An American Tail: Fievel Goes West

Growing up I had a fascination with Don Bluth films. While not as popular with the older audience I was a fan of Rock-a-Doodle, A Troll in Central Park and The Land Before Time sequels.

When I was about 6 I remember watching An American Tail at high holidays as part of the daycare program since kids are restless and it's not fair to keep them cooped up in services for hours on end.

Anyway the film caught my attention and it still has it. However I'm more interested in the sequel, Fievel Goes West.

Disclaimer I have recently found out that this film was not worked on by Bluth or his studio. It doesn't change my opinions on it, however.

I remember the first time I watched this movie was on Cartoon Network's Cartoon Theater back in the 90's. My favorite part is when Tiger learns how to act like a dog. However it wasn't until recently did I realize why I loved the movie so much.

It was the music. One of my favorite musical pieces is Hoedown by ELP (Emerson Lake and Palmer) and Tiger's training session is very similar with the American Tail them melded into it.

I just bought the OST from iTunes and the score is simply amazing! I can hear a lot of hard work went into these musical pieces and they accompany the film perfectly. The music helps make this film so good.

The animation is top-notch. But what else do you expect from Don Bluth? The fluid motion and attention to detail is very well done. Near the end of the film, a cat is giving a speech on how cats and mice are to live together but keeps letting slip words about eating. The other cats standing around him will react when he slips up instead of just ignoring it.

The scaled proportions are also very well done. The mice are tiny, as they should be. The cats are seen as giant menacing monsters. But in this film we see direct human interaction with one of the characters, Cat R. Waul (caterwaul lol) is grabbed and mercilessnessly pet by a woman.

My biggest complaint about the movie is actually the humans. How do none of them see it or are around to witness this? When they build the door to the saloon, they walk in and there are cats drinking, smoking and gambling. Later in this scene Cat R. Waul jumps through a ceiling board and comes up underneath a human saloon (where he is snuggled).

I can understand that they're a floor above, but that means they'd have to walk through a saloon with cats being humans. Nobody cares?

Same with the shootout at the end. They're fighting like cats and dogs, even firing a gun mounted on a turnstile (since proportions being what they are, a cat couldn't actually lift a human gun). But there are no humans around to see this?

We've already established humans exist in this world but these animal do things in broad daylight that don't seem to call any attention to themselves.

Criticisms aside, I think it's a really fun movie. Animation is top notch and music is excellent.

The story is fun to follow, even if the message isn't really clear; pretend to be something your not? Tiger only won back Miss Kitty by acting like a dog, but Wylie changed his original character. Fievel still hasn't seemed to change from the first film, running off on his own and not thinking about it. Only Tanya seemed to change and that was giving up on her dreams as a singer.

It's a classic western made for a younger audience, and that's okay. It's not a great movie, but it's still a fun well crafted film and I'll always love it.

Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg brought us these masterpieces, which are both as dark but meaningful as the original The Land Before Time (also a Don Bluth film), and hold up really well, while not so much technically but more in terms of story-telling, but I do love the animation anyway.

I grew up with these movies and am 33 now but watched Fievel Goes West again tonight and thought of how today's kids just get 3D Pixar/Dreamworks flicks, and hope that the classics of "traditional" animation don't get buried among them. Not that I have anything against those studios or anything, though.

Plus FGW has John Cleese and both have Dom DeLuise. What's not to love?

And then of course there's All Dogs Go To Heaven, another Don Bluth flick with the Judith Barsi (also played Ducky in TLBT) voicing the main character alongside Burt Reynolds.

Edit: Honourable mention to The Secret of NIMH (the book series is better, though).

Edit 2: This is now a Don Bluth appreciation thread.

This movie has been with me since I was a kid and I watch it at least once a year. It still gives me chills about how a small person can be a great person and how you may struggle but you can overcome and be the hero that you may have been looking for. Music is amazing like Tanya's song and just the general background music never leaves my mind in my daily life. There aren't many animated movies from this time period that I remember but this one has to be by far my favorite. There is hope, honor, regret, despair, confidence and becoming the real hero you always wanted to be even if you didn't know it could happen, and you could forget the laaaaaazy EYE! Plus it's funny. Thoughts?

My wife an I have started a Sunday evening tradition called ‘Does it Hold Up?’ Where we watch some of our childhood favorites and see if the years and our increasing age allows some of these movies to still be enjoyable to our adult selves. (Last week was our first round of this watching Little Nemo in Slumberland and Cat’s Can’t Dance). We also learned tonight that there were two more American Tail direct to video sequels— but we were focused on the original two.

So American Tail, it had been so long since I saw this movie, but it came back to me each time. ‘Oh I remember this now!’ Went through my head. I gritted my teeth every time Fievel and his family were on screen at the same time but literally just missed each other. The most infuriating was at the assembly and Fievel and literally on the stage and the family can’t see— yet NO ONE on stage thought to call out to the gathered mice ‘oh by the way, has has anyone seen this kids family?’ But as a whole, An American Tail was still really enjoyable and I feel it holds up. I think similar to Cats Can’t Dance, if it was set in an older period to begin with, it helps make it hold up easier than a movie that’s set in a present day which then feels dated (sorry Oliver and Company fans).

Now Fievel Goes West. Both my wife and I agreed going in to the pair, that the sequel was better than the original. I think that’s because it was newer to us as we were growing up, as the first movie actually falls around us being babies. Now in 1991 we are young kids, and this is a new movie. It feels newer than American Tail as well in that the animation is smoother and brighter and it’s a lot more— energetic.

But sadly, and my wife disagrees with me on this, my vote now says that American Tail is the far superior of the two films. I am often very critical of comic relief characters and Tiger oversteps the line of tolerable in FGW. While I much prefer to John Cleese’s Cat R Waul to the villain of the first movie, that’s about the only thing I prefer in the sequel.

I became increasingly frustrated at Fievel’s sister. In the first movie, Fievel is 7, Tanya is 8. She is a year older than him. The second movie feels like it’s a couple mouse years later. The baby looks about two, Fievel I could say was 9— Tanya SHOULD HAVE BEEN 10 by that notion. And in the beginning of the movie, I’d have agreed that she was 10 or 11, maybe even 12. Already that’s older than she should have been.

However, we get into the second half of the movie, and she becomes a stage performer, in a low cut dress and we even see her defined cleavage while all the cats are fawning over her while she sings. And at the very end we see her next to Fievel again and she is much taller than him, looking now like she’s 16 or so. I don’t know how his sister aged 6 years in the course of the movie, but that was a very weird progression. The sister plot itself was perfectly fine, I liked what they did with her story— but her age completely baffled me and actually kind of upset me.

Tiger’s whole story was pretty cringe inducing for me. As I stated above, comic relief characters are already on my radar. Much like Mater in Cars— they had a comic character that young fans latched on to and then gave them a pivotal and primary role in the second movie that is almost more important than the main character. The best part of FGW was the middle of the movie because you actually forget about a tiger for a bit.

They make a big deal about Fievel’s hat in the first movie, it’s literally the thing that gets the little fool split from them in the first place and then he’s constantly losing it and then suddenly having it with him. And then in the second movie— this family hairloom for generations— he pulls inside out and suddenly it’s a cowboy hat... yes... I know we are watching a movie about talking animals and I should suspend my disbelief— but how the hell does that happen? And it’s such an important thing in the first movie to literally just get snapped into something else at the beginning of the movie to fit the theme— but it’s not replaced! No! Because he has to pull it inside about again at the end of the movie to get his original hat back.

My last gripe, which we see a little bit in the first movie with how savage the cats are in the first half of American Tail but then they’re kind of bumbling and normal in the second half. The movies really picks and chooses its sentience when it’s convenient. So the first half of American Tail the cats are savage and stuff, the second half after Fievel finds their lair, they’re a lot easier to escape from and mess around with. In the second movie, even during the cats attacks you see them more as the more sentient, albeit bumbling, creatures the movie established— but then there is a bit about as long as Polar Express’s traveling ticket scene with Tiger being chased by dogs. Dogs that are very much NOT sentient. Aside from the very last one on the stage coach wearing clothes, none of these dogs seem anything more than just animals. But then enter Wylie Burp and hey, look, a talking dog who is just as sentient as the rest of the characters.

Still loved both movies, where we went in with fonder memories of Fievel Goes West than American Tail, we both now agree (as she has agreed with me since I started writing this and I don’t wanna go back and edit) that American Tail was the superior of the two films. However we both feel that the films, despite errors that I primarily focused on, did hold up relatively well, they’re both fun, I feel both parents and kids could watch these movies and have fun with them today.

Future movies on our books are; Rockadoodle, Page Master, Swan Princess, We’re Back! A Dinosaur Tale, Charlotte’s Web, & All Dogs Go To Heaven. We did Ferngully about a year ago and that was rough. Even Tim Curry wasn’t enough to make that movie hold up.