‘It’s the end of the world...’
For someone with such a monomaniacal obsession with nostalgia, there is one element of my childhood that I have never revisited. Whilst the films that shaped my adolescence have been a constant ever since, the stuff that made me fall in love with cinema in the first place, the kids movies, have been allowed to disappear into the unforgiving sands of time. I’ve never revisited any of those old Disney movies I used to watch every day. Robin Hood, The Sword in the Stone, Jungle Book. These are films I must have seen fifty times but none of them since I was a child. I think this is partly because I’m worried that if I go back to them, I won’t find them to be as wonderful as I did all those years ago. In fact, the only one that I have revisited is The Land Before Time – and even that only happened in the throes of grief one Christmas Eve when I didn’t really know what else to do. The man who directed that classic, Don Bluth, also brought us a number of other animated children’s films in the 80s and 90s, and under the wing of Steven Spielberg’s short lived animation studio Amblimation, no less. An American Tail was one of them…
Fievel Mousekewitz (Phillip Glasser) is a young Russian mouse who is separated from his family following their emigration to America as a result of the misguided belief that there are no cats in America. Ironically, almost immediately upon arrival, it turns out there are cats everywhere, and this is what precipitates the disappearance of Fievel. On his journey, Fievel will encounter other mice with outrageous caricatures of various New York dialects as well as one cat who is different to all of the others (Tiger – voiced with gusto by Dom DeLuise).
A pretty standard children’s tale of finding one’s way back home then, but one that is executed with warmth and a whole lot of heart. It helps that the whole thing looks gorgeous and the voice cast do a lovely job in bringing these fairly two dimensional characters to life. While it never hits the dizzy heights of The Land Before Time, and I was surprised at how little of this film I remembered considering the number of times I watched it as a child, I still really enjoyed An American Tail, and it was actually quite refreshing to see a children’s animated movie that is just that. Something simple and uncomplicated. Sure, a bunch of the cats are playing cards and smoking cigars, but this was the 80s for chrissakes. We should count ourselves lucky the the antagonist Henri (Christopher Plummer) wasn’t racking up lines of catnip and mainlining kibble.
Joking aside, An American Tail is no masterpiece, but it contains everything that anyone could reasonably ask of a children’s animated movie. I loved it.