Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy. Courtesy of Jerry Beck.

A personal remembrance of when Don Bluth quit Disney, formed an independent studio and inspired the current feature animation boom.
The 1970s was a decade in which TV animation plunged to its depths, with the likes of Hanna-Barbera and Filmation dominating Saturday mornings with the worst of their wares. Although Hollywood was barely interested in animated film, the period began with considerable promise, with such independent films as Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic, John Wilson's Shinbone Alley and René Laloux' Fantastic Planet. But as the decade progressed, Disney sunk to an all-time low with the release of Robin Hood, and ambitious attempts like Richard Williams' Raggedy Ann and Andy, Murukami-Wolf-Swenson's Mouse and His Child and Sanrio's Winds of Change proved to be bitter disappointments.

I graduated from high school in 1974 and planned a career as a cartoonist and animator. But things were so bad in those days that I grew frustrated with animation and pursued research into its wonderful past.

All was not lost. Disney's The Rescuers showed the possibilities offered by a new team of young animators; this, along with early artwork released on The Fox and the Hound offered some hope. Then came a story in The New York Times about a defection at Disney's.

Quitting in the Name of Disney
Directing animator Don Bluth and two colleagues, Gary Goldman and John Pomeroy, three of the most talented of the young Turks at Disney (publicized heavily in the promotion of The Rescuers) had defiantly quit. They left because of what they felt was a lack of regard by their superiors about the quality of the artwork, a deteriorating production process, and management's declining respect for the artists who built the studio. They quit in the name of Walt Disney, whom the three felt would never tolerate the way the current regime had let the animation department fall to such a low level.

The next day, 11 other animators quit to join Bluth and company. It was a bold move and it shook up Disney's animation department; finding capable Disney-trained character animators to replace these renegades wasn't easy. And it would cause a major delay in the release of The Fox and the Hound.

Bluth established his own studio, with the backing of Aurora Productions, a company headed by a group of ex-Disney executives, and started production on a feature, The Secret of NIMH.

While at Disney, Bluth led a group of animators to work after hours on a Disneyesque half hour short, Banjo the Woodpile Cat. It was done to learn the entire process of making a film, not just the character animation they were toiling on during the day. Banjo also taught them tricks and techniques they could use on their features. The art direction and special effects were in the classic Disney and Hollywood cartoon traditions, techniques and styles no longer being practiced anywhere in animation at that time.