Don’s History
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Don Bluth has spent the past 50 years drawing and designing characters and environments for animation. In 1972, Bluth made a decision and set out to test his skills and endurance in an effort to recapture what he considered the decline of the classical animation style at Disney Studios. He spent years with fellow animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, in his Culver City garage, working nights and weekends, teaching themselves the crucial technicalities and nuances of the craft. With a crew of 26 animation artists, dedicated to refining their animation art, the efforts culminated in 1979 with the completion of the short film, Banjo The Woodpile Cat. Within the next six years, the Don Bluth name would be revered as the first animator to successfully compete with the Disney Studio in feature animation.
Born in El Paso, Texas on September 13, 1937, Don Bluth spent his childhood in a creative family environment with six siblings on a farm in Payson, Utah. The family moved to Santa Monica, California in 1954, putting the teen within reach of his childhood dream of working for Walt Disney Studios in Burbank. Upon graduation, Bluth got a job in the animation department as a rough inbetweener and was assigned to work with veteran Directing Animator John Lounsbery. He worked on the movie Sleeping Beauty during 1955 and 1956, but left the company after this first year to pursue other interests. Bluth worked again for Disney from 1960-63 during summer breaks while earning his degree from Brigham Young University as an English Literature major.
1964, he and brother Toby started a theatre in Santa Monica where they produced and directed popular musical comedies. After three years, Don decided to return to his first passion, animation. He landed a job as a layout artist for Filmation Studios, which produced of TV series programming. Designing layouts and character poses for the animators, he quickly moved through the ranks to head the Layout department.
Bluth returned to Disney Studios in 1971 as an animator on the film Robin Hood, which was released in 1973. Showing great promise, Bluth was promoted within two years to the position of Directing Animator. The years 1974 through 1976 found Bluth training young animators at Disney on the projects Winnie The Pooh and Tigger Too (1974) and The Rescuers (1976). He became the Director of Animation for Pete’s Dragon in 1977 and by 1978 was promoted to Producer/Director for the short Christmas tale, The Small One.
Bluth and colleagues Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy met with film industry executives in early 1979 about making an animated feature film independent of Disney Studios. The critically acclaimed The Secret of NIMH was released in July 1982. The trio was contacted in late 1982 with an idea to blend a new interactive laser disc technology with traditional animation to create a video game with high quality production values. Dragon’s Lair debuted in the summer of 1983. It is considered a video game classic, a major milestone in video game history and another milestone in Bluth’s career.
Don and his team began collaborating with Steven Spielberg in December 1984, and in November of 1986 Universal Pictures released An American Tail, setting new box office records for an animated film. However, they would have to track the film’s success from week-old trade papers, because in September 1986, Don moved the studio and it’s crew to Dublin, Ireland at the invitation of the Irish government.
By 1988, the company had become the largest animation studio in Europe. The Land Before Time, made entirely in Ireland, with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as presenters, was released Thanksgiving weekend, 1988. It achieved a record-breaking opening weekend gross for an animated film. The Dublin-based studio trained several hundred international artists over the next eight years while producing five films.
In the summer of 1994, Bluth was invited to help start and co-helm with Gary Goldman Twentieth Century Fox’s Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona. Don returned to the United States with several veteran animators in tow. Fox released its first film, the musical Anastasia in 1997. The film received two Oscar nominations along with critical acclaim. Their second project, the direct-to-video, Bartok the Magnificent was released in 1999. Overlapping the productions, the duo and their dedicated crew completed the science fiction-themed Titan A.E. for a summer 2000 release.
Bluth makes his home in Scottsdale, AZ, working at developing scripts, character designs and storyboards. He spends his free time directing a teen choir and recently authored two books on animation production The Art of Storyboard and The Art of Animation Drawing, published by Dark Horse. Don has been an active member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 1976.
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