Don Bluth is an American animator and independent studio owner. He became one of the chief animators at the Walt Disney Company. Along with fellow animators Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, he set out in 1979 to start his own animation studio.
While working at Disney, he was an assistant animator on 101 Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone. He drew a few scenes for The Fox and the Hound but left early in the production. Upset with how the Disney animated features had “lost their charm,” he brought several other of the company’s animators with him to form a rival studio. Bluth’s first feature-length animated film was The Secret of NIMH. It grossed twice its budget at the box office and is considered by many to be his masterpiece.
Teaming up with Rick Dyer in the early 1980s, Bluth then created the groundbreaking arcade game Dragon’s Lair, which let the player control a cartoon-animated character on screen played off a laser disc. This was followed by Space Ace, a science fiction game based on the same technology. Bluth teamed up with Steven Spielberg to make An American Tail and The Land Before Time, both of which did well in theaters. By the end of the ‘80s and into the 1990s, he made films like Rock-a-Doodle and Thumbelina, which were not commercially successful. In 1997, he made Anastasia at Fox Animation Studios and it was a big commercial success.
