Not Living by Animation Alone

Closing out the Don Bluth series.

A still from The Secret of NIMH (1982)

Welcome! It’s a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter — and, today, we’re wrapping up a subject from recent weeks.

We ran a two-part series of articles about Don Bluth this month. They cover his time at Disney in the ‘70s, the garage studio he opened for off-the-clock learning, his team’s breakaway in 1979 and the making of their first feature: The Secret of NIMH. The main arc is Bluth’s revival of old Disney ideas and techniques.

The reaction to these pieces was amazing — together, they made this Monday our top traffic day of 2024. We read so many awesome replies, and the industry legend Rob Renzetti called the second article (on NIMH) a “great story about a great film.” Some discussion even cropped up on Hacker News.

That said, time and length forced us to leave exciting parts of this story on the cutting room floor. There’s a bit more to it. One Hacker News poster, for example, noted that we were “not really clear about the reasons why younger talent wasn’t being trained on those techniques” at Disney.

It’s a good point. Why weren’t Bluth and his friends fully trained in the classic Disney process?

For one, many of the techniques they wanted to learn were no longer in active use at the studio. For another, the departments kept to themselves, without much crossover. And then there was the biggest problem. With Walt Disney gone, his animation team was largely stuck on autopilot.

One of the Nine Old Men, Eric Larson, explained it clearly. “We didn’t get frightened about the future until around 1970. Even after Walt died (in 1966), it didn’t seem to dawn on us that the same people couldn’t keep working forever,” he said. The one who tried the hardest to save the studio was Woolie Reitherman, another of the Nine and the studio’s creative head after Walt Disney’s death.¹

Eric Larson (center) in the late ‘70s. Around him, from left, are up-and-comers Bill Kroyer, Heidi Guedel, Lorna Cook, Dan Haskett (on the floor) and Emily Jiuliano. Courtesy of Andreas Deja’s blog.

Don Bluth joined Disney as a trainee in 1971, part of the new generation hired to keep the studio alive. This was the era before The Illusion of Life — Disney filmmaking was a loose oral tradition without dedicated keepers inside the studio. The passing of knowledge wasn’t standardized, or very thorough.