Commentary 01 Apr 2009 07:42 am
Bluth & Banjo – 2
- Banjo the Woodpile Cat first aired on ABC on May 1, 1982, and that’s the first time I actually got to see the film. As I stated yesterday, there was a long wait for this one and a lot of hope and excitement in anticipation.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
The film wasn’t all that I’d anticipated. I had real problems with the story, however the animation was so much better than what we were used to seeing that it was obvious that better things were coming.
The story seemed to be little more than a bunch of vignettes hung together by the weakest of threads. A frustrated kitten heads out for the road and gets lost. An older cat, excellently voiced by Scatman Crouthers, helps him out, and he returns home.
The film is tied together by some poor songs which accent any hokeyness the film has in its underbelly.
The quality of the animation was feature theatrical in nature and was at least equal to the animation that was coming out of the Disney studio.
I had been bothered by the poor and shallow short, The Small One. All style had left the films and the music by Robert Brunner (who also scored Banjo) was too popular and without the heft that that story needed. The movement, I think, was certainly not up to the quality of Banjo.
That same year, The Secret of Nimh was released. This was a solid meal from the Bluth people. They had jumped from something so mediocre in Banjo, to something far superior to anything that Disney had done since The Sword in the Stone.. It was obvious that Banjo was a primer – an exercise to move the fledgling studio forward, and it was a success. A new competitor was born.
Now a DVD has been released of Banjo the Woodpile Cat, and it comes with a number of extra documentaries. As a piece of history, this is a must-have for animation enthusiasts. It was the stepping stone to something that moved animation forward. Without those industrious people at Bluth’s studio, the small rebirth of animation in the 90s wouldn’t have happened. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast et al are all the outgrowth of these steps taken by that rebellious group.
It was a hard move for them to have made, but they did so knowing full well that they were right. The end results have confirmed it.
My only sadness is the the Bluth studio isn’t moving forward with more features. I’m sure it’s difficult in these 3D days, and the energy required is for the young, but I wish he could engender the cash to continue on with the medium.
Don Bluth and his partners and studio deserve a couple of books to properly place them in animation history. You can be sure that I’ll have more to say on the subject soon.
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All images come from the dvd and are
copyright © 2009 Don Bluth Films, All Rights Reserved.
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on 01 Apr 2009 at 1:37 pm 1.Emmett Goodman said …
Don Bluth did a music video recently for the Scissor Sisters, 2D style. Just fyi.
Story has always been the problem with Bluth’s films. For some reason, they never solidified the stories enough, and more time was spent on the technical side of the film. Granted, the animation his studio turned was outstanding.
on 01 Apr 2009 at 3:11 pm 2.mathieu said …
Hello, very interesting post. Don Bluth made really nice things in the early 80, and then gave up his extravagance.
One thing about his career that I never hear about is the video game series he made for arcade on laser disc. It was Space Ace and Dragon’s lare.
There was almost no scenario, but a shower of weird action scenes with a crazy rhythm. To my mind everything was like a real big budget feature and strange exposure film effects.
I did not see those things for at least 10 years and have never been able to finish the games. but it was fantastic.
I have been just searching now about those games and it seems it have been re-released 2 years ago on DVD.
This is the trailer of space ace
I think there was 2 space ace and 2 Dragon’s Lair and maybe some other series less known
Dragon’s Lair 1 trailer
this is the whole video of dragon’s lair, the picture is soso
If you have more information about those films it would be nice to hear it.
thanks !
M
on 01 Apr 2009 at 5:33 pm 3.Jenny said …
I remember well watching this on TV when it first aired with a great deal of excitement. I doubt those under 35 or so today could believe how rare seeing any lush, full animation was then. Talk about an event.
I had much the same issues with it that you report. I was also put off by the designs of the characters. These were cats? Some of them–”Zazoo” , IIRC, comes to mind–resembled felines as much as Tweety bird looks like a canary–except Tweety was much more appealing and after all, lived in a cartoon universe of an entirely different sort. All’s fair in animation up to a point, but the reality that’s presented has to have some kind of believability on some level.
I found it easiest to simply think of little Banjo as a human kid with a kind of Lost Boys costume on-at least facially. But the older characters were…bizarre.
on 01 Apr 2009 at 7:12 pm 4.Michael said …
Jenny, your “Lost Boys” comment is hilarious and dead on (something that once crossed my mind, I have to say). I found myself obsessed with the tail wagging. The “cats’ moved like dogs.
on 02 Apr 2009 at 9:55 am 5.Doug said …
Just to let you know, Mr Bluth has appeared at the forum at Animation Nation, posting a question and responding to questions. Interesting reading. Check one of them here … http://www.animationnation.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=013579
on 02 Apr 2009 at 10:03 am 6.Dave Levy said …
Michael, having just visited Mike Barrier’s site a moment ago, I find it interesting to compare your different reads on Bluth. I think you give him credit for the effort he exerted and for the promise he represented. Barrier, on the other hand, wants to hold him accountable for the work he produced.
Bluth and his collaborators needed more of a mission statement than simply trying to rescue theatrical animation. After all, Richard Williams was already doing that across the pond. Unlike Disney in the formative period between 1928-1942, Bluth was not trying to advance the art form… he was instead trying to recreate it. How could it not have been anything but diminished returns?
on 02 Apr 2009 at 10:37 am 7.Michael said …
I’m not sure Richard Williams saw himself in quite the same light as Don Bluth. Williams was preserving the work of those very masters who were dying off and he was using them again. Bluth wanted to show that the new young generation could also do brilliant work.
I’m not sure whether either of them succeeded. Yet, both are equally responsible for the work that came out of Disney and Dreamworks in those pre cgi days.
There was an energy that Bluth created. Dick Williams, globally, created an energy but it was too slow in jelling. I’d watched his work from 1965 through The Cobbler and didn’t feel he was ever going to reverse the course animation was taking. Perhaps working on Raggedy Ann helped, but that glimmer died quickly. Bluth’s enthusiasm continued, certainly, through American Tail.
on 02 Apr 2009 at 7:23 pm 8.Cameron said …
I like The Small One a lot more than you.
I thought there was a more human element to it than Banjo. Some of the rotoscoping was a bit jarring, but it was a far more compelling story (simple as it was).
I still really like Bluth’s eighties work, even with its script issues, and Secret of NIMH is one of the best animated features of that decade if you ask me. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what happened with Rock-A-Doodle and everything afterward, however.
on 02 Apr 2009 at 8:17 pm 9.Cameron said …
Well, I’ve checked the Michael Barrier article, and I’m not really sure what it is you see in the man.
He criticizes John Pomeroy’s introducing animation of Milo in Atlantis. That’s fine. But he criticizes the opening for being a self-concious performance…WHICH IT LITERALLY WAS. IN-THE-STORY. I’m not a fan of the movie, but I liked Pomeroy’s work in it. And that’s an opinion.
I’m not waiting for a sequel for Anastasia (which I found wretched), I’m just a guy who doesn’t like that Michael Barrier passes off his opinions as informed by some imaginary higher comprehension of animation.
Perhaps I’m just reading the wrong stuff of his.
on 02 Apr 2009 at 11:40 pm 10.Dagan said …
Great stuff, Michael. Thank you so much for posting and sharing.
I agree that Bluth deserves a book covering his
contributions to our medium. And I would LOVE to have his story all wrapped-up in one reliable tome.
I am also very interested in learning more about key players to the Bluth films, like John Pomeroy. I feel like I have been gathering crumbs of information over the years covering Bluth’s departure from Disney’s and those early days through Nimh… They sound like such exciting days indeed!
I always enjoyed much of Bluth’s work, especially Nimh and the video-game work of the 80′s… Just the fact that these animators were trying to do something different during such a strange time for the medium warrants a written tribute, no?
on 05 Apr 2009 at 2:54 am 11.Janet said …
The three films that REALLY turned Disney around were: The Brave Little Toaster, the original Family Dog, and Disney’s own Basil of Baker Street. Bluth leaving was the best thing to happen at Disney. His power games and his rejection by the older Disney animators for his lack of good storytelling skills contributed to the sense of “us vs. them” at the studio that was NOT healthy. When Disney formed the CalArts Character Animation program, it became clear to Bluth that he was not going to be the “heir apparent” he thought he’d be, so in true Bluth fashion–he ran away (a theme that he continued for years to come).
His films are truly horrible. All of them. Especially Nimh. I don’t mind the technical skill so much, but it’s at the service of such incredibly insipid, backwards looking, sentimental, and shallow stories, with little “character animation” at all. He intensely hates his audiences, and shows zero respect for them. Hence their ultimate rejection of his product–and rightfully so.
on 12 Mar 2010 at 5:32 pm 12.wynnyelle said …
Energy is for the young? Creativity has nothing to do with age. You don’t lose it as you get older. It’s more of a use it or lose it, or, I think in Don Bluth’s case, of just losing your way. Secret of Nimh was his best movie hands down. american tail {only the first one} and to a lesser extent land before time and all dogs go to heaven were also decent. Then, it all just went to hell in the 90s for Bluth.
What HAPPENED? I’ve seen some of that stuff and it’s just godawful. Anastasia was OK, but even that contains a generous amount of Disney-ripping off. now, granted, he founded his company with the idea of producing movies that were as good as and revelled in the style of “old Disney.” But it’s one thing to revive a {let’s admit it} largely vanished style and create a new original work of your own in that style, and it’s another to just rip it off without really adding anything of quality.
I don’t think it has to do with his or any of his animators’ advancing age. Walt Disney himself was still innovating and producing inspiring works right up until his death, of old age. It may be that Bluth is really, at the heart of things, just a one-trick pony.
on 19 Nov 2011 at 1:31 am 13.Liim Lsan said …
I always thought that Don Bluth thought that A) The driving force of a movie is the story and B) the animation must be impressively fluid to be taken seriously.
The other thing about Bluth (besides that his style became stock in later features) is that he is awful as a storyteller.
This is not a good combination.
I must point out: All of his good films are really Special Cases when it comes to story. American Tail, Land Before Time, and Anastasia are Picaresque narratives (And it’s not very easy to make those unappealing); The Secret of NIMH and Titan AE were adapted from other sources (a book and an earlier screenplay by a completely different team) and so they had something to measure their storytelling against; and All Dogs Go To Heaven is a case unto itself, carried almost entirely by ‘atmospherics’ (And I consider it a masterpiece of Atmosphere, a mediocre film, and very very high on my list of personal favorites).
You can tell that he usually depends on story-telling to carry the story, but has an awful time adapting stories to changes. An American Tail would make a much more solid narrative had they kept two scenes in (of Fievel in the Sweatshop slowly realizing the problems of the American dream in song; and of Tiger actually meeting the rest of the muriscine cast); as it is, the lack of those scenes seems to make the settings seem abandoned much too early.
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To the post: The Small one was overdone by mawkishness, and clearly the editing was underdone. Banjo, again, was a vignettish tale that I find relieving.
What I love is that he realized that you needed to learn things before you can make masterpieces. Banjo was, I consider, significant because of how much it taught the filmmakers.
The original Feature Film pitch they had for the story seems to be quite a piece with later Bluth tales (a character dies and the villian smokes cigars), but I really think it’d be a good project if Don Bluth can’t get backing for Dragon’s Lair. ^^
Personally, Don Bluth films aren’t nearly as self conscious as they’re made out to be. The thing with Michael Barrier is that he views Bill Tytla as basically God’s answer to Stanislavski in animation, and anything not of a piece with that seems to be odd and underdone.
(Note that he dismisses Duncan Marjoribanks’ work on Sebastian as ‘Chuck Jones like’ in ‘Hollywood Cartoons’, as if he watched the film once, expecting to hate it. When I talked to Duncan, he was unabashedly gleeful about Bob Clampett’s animators (he’s surprisingly accessible beneath the mollusk behaviors) and the character is almost in-your-face how much of a piece with that it is.)
Don Bluth’s biggest failing is that he was never involved in good stories because he was searching for ways to get his characters to move around.
(A great deal of the time, he does, like a Hanna-Barbarian toon, character conversational exposition; then has the charcters do something unconnected to have them moving around. (See, f’instance, Charlie and Carface dueling over the radio volume, or Hubie and Rocko on the island, talking about flying and doing…god, I don’t even know what the fuck they were doing.)
I miss the days when he was making films; just the fact that the films were there, there was always the hope that they would improve.