criticized as being too dark and frightening for a G-rated animated movie. While TRON – Disney’s big release of the year – had its own problems at the box office, a little film called E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial pulled moviegoing families away from NIMH in droves. Whatever the reason, NIMH faded into obscurity and is not well known by the general public today. So how does the film hold up almost thirty years after its original release? The answer is somewhat complicated. For while The Secret of NIMH is an ambitious film that sought to bring back classic hand drawn animation while simultaneously exploring new territory in story and theme, it also suffers from narrative flaws that keep it from being a great film.

The film is based on the Newbury award winning children’s novel “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH.” (The main character’s name was changed to “Mrs. Brisby” for the movie to avoid a legal conflict with Wham-O over the similarity to the name of their flying disc toy.) Like the book, the movie tells the story of a widowed field mouse whose youngest son contracts pneumonia at the worst possible time. According to the cranky old doctor mouse Mr. Ages, little Timothy requires complete bed rest to recover, but the Brisby family home is in the path of the farmer’s tractor and if they don’t move soon, they will all be killed once the plowing starts. In her search for a solution to this impossible dilemma, Mrs. Brisby discovers a colony of escaped lab rats who have gained amazing intelligence from the experiments performed on them by the National Institute of Mental Health, also known as “NIMH.” Mrs. Brisby’s husband Jonathan was imprisoned at the same lab and aided the rats in their escape. Out of respect and gratitude to Jonathan, the rats agree to help Mrs. Brisby move her home to a safe location.



One of the film’s main strengths is Mrs. Brisby herself. What makes her interesting is not that she is an inherently brave character, but how her circumstances force her to overcome her fears. She loves her children dearly and her need to protect them is what drives her to leave her comfort zone in search of an answer to her problem. But this need does not immediately render her brave. When the farmer start to plow the field, Mrs. Brisby leaves her other three children with local busybody Auntie Shrew and runs off to try to stop the tractor. But she is in over her head and ends up curled up and shaking atop the tractor while the shrew cuts the fuel line and takes the terrified field mouse to safety. “I wish Jonathan were here,” Mrs. Brisby sobs, but of course he is not. Mrs. Brisby must start fighting her fears and if she is going to be able to save her home and her children. But at this early stage, she still needs to be pushed into taking risks. It is Auntie Shrew who insists that she seek advice from the mysterious Great Owl and reminds her that Timmy’s life is at stake when Mrs. Brisby protests that owls eat mice.




It is only through experience and literally reminding herself that she is doing these things for her children that Mrs. Brisby is able to take on the challenges that ultimately reveal a way for her to move her family without risking Timmy’s life. Her real turning point comes after she has met the rats of NIMH and learned of her late husband’s connection with them. The rats have already promised to move her home to the lea of the stone, where it will be safe from the tractor, so she has what she wants. Then, right as she is about to leave, she stops, turns around, and volunteers for the job of drugging Dragon, the farmer’s cat, so that he won’t threaten the rats as they move her home. Her offer seems to surprise her as much as it does the rats. “I must be crazy,” she says to herself repeatedly. It is even more remarkable considering that her husband was killed performing that very same task. But that is exactly why she has to do it herself. Jonathan is dead. The rats intend to leave for a new home shortly. If Mrs. Brisby is to survive and care for her family in the future, she needs to be strong enough to tackle the dangers that come her way on her own.

Much work and care went into the visuals of the film. Techniques such a backlighting to create glow effects and multiple exposures for transparent shadows that the animators had longed to use during their time at Disney make frequent appearances. Mrs. Brisby herself is colored in literally dozens of different palettes to reflect the difference in lighting when she is inside, outside, underwater, in shadow, lit by colored light, or in any other situation. The tractor that threatens the Brisby home is an enormous, clanking metal monstrosity, rust colored from years of use, but still capable of churning up earth and stone as Mrs. Brisby dangles perilously above the blades of the plow. It sakes violently as first Mrs. Brisby and then Auntie Shrew rush about in their frantic attempts to stop it. Intercut with images of little Timmy sleeping away as bits of dirt start to fall from the ceiling of his bedroom, these shots do an excellent job of conveying the tension of the situation. The creepiness of the Great Owl’s home is accented by the small bones strewn about and the translucent cobwebs that cover even the Owl himself, swaying and falling from his feathers as he moves about. Details like these create the lush look that the animators were trying to achieve and make the film a visual treat.



The movie is certainly more violent and outright scariness in it than audiences of the time were accustomed to seeing in a G-rated animated film. Death is a constant factor in the story, from the very first scene where Nicodemus, the leader of the rats, notes the loss of Jonathan Brisby in his journal. The central problem of the film is the dual threat to Timothy’s life: he will be killed by the plow if his mother does not move him, but his pneumonia could become fatal if she does. Death was certainly not unknown to animation before NIMH, but where the film really ups the ante is in the level of violence. Characters fight, shed blood, kill one another, and die onscreen. That, combined with moments like the Great Owl devouring a moth, Mrs. Brisby being chased by a rat guard wielding a spear charged with crackling energy, and the animals at NIMH quaking fearfully in their cages, being injected with various strange chemicals, and contorting in pain as the injections take effect, may have rendered the film too scary for some young viewers. But that really isn’t a flaw. Animation is under no obligation to be safe, scare-free viewing for all ages. The problem is more the comedic parts of the movie, like the bumbling crow Jeremy (voiced by the late Dom DeLuise, who would go on to play roles in several other Bluth films), or Mrs. Brisby’s adorable, bubbly baby Cynthia. While such comic relief moments do not feel completely out of place, some of them do come off as forced, as if the movie needs to stop so the audience can get a laugh in before returning to the real plot. What’s worse, the superfluous comedy takes time away from more important aspects of the film, such as developing the characters of the Brisby children. Timothy in particular should be a tremendously sympathetic character, but his actual role is so small that he might as well just be called “Sick Kid.” He has no lines until the very end of the story and is curiously absent from the movie after the first half hour. Why ignore a character who is so crucial to the plot in favor of pointless side stories like Jeremy’s desire to find a mate and settle down? It is not a huge failing, but unfortunately, the film has bigger ones.



The writers’ biggest misstep with The Secret of NIMH was adding magic to the story. Magic is not part of the original book, but that’s not why I have a problem with it being in the movie. The problem is that the magical elements in NIMH are poorly defined and end up distracting from the core concepts of the story. The thing that makes the rats of NIMH special is that they are highly intelligent due to the experimental injections they were given. But when Nicodemus is able to levitate objects and look into a magical sphere to views events past and present, I stop being impressed by the fact that the rats can read, write, and work with electricity. The reason why Nicodemus can use magic is never explained. He just can and magic just exists, a strange bedfellow for the science that grounds the origin of the rats. Had the writers simply changed the story so that the experimentation done on the rats at NIMH gave them magical abilities rather than super-intelligence, the inclusion of magic might have worked. As it stands, the two elements compete with each other and the more visually impressive magic wins out over the more believable but less showy intelligence of the rats.

The film’s central magical artifact is an amulet with a ruby red stone at its center. It and the idea of magic are both introduced at the beginning of the movie, which is better than bringing magic in as a “surprise” partway through the film. But the amulet too remains unexplained. It seems to have some connection with Jonathan Brisby, as Nicodemus says that Jonathan meant for Mrs. Brisby to have it, but where it came from is never made clear. More importantly, its abilities never get spelled out. It has some kind of power that can only be activated when it is worn by someone with a courageous heart. But since the nature of that power is never defined, the amulet becomes the obvious ace up the story’s sleeve. Once all other possibilities have been exhausted, Mrs. Brisby will be able to use the amulet to do whatever it is she needs to do to save her family. It gets to the point where the only way to bring back the suspense is to have the stone fall into the mud, after which it flies up into the air and returns to Mrs. Brisby for no apparent reason, other than that it’s magical and she needs it at that moment to save her home and her children.

One of the goals of The Secret of NIMH was to focus on character and story. While there are some interesting and compelling characters in the movie, story often takes a back seat to ideas that pack a lot of visual punch, to the point where the writers appear to have forgotten to check their work for consistency and to answer the questions their script brings up. The Great Owl is first set up as both wise and dangerous in a way that makes sense. The implication seems to be that when all other options have been exhausted, the animals of the field will risk seeking the Owl’s council and hope that he has eaten a big meal beforehand. Both Auntie Shrew and Nicodemus, watching from afar with his magical sphere, think it would be a very good idea for Mrs. Brisby to ask the Owl for advice, in spite of the potential danger. But when Mrs. Brisby tells Mr. Ages that it was the Owl who told her to seek out the rats, he is shocked because no one has ever been to see the Owl and lived. Finally, when Mrs. Brisby has an audience with Nicodemus himself, he refers to the Owl as “a dear comrade.” Huh?

This isn’t the only continuity problem. At the start of the film, Nicodemus muses that it has been four years since the rats escaped from NIMH. But later on, the young rat captain of the guard Justin tells Mrs. Brisby that the rat colony has been outfitted with electricity for four years now and Mr. Ages corrects him, saying it has been five years. There are many unanswered questions strewn about NIMH as well. The Great Owl clearly knows Nicodemus and at least knew who Jonathan Brisby was, but how did he come to know either of them? The rats have a plan to live without stealing from the farmer any longer, which is part of the reason they intend to move. So why are they first seen taking an electrical cord from the farmer’s house? Mr. Ages complains that Justin is always tiring out Nicodemus with “his silly nonsense,” but exactly what they talk about is never revealed. Nicodemus does attempt to explain to Mrs. Brisby why her husband never told her about his captivity at NIMH or his friends the rats, but his explanation makes very little sense. The injections that the rats and mice were given by NIMH also made them age more slowly, meaning that Jonathan would have remained young while his beloved wife grew old and died. It is a part of the original book, but in the movie it feels like a throwaway detail, and certainly not a good reason for Jonathan to keep his association with the rats a secret from his family. A few questions without clear answers would not have been such a big deal, but as they start to pile up, the movie becomes somewhat confusing and doesn't seem as well thought out as it should be.



The film runs into some trouble in the villain department as well. Most of the foes that the heroes face – NIMH, Farmer Fitzgibbons and his family, and Dragon the farmer’s cat – do not have any personal grievance with them. Dragon is a cat and although he is portrayed as more of a monster than a normal pet cat, he is still just a predator stalking prey. The Fitzgibbons family poses the most direct threat to Mrs. Brisby and her family, but their actions are driven more by a lack of concern for the mice than actual cruelty or malice. NIMH is a shadowy organization of anonymous scientists. They are always referred to collectively as “NIMH” rather than by individual names. None of this is necessarily a problem; it is entirely possible to have a strong story where the antagonist is not fully aware of the protagonist or the protagonist’s problems. It works in Bambi, a fact which Bluth and his colleagues were obviously aware of, since the scene where the animals abandon the field to escape the farmer’s plow borrows heavily from the scene where the deer flee the meadow in the Disney film. But it can be hard to show the hero as heroic when all of his or her foes are unaware of the hero, completely beyond reasoning with, and ultimately undefeatable. So the filmmakers took Jenner, a dissident rat who has left the colony before Mrs. Frisby arrives in the original book, and made him into a full blown villain, one that the main characters can talk to, argue with, and battle on his own level. It sounds like a good idea, but Jenner ends up hurting the story more than helping it.




The main problem with Jenner is that he does not have any real connection with Mrs. Brisby either. He is not so much her enemy as he is a foe of Nicodemus and Justin, or the rats in general. He does not care one way or the other about Mrs. Brisby so long as she doesn’t interfere with his plans. Before Jenner makes his actual debut, Nicodemus watches Jenner’s image in his magic “crystal ball” and talks about Jenner’s lust for power and his fear that Jenner may do harm to Mrs. Brisby. But since it’s never clear why Nicodemus believes that Jenner poses a threat to the widowed field mouse, it just feels like a feeble attempt to connect the villain to the hero. In Jenner’s first of only two direct interactions with Mrs. Brisby, he offers his services in helping to move her house, though his manner is transparently slimy. His real goal is to stage an accident during the moving of the house that will kill Nicodemus, clearing the way for Jenner to take over as leader of the rats. This would be disastrous for the Brisby family, but Jenner doesn’t care what happens to them any more than Farmer Fitzgibbons does. The fact that he is aware of Mrs. Brisby and knows that she and her children are thinking, feeling, creatures, makes his actions more unconscionable, but the Brisbys are still not his real target. It is only towards the end of the story when Mrs. Brisby warns the rats that NIMH is coming, threatening Jenner’s plan to keep the rats in their rosebush home and challenging his newly won leadership, that Jenner sees Mrs. Brisby as a threat and attacks her. Even then, it is Justin who ends up dueling with Jenner, taking his focus off of the main character once again. During the fight, Jenner notices that Mrs. Brisby is wearing the magical amulet and declares that he must have it. This is almost painfully forced. Nicodemus mentioned earlier that it would be very bad if Jenner were to take possession of the amulet, but Jenner himself has never even mentioned the stone before now. And since the one thing that is clear about the stone is that its power can only be unlocked by someone with a courageous heart, I don’t see how it would be of any use to Jenner at all. On top of that, Jenner is already going after Mrs. Brisby when he notices the stone, so his sudden need to get it from her does not result in any change in his course of action.

One of the issues that the filmmakers at Don Bluth Productions faced when they first started work on adapting the story of NIMH was that the original book is really two stories in one. There is the tale of Mrs. Frisby and her need to move her sick son before the farmer’s plow arrives, and the story related to Mrs. Frisby by the rats of how they gained their amazing intelligence and came to live in their current abode. It was eventually decided that the story of the movie had to focus primarily on Mrs. Brisby and her family. With that in mind, it is a complete mystery why the decision was made to add a villain who brings the focus of the story back to the rats and away from the Brisby family.

The Secret of NIMH was an ambitious experiment that may have tried to be too much. The multiple goals of creating a film to both compete with Disney and inspire Disney to start making high quality films again, returning to the classic style of film animation, crafting visuals to wow a modern audience, telling a strong story with great characters, evoking memories of past animated classics, and exploring dark themes seldom touched on before in animation might have been more than the team of first time filmmakers could handle. There are too many basic story flaws for me to truly consider the film a lost classic that just never got a fair shot at success. But it is not without moments of beauty and even brilliance. There is enough potential in the film to make me wonder how the industry might have changed if NIMH had been a financial success and what sort of strange, dark fantasies might have been a part of the history of theatrical animation.

Fun Fact: Mrs. Brisby two older children, Martin and Teresa, are voiced by a very young Will Wheaton and an almost as young Shannen Doherty respectively. Despite the connection, I still don't think we'll be seeing a Star Trek: The Next Generation/ Beverly Hills, 90210 reunion crossover anytime soon.

All images from this article are copyright MGM/UA/Aurora. The screenshots were kindly provided to me by Thorn Valley after I forgot to take my own before returning my rented copy of the film.