Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life

Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life by Don Bluth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This autobiography of animator Donald Virgil "Don" Bluth opens with the story of his birth in El Paso, Texas from a religious viewpoint, with his membership and faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints significant in his upbringing and later animated work. His family would move to a farm in Utah, Bluth only occasionally mentioning other family members such as his siblings, including his older brother Bob, fascinated with taxidermy, and his younger brother Toby, who would produce creative work of his own, although Don only briefly touches upon Toby's divergence from his birth name, another of his creative siblings, Brad, given no mention at all.

The Bluth family's farm in Utah would ruin them financially, with Don ultimately attending high school in California before his hiring into Disney (which had the potential to become a hospital were it to go under financially), although a church mission to Argentina would divert him for a few years, and he would go back to Utah to attend Brigham Young University (BYU), where he would improve his reading skills. Bluth would remain with Disney until the death of its eponymous founder Walt, with the question of the company's leadership mulled postmortem. The animator would meet and partner with Gary Goldman, the two working on a few Disney animated features such as Robin Hood.

Bluth would eventually break with Disney after his involvement in the short The Small One and the animation of the eponymous character of Pete's Dragon, producing Banjo the Woodpile Cat and The Secret of NIMH among his first independent features, though the latter fared poorly at the box office against Steven Spielberg's ballyhooed E.T. Regardless, Bluth would go on to animate the arcade game Dragon's Lair, noting that he found humans more difficult to work with than animals. Spielberg would collaborate with Bluth on An American Tail as well as George Lucas for The Land Before Time, with Michael Jackson wishing for collaboration as well, though that would fizzle.

Most of Bluth's other works such as All Dogs Go to Heaven and Rock-A-Doodle would face troubled productions despite featuring celebrity talent, with some of his films having distribution by different studios and ultimately sending the animator financially down under. He would resurge with Anastasia under 20th Century Fox, which would ultimately come under the Disney banner, although Titan A.E. would fare poorly, given its high preproduction costs. Anastasia would eventually become a Broadway production, with Bluth ending his autobiography on a high note with a proposed Dragon's Lair film in the indefinite future.

All in all, Bluth's book is an interesting read, with his Mormonism definitely catching me unaware, and the details of the productions of his various animated films are certainly insightful, despite the troublesome disposition of most of them. Granted, I do wish he had talked more about his brothers, particularly Toby and Brad, a few of whose illustrated literary works I own. His early career Bluth certainly highlights well, although having watched a few of his films, his faith certainly isn’t overly ham-fisted in most of them, except maybe All Dogs Go to Heaven. Regardless, those with a passing interest in traditional animation owe it to themselves to check out his autobiography.

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