29 Facts About Don Bluth

Donald Virgil Bluth is an American filmmaker, animator, video game designer and author.

Don Bluth came to prominence working for Walt Disney Productions before creating his own film studio in the early 1980s.

Don Bluth Productions hired many animators away from Disney, and Bluth's films were a major competitor to Disney in the 1980s, leading up to the Disney Renaissance.

Don Bluth was born on September 13,1937 in El Paso, Texas, to Emaline and Virgil Roneal Don Bluth.

Don Bluth's maternal grandfather was Rey Pratt from the Pratt family, whose own father Helaman Pratt was an early leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well as a grandfather of George W Romney and great-grandfather of Mitt Romney.

Don Bluth is of Swedish, English, Irish, Scottish, and German descent.

Don Bluth later said, "then I'd go home and copy every Disney comic book I could find".

Don Bluth has stated that he and his siblings do not communicate with each other as adults.

Don Bluth attended Brigham Young University in Utah for one year, and then returned later to complete a degree in English.

In 1957, Don Bluth left Disney, recalling he found the work to be "kind of boring".

For two and a half years, Don Bluth resided in Argentina on a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Don Bluth returned to the United States where he opened a local theater in Culver City, producing musicals such as The Music Man and The Sound of Music.

Don Bluth returned to college and earned a degree in English literature from Brigham Young University.

In 1964, Don Bluth illustrated Affairs of the Harp, a harp maintenance manual by Samuel O Pratt, with dozens of anthropomorphic cartoon harp characters he called "Harpoons".

In 1967, Don Bluth returned to the animation industry, and joined Filmation working on layouts for The Archie Show and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Don Bluth then worked as an animation director on Pete's Dragon.

Don Bluth employed 160 animators during the production and agreed to the first profit sharing contract in the animation industry.

Nevertheless, due to the modest gross and an industry-wide animation strike, Don Bluth Productions filed for bankruptcy.

Don Bluth's studio was left without a source of income and the Don Bluth Group filed for bankruptcy on March 1,1985.

Sullivan Don Bluth Studios helped boost animation as an industry within Ireland.

Don Bluth ended his working relationship with Spielberg before his next film, All Dogs Go to Heaven and was not involved with An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, the first film produced by Spielberg's new Amblimation studio.

Don Bluth directed films, such as Rock-a-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park, and The Pebble and the Penguin, which were all critical and box office failures; however, Rock-a-Doodle would find greater success on home video.

Don Bluth scored a hit in 1997 with Anastasia, produced at Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona, which grossed nearly US$140 million worldwide.

In October 2004, Polydor Records released the song "Mary", by the Scissor Sisters, which was accompanied by a music video for which Don Bluth did the animation.

In 2009, Don Bluth was asked to produce storyboards for, and to direct, the 30-minute Saudi Arabian festival film Gift of the Hoopoe.

Don Bluth ultimately had little say in the animation and content of the film and asked that he not be credited as the director or producer.

Don Bluth's goal is to bring a "renaissance of hand-drawn animation", in the belief that there is an audience demand for it.

The earliest of Don Bluth's unfinished film projects is a Disney-produced animated short film adaptation of the fairy tale The Pied Piper of Hamelin from the early 1970s.

That same time, Don Bluth began developing an animated adaptation of East of the Sun and West of the Moon.