Even a little Jewish mouse can have a huge impact on animation.

The 1986 Don Bluth animated classic An American Tail, a film that became the highest-grossing non-Disney animated feature of its time and helped reshape the animation industry, is the first movie to celebrate this podcast's seventh birthday.

The project began with a concept by David Kirschner that was first pitched to Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney, but when it reached Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, the legendary director saw its potential as a feature film. Spielberg, making his first foray into animation, brought aboard Don Bluth, a former Disney animator whose 1982 film The Secret of NIMH had impressed him with its return to the lush, detailed style of classic Disney animation.

The film's story held deep personal significance for Steven Spielberg. Fievel was named after Spielberg's grandfather's Yiddish name, and the narrative of Jewish immigration and escape from persecution in 1885 Russia drew directly from stories Spielberg had heard about his own family history.

An American Tail doesn't shy away from the harsh realities of immigrant life in 1880s New York, either. The film portrays sweatshops, tenement poverty, political corruption, and exploitation, though it wraps these difficult themes in the accessible framework of a mouse family's journey to find each other in a new land.

Don Bluth's unique animation style revolutionized the industry, proving that animation is a powerful medium for all ages, and should not be pigeonholed as just movies for children. An American Tail tackles serious themes like immigration, anti-Semitism and child slavery, making it relevant for audiences of all ages.

An American Tail was a wake-up call for Disney, and the fact it beat (Basil) The Great Mouse Detective's box office takings, meant battle lines were drawn, and round one went to Bluth and Spielberg...

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Hi everyone, I'm Em and welcome to Verbal Diorama, episode 332, An American Tail.

This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know and movies you don't that can tell you for a fact there are no cats at Verbal Diorama hq. None. Not one cat, not two cats. No cats. There are no cats. Cats don't exist here. I can promise you there are no caps. Welcome to Verbal Diorama.

Whether you're a brand new listener, whether you're a regular returning listener, thank you for being here. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast. I'm so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of An American Tail.

And thanks to listeners who have listened to this podcast and have continued to listen and support this podcast. Especially now, because this is the first of three special episodes celebrating this podcast's birthday.

This podcast is now seven years old and seven years ago, pretty much to the day.

The point is, over the years on this podcast, I've returned to Don Bluth many more times for the secret of NINH and Anastasia.

And Don Bluth has this ability to just transform me back to my childhood, where I spent a lot of my childhood watching Don Bluth animated movies on repeat, probably in a cycle with the Disney movies that I used to watch on repeat. Animation has always been the foundation of my very being, which I guess is not really rare for a millennial.

But even as a semi official grown up, I still love animation and I treasure it so much. And that's why this podcast started with animation and why animation continues to feature so prevalently on this podcast and probably always will.

Because this is the 6th annual animation season and so far this year on the podcast we've had Monsters, Inc. K Pop, Demon Hunters, Paprika, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mutant Mayhem, and most recently the Princess and the Frog. And I am a huge fan of animated movies. I think more podcasts should talk about them.

And the reason why I think that is because animation deserves to be celebrated in all forms, whether it is traditional 2D, hand drawn or stop motion or CGI. And animation season is here to tell you that animation is not just for children. Even a movie like An American Tale is not just for children.

And I'll explain why in a bit. Animation is also not a genre either. It is just a medium by which to tell a story.

It is the perfect art form and it is capable of depicting anyone and anything without the limitations of live action cinema. It's actually something that Steven Spielberg also believes because that's how he got involved in this movie in the first place.

And this is why Animation Season remains so important to highlight movies that you might have discounted for whatever reason or you may never have seen since you were a small child. But you should revisit them because I guarantee you are missing out on incredible storytelling.

A little Jewish mouse may not be the biggest character to star in a movie, but a little Jewish mouse can do amazing things like become the mascot for Amblimation, Steven Spielberg's animation studio, appearing in its production logo. And a little Jewish mouse can also star in one of Don Bluth's most accomplished, heartbreaking and fascinating stories.

Children love Fievel, but there's a lot more to this story that's somewhere out there. Here's the trailer for An American Tail.

Believing there are no cats in America, he arrives in New York harbor alone and struggles through the harsh realities of immigrant life as he realizes there are indeed cats in America. And he strives to find his family. Let's run through the cast.

We have Philip Glassam as Fievel Mouskowitz, John Finnegan as Warren T. Rat Amy Green as Tanya Mouskowitz Nehemia Persoff as Papa Erica Yoan as Mama Pat Music as Tony to Pony Dom DeLuise as Tiger Christopher Plummer as Henri Le Pigeon Cathianne Blore as Bridget Neil Ross as Honest John and Madeleine Kahn as Gussy Mausheimer.

Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, along with a further four animators and four assistant animators represented about 17% of the studio's animation staff. The loss was so significant to Disney that it delayed the release of the Fox and the Hound by six months.

Bluth left Disney and started Don Bluth Productions and he was passionate about reviving the classical animation style Disney had used on its Golden Age classics. And the cost cutting measures of the 60s and 70s left Bluth feeling concerned for Disney's future.

He felt they could no longer be creative, that there was too much bureaucracy, that artistic value was reduced and with no scope to grow, they had no choice but to leave and set up on their own. Their first feature length animated movie was an adaptation of Mrs. Frisby and the rats at NIMH, which became the secret of NIMH.

That's episode 76 of this podcast and it represented the sort of animated movies that would become blues trademarks. Often dark, a little scary and nightmare fuel for our childhoods.

And this was when a collaboration with Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment led to one of Bluth's most endearing and popular movies, especially where sales of Kleenex are concerned. And American Tales creation can actually be attributed to the late composer Jerry Goldsmith, composer of the Mummy, the greatest movie ever made.

And that friend was completely bowled over by the movie and wanted to meet the creators. That friend was Steven Spielberg. And in the early 80s, Spielberg was literally the biggest director of the toy, fresh off of E.T.

the extraterrestrial. And when Spielberg arrived at the studios, he complimented the team of Bluth, Goldman and Pomeroy.

Spielberg told them he thought the golden age of animation was over until he saw Nimh. He asked how much it cost.

They told him $9 million, and that it was entirely made in the U.S. and that's when Spielberg lit up and said that he'd always wanted to make an animated movie and that he genuinely believed in the medium of animation, that there were no limits to animation. Something that I have also been saying for a very long time, although clearly Spielberg has been saying it longer. So of course they said yes.

And so Spielberg said he would find the perfect story and get back to them. It would be almost two years later when Spielberg returned with the perfect story.

Bluth's group was driven yet again to bankruptcy, and there was still no word from Spielberg at that time. But Don Bluth did have a lovely conversation with Michael Jackson, who was also a fan of the Secret of Myth.

It was about a young mouse named Mousey Mousekowitz and his family who emigrate from Russia to the United States by boat after their home is destroyed by cats. During the trip, a fierce storm would throw little Mousie overboard and he loses contact with his family.

The story would be his journey to find them again.

It would be a musical and they would call it an American Tail, spelled T A I L, not T A L E. It would be another movie to feature rodents, something that was becoming popular for animation in the 70s and 80s with the rescuers, the secret of NIMH Basil the Great Mouse Detective, which would come out the same year as An American Tail. More on that later. But the whole mouse thing was actually a complete coincidence.

An American Tail was a concept by David Kirchner, the same guy who created Chucky in Child's Play and also Hocus Pocus.

Steven Spielberg felt differently and he provided the production with money and ideas. But there wouldn't be as much money as you might expect for a feature length animated movie with the likes of Steven Spielberg's involvement.

Don Bluth had to accept a smaller budget than usual in order to get the movie made. Disney was spending about $12 million on each movie at the time, but Universal would only support the movie up to $6.5 million.

But the significance of collaborating with Steven Spielberg on a significant project outweighed the potential financial cost, or so they thought. They eventually agreed on a budget of $9 million.

But to do an American tail for $9 million, the newly formed Sullivan Bluth Studios had to freeze everyone's salaries for a year and a half. And those people could not be members of the union because the union required higher rates of pay than the studio could offer.

Unlike the former Don Bluth production studio, the Sullivan Bluth studio wasn't in the union.

And when many of the crew attempted to withdraw from the union to work on the movie, the union stepped in and sent a memo requesting Sullivan Bluth to conformed to union demands and accused them of coercing their members to resign their membership in order to work for them. The union also believed Sullivan Bluth was Don Bluth Productions.

Sullivan Bluth responded to the union saying they had made a tentative agreement to produce a feature length movie and that a final contract had not been agreed upon at that time. But an important contingency of the work was the agreed budget, which was lower than expected.

This battle between Sullivan Bluth and the unions would be ongoing during production. Nevertheless, Steven Spielberg was incredibly hands on with this movie and with its production.

And Mousey Mousekewitz became Fievel, his Russian grandfather Philip's Yiddish name. He originally wanted the idea to be more like Disney's Robin Hood in a normal animal world.

It was Don Bluth who suggested grounding it in the real world with the mice as tiny versions in the Human world. Just like Basil, the Great Mouse Detective and the Rescuers, Spielberg actually watched the rescuers and agreed.

In the planning stages, Spielberg was in Japan making Empire of the sun and Don Bluth would send everything to him for approval, from storyboards to character designs and sequences.

Before this, I had been a bottomless pit of appreciation for animated films without knowing what went into making them. At this point I'm enlightened, but I still can't believe it's so complicated. End quote.

David Kirschner's concept was about half an hour's worth of format and so to flesh it out, Emmy Award winning writers Judy Freudberg and Tony Geiss, known for their work on Sesame street, were brought in to finish the script. When the initial script was complete. It was long and it had to be heavily edited before its final release and security around this script was tight.

One example of the security procedures in place was that the final script pages were all stamped with a specific number, so any photocopies found outside of the studio could be tracked back to an original source. Even the Don Bluth newsletter had to receive permission from Amblin before publishing any artwork from the upcoming An American Tale.

Despite agreeing with many of Spielberg's suggestions for the movie, Don Bluth expressed and disagreement with the main character's name of Fievel. It may have been Spielberg's grandfather's name, but Bluth felt that it was too foreign sounding and audiences wouldn't remember it.

Spielberg obviously disagreed, so a compromise was reached in having Tony refer to Fievel as Philly.

That doesn't mean a universal spelling of Fievel was agreed because the opening credits misspell it as F E I V E L rather than F I E V E L, which went largely unnoticed until after it released the idea that Tanya was renamed Tilly so Fieval could have been renamed.

Philly came from the idea too, although it incorrect that immigrants were forced to change their names on entry to the US While new immigrants did frequently have their names and disguised upon arriving in America. Changing them entirely in a legal sense was never done and any permanent changes were done by the person themselves well after they'd arrived.

Perhaps because they felt the family would assimilate better with an American sounding name.

Names were recorded at the point of departure on ship manifest and these were used upon entry to the United States, even if they were long or difficult to pronounce. The myth of immigrant name changes was popularized by movies like The Godfather Part 2.

The large scale Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire to the United States in the decades preceding World War I and the Russian Revolution was largely due to these circumstances.

The experience of immigrants in late 19th century New York and their disappointment with the so called American Dream makes up the majority of the narrative. As socioeconomic differences gained significance, ethnic differences became less significant.

Compared to the Jewish Gussie Mausheimer, the wealthiest mouse in New York, the impoverished Jewish mice are more similar to the other impoverished immigrant mice. And this movie has it all.

Anti Semitism, child slavery, genocide, the building of the Statue of Liberty and appalling circumstances in sweatshops and tenements. They're all that. And wouldn't you believe it? There are cats in America. Just a point.

The mice and the human immigrants don't actually arrive at Ellis island because this movie predates Ellis Island. They arrive at Castle Garden, previously Fort Clinton, which is now known as Castle Clinton.

Honest John represents politicians, particularly those who operated out of Tammany hall, who would skim votes from new immigrants with pro immigrant policies and stances.

Wanting to make these mice stylistically different from those from Disney and from the Secret of nimh, Bluth designed the characters of An American Tail with the Amblin and Sears Marketing departments. They used a 40s look featuring large ears and a larger head. Bluth did the major designs for all of the characters.

Some changes occurred during production, such as Henri the pigeon. He was originally drawn scraggly and worn, and this design was due to the first choice for Henri's voice being Sid Caesar.

After the recording session, Bluth felt the boys didn't have the feel of the scene, and so the role was eventually recast with Christopher Plummer and then redesigned to have a more dignified look with a top hat instead of a beret. Henri was quite a contentious character and some people at the studio requested the pigeon be cut.

But Bluth was adamant that Henri was the voice of the Statue of Liberty. And it was important that she had a voice because she is the first thing that immigrants see when they get off the boat.

Speaking of voices, the cast was filled with known and unknown voice actors. Madeleine Khan was cast as the very wealthy Gussie Mausheimer.

She was picked hoping that she would use a voice similar to the one she uses in Blazing Saddles. Papa was played by Nehemia Persoff, chosen because of his similar role as Barbra Streisand's father in Yentl.

Christopher Plummer was best known as the lead in the movie the Sound of Music.

Obviously chosen as honoree Pigeon Dom DeLuise had also starred in the Secret of NIMH and would be a frequent collaborator of Bluth, as well as Mel Brooks. Going back to Blazing Saddles, not for the Land Before Time, but I'll get to that next episode.

The pivotal role of Fievel went to Philip Glasser, the son of a musician and voice teacher. Glasser was discovered by accident after he was heard auditioning for an Oscar Mayer commercial.

John Finnegan was cast as Warren T Rat, reciting excerpts from Shakespeare's Hamlet in a voice that sounded like a Brooklyn taxi driver. The idea was so funny that the writers made Warren frequently misquotes Shakespeare.

Don Bluth wanted to storyboard the entire film, but underestimated the scope of the work, and Larry Leker was hired to assist Bluth with a few sequences. Bluth would make rough sketches that Leker would decipher into actual storyboard panels.

But then they found a new tool that would play a significant role in their future operations. A video printer.

They discovered they could capture live action using an early inexpensive model, then used the printer to print out tiny 4 by 5 inches black and white thermal images from the tape. They then had precise posing to work from by printing each frame of the footage.

While some animators simply used this as a reference, others photocopied it to make it larger and could then trace the images from Honest John's lightly inebriated stroll to the firefighters battling the fire. The filmmakers used this technique to help in a number of scenes sequences.

It is very similar to the rotoscoping technique that's been used since the earliest days of animation, in which sequences are shot in live action and traced onto animation cells. But this is a quicker version. They also built models and photographed them, with the most elaborate being the Mouse of Minsk.

A model of the ship was also built for the storm at sea sequence. A large workforce was assembled as the animation production began, with animators coming from all around the world.

A number of animators came from Canada to work and learn from the master, Don Bluth. There was also a trainee crew from Ireland and several students from the California Institute of the Arts. They worked as freelancers.

There was talk about relocating the entire production to Ireland, but Steven Spielberg flat out rejected the idea, saying that a movie called An American Tail could only be made in America and would not be produced in Ireland.

Unfortunately, due to financial constraints, of which there were many on this movie, Spielberg would let the movie Cells be painted in Ireland, which had its own issues due to the slower turnaround in Ireland compared to the us. There were three in this marriage on this movie. Don Bluth, Anne Blynn and Universal. And each of them had their own ideas.

Due to budgetary and scheduling issues, they had to cut either a song or a scene. But as Spielberg wanted his very own hi ho type song, it was decided to instead cut scenes.

And this would mean some of the key narrative scenes, such as the Mouskowitz's journey from Shotsk, which is in Ukraine, to Hamburg, which is in Germany, was removed. And also the explanation of where baby Yasha disappears to would also end up on the cutting room floor.

It would also mean the cutting of more intense, less family friendly scenes, including a scarier scene at the sea with wave monsters. But throughout it all, Bluth always remembered he was working with Steven Spielberg. A literal dream come true for any filmmaker.

And despite all the hardships, the long days, the tight budget, the high stakes, An American Tale would be the little Jewish mouse that could. And this is really the perfect time to segue into the obligatory Keanu reference, if you don't know what that is.

This is a part of the podcast where I try and link every movie that I feature with Keanu Reeves for no reason other than he is the best of Men. And Keanu Reeves sort of worked with Steven Spielberg. Let me explain. On a biographical documentary called Mifune the Last Samurai.

Keanu Reeves narrated the documentary and Spielberg was interviewed alongside Martin Scorsese about Mifune's influence on cinema.

And the reason why I'm choosing this to link to An American Tale and not another movie is, quite frankly, Keanu Reeves has never starred as a mouse, so it's kind of difficult. I mean, technically, I suppose he has starred as an American, but it's too vague.

So, anyway, let's talk about the soundtrack to An American Tail, because it is an original score composed by James Horner, which was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and the choir of King's College. And as I mentioned, Spielberg wanted his High Ho, a song that would be remembered for decades, and he would get it as well.

The first person brought in to write songs was Tom Barlow. He'd been a music supervisor and composer who'd worked frequently with Quincy Jones.

But after writing a few songs, nothing was really hitting and the team decided to hire another songwriter. So husband and wife Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann were brought in and they've written a number of pop hits for Dolly Parton and others.

Warner was also involved with the writing of the songs.

After the first batch of songs were written, it was decided that a special song would be written for Linda Ronstadt, the then girlfriend of Spielberg's friend George Lucas, coming back to him next episode.

The song Somewhere Out There was written as a duet for siblings Fievel and Tonya, then planned to be run over the end credits with Ron Stud singing it alongside James Ingram.

Somewhere Out There would go on to win two Grammy Awards for Song of the Year, a best song written specifically for a motion picture or for television, and become the most popular song to come from an animated feature since the 50s.

There was also a huge marketing push for Fievel as a cute, cuddly animated mouse, including plush toys at Sears, along with a line of clothing and accessories. And this was all intentional because Don Bluth wanted people to know who Fievel was.

And when he read the description of An American Tail, Spiegelman raced to complete Maus because the similarities caused him to think that Bluth and Spielberg were plagiarising him. Both feature a family of mice attempting to escape a cruel regime of cats, and both mice families have Jewish surnames.

However, there are clear differences.

An American Tail serves as a metaphor for Jewish immigration to the US while Maus deals with the horrors of the Holocaust by using mice and cats as a metaphor for Jews and Nazis, respectively.

The Voyage Home and American Tail debuted at third, with Song of the south at fourth, with just over a million dollars between the pair that first week, and American Tail's tankings actually jumped 15.1% in its second week the week after Thanksgiving, but not enough to jump up the charts any further, and Fievel stayed at third and American Tail would end up in the US top 10 for six weeks.

On its $9 million budget, an American Tail would gross $47.5 million in the US and $36.5 million internationally for a total worldwide gross of $84 million at the time of its domestic release. It became the highest grossing animated feature for an initial release and the highest grossing non Disney produced animated film.

It was also one of the first animated films to be more financially successful than a Disney one because it beat the Great Mouse detectives $50 million by quite some margin.

A Rotten Tomatoes and American Tail has a 77% rating with a consensus of exquisitely animated An American Tail is a sweet, melancholy immigrant story, but the movie did draw the ire of some film critics who felt the tone was bleak and depressing and that the immigrant experience was told through stereotypes.

Both reviewers also criticized how it gave little mention that the main characters were Jewish or that the attack on their home at the beginning was an anti Semitic one. They called it a Jewish parable that doesn't want to declare itself and felt that it chickened out on its ethnic heritage.

In his own review for the Chicago Sun Times, Roger Ebert gave it two stars out of four, giving credit to the animation, calling it full and detailed, enhanced by computers and an improvement on so much recent animation that cuts corners, but that the story was too dark and gloomy. The Academy Award for Best Original Song they nos to take my breath away from the band Berlin for the movie Top Gun.

Also nominated that year was Mean Green Mother from Little Shop of Horrors, one of my personal favorite musicals. As for sequels, Darth Bluth had no direct involvement in the theatrical sequel Fievel Goes west, which was more comedic in tone than the first movie.

I don't believe it is still there though, and one of the most wonderful things about animation is how it can mask serious subjects by having a cute protagonist or bright colors. I watched this movie when I was a small child and young me didn't know that these mice were Jewish because I didn't know what Hanukkah was.

Little me didn't know about religious persecution. Little me didn't know about sweatshops or child slavery.

All little me knew was a little mouse had lost his family and that's all I needed to know when I was a child. Nowadays I look at this movie in an entirely different lens.

A lens of knowing about antisemitism, of knowing that the American Dream immigrants were sold is often more of a nightmare and that hundreds of people just like the Mousekowitz family die on boat crossings to get to the UK for a better life. And sometimes we are not as warm and receptive as the staff at Castle Garden are depicted as being.

It really goes to show the power animation has to expose everyone to topics that might be harsher in live action.

Not to mention the popularity of An American Tail was a wake up call for many, in an industry where Disney had dominated the box office for so long while also becoming a cultural touchstone for its generation, Disney were actually struggling to gain relevance in the market at the time, and they ended up losing to an animator who used to work for them. And that must have been a huge kick in the teeth.

It would result in an ongoing war between the studios, a war that Bluth would eventually lose, but for this brief moment, he was on top, and it showed other animation studios that taking on the House of Mouse was possible.

Steven Spielberg would use this to branch off into Amblemation, and while Fievel would be Amblenation's mascot and its first movie would be the sequel to this, Amblemation would only end up making three movies because after Balto failed at the box office, Amblemation was closed and many of the staff ended up at DreamWorks working on the Prince of Egypt.

But Don Bluth would continue with the next movie in this series, join forces yet again with Steven Spielberg and his good friend George Lucas for the Land Before Time, which would be another massive hit for Don Bluth and be the start of a franchise with, count them, 13 sequels. But more on that next episode. Thank you for listening.

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