In 2003 I visited an exhibit on Jewish cinema at the Jewish Museum in New York City. Clips of Seinfeld looped continuously on monitors, and the galleries of artifacts included items associated with filmmakers as diverse as the Marx brothers and Steven Spielberg, along with the conversion certificates of Marilyn Monroe and Sammy Davis, Jr. and other memorabilia. In one corner I spotted some children’s merchandise based on the 1986 cartoon An American Tail, an inclusion which was appropriate enough. The characters, although mice, are portrayed as Jewish: they initially live in a small Russian village in 1885, they play and sing Jewish-influenced music, they celebrate Hanukkah, and they are driven from their homes by a pogrom that includes the film’s only notable footage of humans. After this opening, the bulk of the plot deals with the family’s journey to New York City, reenacting both the Israelites’ Egyptian exodus and the specific story of immigration to the New World so fundamental to Jewish-Americans’ identity in the late nineteenth century. Despite all this, and even the fact that the film was produced by Spielberg himself—who conceived the narrative from his family’s history and named the main character Fievel after his own grandfatherⁱ—it made me laugh to wonder what the curators would have thought had I suggested An American Tail was actually about Mormonism.

A fair case can be made, however, that it is and, for that matter, that essentially each of the other ten films made by An American Tail’s director Don Bluth is also. Born into an LDS family in El Paso in 1937, Bluth was raised in the Church in Texas, Utah, and California, then briefly worked at Disney while still a teenager, served a mission in Argentina, and graduated from BYU with a degree in English. He then returned to Disney where he rose through the animation ranks for nearly a decade from 1970 until 1979 when he and a contingency of nineteen colleagues resigned en masse in protest over the company’s increasingly corporate governance, which they saw as overextending and underappreciating staff and, more critically, stifling the creative process and thus producing low-quality films that were a pale shadow of the studio’s golden age under Walt Disney. Striking out on their own as Don Bluth Productions, this growing team soon gave Disney stiff competition through films like The Secret of NIMH (1982), An American Tail (1986), The Land Before Time (1988), and All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989)—as well as creating the innovative LaserDisc video game Dragon’s Lair in 1983—and film historians believe this competition helped push Disney to achieve their own animation renaissance in the 1990s. Despite Bluth’s artistic and commercial success it was always a struggle to maintain revenue for his company, prompting a move to Dublin in 1987 and the production of a series of less expensive—and less successful—films in the ’90s: Rock-a-Doodle (1991), Thumbelina (1994), A Troll in Central Park (1994), and The Pebble and the Penguin (1995). In 1994, with these last three pictures in production, his investors were indicted for fraud and his studio was sold to MGM/United Artists, which would finish these films without him. But Bluth, his chief collaborator Gary Goldman (who co-directed most of his movies), and 162 of their artists moved to Phoenix to create a new animation studio for Twentieth Century-Fox.ⁱⁱ Empowered by a supportive studio, they returned to peak performance with Anastasia (1997), followed by the straight-to-video prequel Bartok the Magnificent (1999) and the hand drawn-3D hybrid Titan A.E. (2000), a film plagued by delays and cost overruns before Bluth and Goldman came onboard, causing Fox to close the Arizona studio after its release. Bluth stayed near Phoenix and for the past twenty-two years he’s run a large community theater, written books on animation and trained a new generation of students through online and in-person programs like Don Bluth University, and worked to develop Dragon’s Lair as an animated or live-action film or series. Most recently, he spent a portion of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown writing his autobiography Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life, which provides wonderful insights into his life and career.

One of the reasons the book is particularly engaging for students of Mormonism is how forthrightly and often Bluth discusses his faith, from the opening dedication to the acknowledgements at the end, where he concludes by saying, “It is no secret that I have a spiritual influence that guides every detail of my life. My greatest gratitude is for the savior, Jesus Christ….”ⁱⁱⁱ This openness about his faith is somewhat revelatory because, as Bluth himself concedes in the book, “During my career, I’ve made little mention about my affiliation with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Worshipping God is a very personal matter, and all God’s children are free to make their own choices on the subject…”^iv His previous reticence has kept him from being widely recognized as LDS; indeed, as someone from the generation that grew up watching his films, I clearly remember my excitement to see An American Tail when it was released, for instance, but I didn’t learn of his religion until I began studying Mormon cinema in the early 2000s. Since then my experience has been that this ignorance is not uncommon even among his LDS fans. One rare occasion when he did mention his faith, however, was an interview with the Church News shortly after the release of All Dogs Go to Heaven in 1989:

Everything I do is centered around the gospel. Even our films are, although the secular world would never realize it. The gospel gives you a pivot point around which you can make a circle for your life. Because the gospel’s permanent and doesn’t shift or change, it provides a strong base in all you do . . . In The Land Before Time, for example, the dinosaurs start off life heading for the promised valley, and they have to overcome obstacles to get there. They have to get along to survive, and work with each other’s peculiarities. American Tail is about being separated from your family, but never giving up, and accomplishing what you set out to do.^v

This perspective—that Bluth’s films are “centered around the gospel”—is essentially what made me identify An American Tail as a Mormon film at the Jewish Museum in 2003. And although he appears to have been unaware of this statement, this is essentially the conclusion that Mormon author and critic—and Irreantum’s co-founder—Benson Parkinson reached when analyzing Anastasia on the early Association for Mormon Letters AML-List discussion board in 1998, a year after the film’s release. This movie depicts the lost Russian princess several years after the fall of Nicholas II. Journeying to Paris and not knowing her real identity, Anastasia must strive to remember her past life and reunite herself with her grandmother Marie, overcoming the attempts of the undead Rasputin to kill her out of pure hatred. Anastasia and her grandmother recognize each other by matching amulets and a shared song. As Parkinson says:

Read typologically, Anastasia holds up better . . . than the Disney films. Think of the St. Petersburg palace as a regal, pre-existent, celestial home, mostly-forgotten, towards which we grope, with little more than hope to guide us most the time. We are opposed by a sinister member of the court who has been expelled, and we have to be diligent and pure, and help each other, to overcome the obstacles he puts in our path. We’re given emblems that help us recognize our heavenly parents when we find them, and once we’re united with them we can’t be separated again. Typologically speaking, Disney shows tend to boil down to, “True love (i.e. romantic love) conquers all.” Anastasia boils down to, “If you’re diligent in your quest, you can find your true identity and be sealed to your family eternally.”^vi

Parkinson goes on to speculate that the inclusion of such typology in Bluth’s films is not accidental:

How we think of typology depends partly on what we see the author doing. It’s perfectly legitimate to find Christian allegory in Snow White or the Lion King, whether the authors intended it or not, because one view of typology is that these patterns in all the world’s stories are pre-existent—they resonate because we knew them before we came. I think Anastasia is different, both because of Bluth’s LDS background and because he’s explored these same themes in his other films: discovering one’s identity in The Secret of NIMH, and finding one’s family in An American Tail and The Land before Time…. I see Bluth as a Latter-day Saint trying consciously to give these themes a purer expression so they will resonate with people and prepare them for the gospel, or at least help make them truer to their natures. And I believe he succeeds….^vii

In referring to typology and archetypes, Parkinson invokes a long tradition of cultural and literary criticism that draws on the work of people like the psychiatrist Carl Jung and his concept of a collective unconscious, and especially Joseph Campbell, who studied comparative mythology and religion and whose most famous concept is probably the monomythic hero’s journey from his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces—a basic pattern that appears again and again in hero stories across centuries and cultures. In his own autobiography Bluth describes how he made the surprising decision to switch from an art major at BYU to instead study English, and how immersing himself in world literature helped him see the patterns and the stories that all characters—and all people—have in common.^viii He found some of the most powerful examples in ancient scripture: “Some of the best stories are from the Bible,” he writes. “And Bible stories have inspired so many of my movies. Topping the list is Joseph, who was sold into Egypt by his ten brothers. It’s about God, family, love, betrayal, repentance, and reconciliation. What a tale! … Just think about it. Joseph became the most powerful man in all of Egypt and the surrounding countries—and the brothers were forced to come to Egypt seeking food with no knowledge of Joseph’s power. His story is a wonderful example of the ‘Hero’s Journey.’”^ix But an even more powerful archetype is Jesus Christ himself:

I’d never really had any doubt that there was a God. I saw the fingerprints of God all over creation. I’ve always loved stories, so how the Old Testament describes Jehovah had always thrilled me. Jehovah, a personage of the spirit, came to Earth as a baby, taking on a body of flesh and blood. As He grew to manhood, He experienced mortal temptations and suffering—doesn’t every good hero?—growing from ‘grace to grace that he might know how to succor his people.’ What beautiful language.^x

The hero’s journey is such a prominent component of Bluth’s films that even a recent Deseret News article about the publication of his autobiography mentions it:

The journey begins when something causes a character, man or woman, to leave home where he or she meets an enemy or confronts an obstacle. The character must then defeat the foe before returning home to an enriched life and valuable lesson learned. Bluth also found deeper spiritual meaning in the hero’s journey and realized everyone can relate to it. The hero’s journey pattern is evident in Bluth’s films.

“This is actually the story of the gospel. We are the hero’s journey right now while we’re here,” [Bluth] said. “If you go around the world, almost every country and society has the same journey. We have different customs, different languages, but the journey is always there.”^xi

Knowing about his interest in the hero’s journey and how he connected it to scriptural stories, we can now look closely at Bluth’s films and find that many of their narratives, which he helps construct, do indeed invite a typological reading in which the events onscreen are symbolic of the hero’s journey’s larger mythological or theological patterns. This makes it worth laying out Campbell’s hero’s journey pattern in greater detail, and the parallels to the LDS doctrine of the plan of salvation should be apparent to those who know it. In the beginning, the hero initially exists in a state of heavenly bliss, often alongside a godlike or venerable father figure, united in a home where all seems well. The hero is undeveloped, however, and things cannot remain in this state, as soon they receive a call to action which makes them leave their home and venture out into the dreary world—although frequently they initially refuse the call and hesitate for a time. Often with the help of a gatekeeper or a magical talisman, the hero journeys through isolation and earthly trials, eventually reaching a nadir Campbell describes as “the belly of the whale,” where the hero is entirely alone and must lose their old identity to be reborn as something new. This “gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation . . . Instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again.”^xii Having undergone this transformation, the hero is now prepared to overcome a final trial or opponent, with which victory they reach a higher plane of existence, a more mature heavenly state. Often this is symbolized by the receipt of an “elixir,” something of substance to empower the hero and visualize this achievement. At this point the journey may seem over, but there is usually one last crucial step: the hero must return to their original home to bestow the elixir on the entire population and reunite with the father, but now in an exalted state that makes the hero equal to him rather than subservient.

We can see this, for example, in An American Tail as the young Fievel Mousekewitz is separated from his family en route to their new home in the United States. He navigates through a lonesome world that tests and tries him, longing to find his family, especially his Papa. Eventually, their utopian vision is realized when their reunion transforms America into an earthly heaven after all. Read at this level, the typology is clear but there is little distinguishing An American Tail from innumerable other stories and films that invoke this same prototypical myth; Star Wars (1977) is nearly always cited as an example, but other movies include The Matrix (1999), Garden State (2004), The Goonies (1985), Spider-Man (2002), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and a host of others, including films adapted from literature like The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings series. Benson Parkinson rightly points out this pattern in Disney films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Lion King (1994) (films which are of course based on a European fairy tale and Hamlet, respectively). Some filmmakers are aware of Campbell’s work and consciously build their narratives around this pattern—entire screenwriting books are now devoted to it—while others simply invoke it subconsciously as storytellers have done for thousands of years. Don Bluth, with his love of literature and knowledge of the hero’s journey, ostensibly falls into the former category, though some mythic elements of his storytelling may have worked into his films subconsciously as well. But if, as a believing Latter-day Saint, he has filtered the hero’s journey through the lens of Mormon theology—“to give these themes a purer expression,” in Parkinson’s words, or to “give you a pivot point around which you can make a circle for your life” in his own—how exactly has he done so? What distinctly Mormon-centric signposts can we look for to uncover the theology underpinning and connecting all of his work?

There are several key components to the Mormon worldview of Bluth’s films; they are derived from and hence similar to the hero’s journey, but I believe resonate more with the plan of salvation than with Campbell’s monomythic version. First, the main character is always separated from their family and spends the film trying to either reunite with their old family or create a new one. Family, particularly multigenerational family, is portrayed as the defining unit of earthly and heavenly society. Second, as Parkinson points out, the hero is given a talisman that connects them with their family and serves as proof of their kinship. Third, the protagonist is opposed by an enemy, often one who comes from the same original home, who is fiendishly bent on their destruction without any recourse to traditional psychological motivation: their destructive actions are motivated by pure evil. Fourth, resurrection features as a major theme, particularly at the climax or moment of reunion; either the main character was assumed dead or lost by their family and appears to come back to life, or the inverse: other family members were assumed dead or lost and come back to the protagonist. Fifth, after everything the hero can do to reunite with or create a family they are saved through grace, a deus ex machina that is beyond their control but implies the existence of God or another benevolent supernatural force that is watching over them. Sixth and finally, at the film’s conclusion a new land, often the west or a wide-open space, serves as a metaphor for Zion or a heavenly kingdom. I’d like to spend the remainder of this essay examining how this typology, derived from the hero’s journey and plan of salvation, manifests in Bluth’s filmography.

The pattern began forming early in his work. The picture he directed with the most openly religious content was his first, the 1978 Disney short The Small One, about the donkey who carries Mary to Bethlehem, done as a training project for a new generation of animators.^xiii It remains Disney’s only film with an openly Christian theme, and Bluth himself said the two songs that he composed for it are “close to what I believe. It’s a theology to which I subscribe.”^xiv But the story, which predates Bluth’s involvement with the project, is essentially about two friends—a boy and the donkey—saying goodbye and doesn’t reflect the themes that would characterize most of his work. Instead we have to look to his next film, the short Banjo the Woodpile Cat (1979), produced independently while he was still at Disney as a project where he and like-minded colleagues could push themselves artistically, though with their departure from Disney it became a calling card to raise money for a feature-length project as well. The film tells the story of a kitten, Banjo, based on an actual stray cat that lived around Bluth’s childhood farm near Payson, Utah.^xv Banjo stows away on a delivery truck traveling north to Salt Lake City—the temple, Capitol Theatre, and other landmarks are shown. At first the big city is exciting to a young cat, but soon he finds himself alone and hungry, searching for shelter from the rain in an alley. Banjo’s descent from his pastoral home could not be made clearer, with the city’s alcohol and traffic—and Banjo’s hunger and loneliness—providing a clear contrast with the pastoral abode of his family. The lyrics to a ballad, written by Bluth, sung at this point set the stage for the rest of his films: “You have wandered far from home. Now the good times have come and gone. Now you’re wise enough to see that the good times, the very best times were back home with your family.” This realization is Banjo’s belly of the whale, and in the morning he receives unexpected assistance from an adult cat named Crazy Legs, who strikes upon the idea of using the same delivery truck to get Banjo back home again. But even with Crazy Legs’s help, finding the truck seems impossible, and that night the older cat sits on a rooftop and prays: “I ain’t never really prayed before. I mean it ain’t like I haven’t tried to find that truck. If you could sort of move it over in my direction I know I could catch it. Gotta get that little guy home.” The next morning the truck parks in front of their building before Crazy Legs even wakes up and soon Banjo is whisked back to his waiting family. The film is a retelling of the prodigal son, though that parable itself is a version of the hero’s journey, and Banjo introduces a few of the aforementioned components of Bluth’s subsequent films: Banjo fails to receive a talisman before departing for the big city and he faces no adversary, but his quest is centered around reuniting with his parents and sisters, and he is saved by one of the most literal deus ex machinas of Bluth’s entire oeuvre as Crazy Legs’s prayer apparently prompts God to send the truck to take Banjo home. There is no dialogue as he reunites with his family, but their joy that he who was lost is found—effectively brought back to life—is plain.

From this point on, Bluth would explore his distinctive themes over and over in his films, if not in his video games. His first feature, The Secret of NIMH, was based on the 1971 book Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien, and therefore was not an original story, as all his subsequent films except Thumbelina would be, but even here Bluth’s preoccupations were clear. His next three pictures—An American Tail, The Land Before Time, and All Dogs Go to Heaven—are all perfect examples of his technique, although All Dogs proves unique in several ways. His weaker films from the early 1990s as well as the direct-to-video Bartok the Magnificent are in fact weak not so much because the budgets are lower or the quality of animation worse, but because the stories—which in his autobiography he generally typifies as rushed—lack the typology that characterizes Bluth’s best work. To be certain, there are still traces present, but they are neither as strong nor as central as in the earlier productions or his renaissance films, Anastasia and Titan A.E.

Undoubtedly the most important characteristic of Bluth’s films is that his heroes’ journeys always center around a search for family, particularly ancestors. Without fail, all of his protagonists are uprooted and in search of a safe home, which can range from a single cinderblock to an entire planet. But the unifying characteristic of these homes is not their physical characteristics but the fact that the hero’s family, including their parents or grandparents, can safely dwell there—they are a place for family. In this, there is a strong correlation with the way in which Mormon doctrine emphasizes creating families through temple ordinances so that they can remain intact after death—and then linking them to past generations through genealogical research and vicarious sealings of children to parents. In other words, if Bluth’s characters are always seeking after their parents—in Banjo the Woodpile Cat, An American Tail, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and Titan A.E.—and grandparents—in The Land Before Time and Anastasia—that is because reuniting with lost ancestors is central to the Mormon concept of heaven. Mormons, essentially distinct among all Christian faiths, are saved in family units, with the only difference between the highest degree of celestial glory and lower strata of heaven being whether people there are united as families or remain as individuals. And while families begin with a marriage, Bluth’s films, as Parkinson notes, are characterized not by a yearning for romantic love but by a search for ancestors, for, as Joseph Smith taught, “we without them cannot be made perfect; neither can they without us be made perfect” (D&C 128:18). This embodies in very visible ways one of the most important passages in Mormon scripture, that the prophet Elijah will return before the “great and dreadful day of the Lord; and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.” These verses from Malachi 4:5–6 are the only ones repeated in all four standard works of LDS scripture,^xvi and Mormons believe they were fulfilled when Elijah literally appeared to Smith in the Kirtland Temple in 1836 to give him the sealing keys to bind mortals together with their deceased forefathers after death (D&C 110:13–16). The pursuit of eternal families is bound up in temple theology, making temples essential for salvation not just for the living but, through vicarious ordinances for the dead, for everyone who has already lived as well. Although Bluth’s plan of salvation typology is not overtly about temple ceremonies, his emphasis on connecting generations thus remains intrinsically linked to LDS temple worship.

When his characters, such as Thumbelina, Hubie in The Pebble and the Penguin, or Anastasia in the final act of her film, seek after romantic love rather than an ancestral connection, the films suffer as a result. Indeed, with Thumbelina Bluth began the screenwriting process by identifying Hans Christian Andersen’s theme for the original story as “love conquers all,” precisely what Parkinson identifies as the principal theme of most Disney films. He then struggled for months with the prominent Mormon poet and author Carol Lynn Pearson to produce a satisfactory script. Ultimately it was a doomed process; Bluth thinks the failure was due to Pearson’s preference for didacticism, creating “a manifesto of empowerment” for young girls, while he “preferred to let the art do the speaking.”^xvii But I would submit the real weakness was the theme itself, which runs counter to Bluth’s much stronger ability to craft stories around intergenerational rather than romantic love. Later on, in Anastasia, the film’s entire premise—that the real-life Russian princess survived the Russian Revolution and, years later, travels to Paris to reunite with her grandmother, first as a fraud only pretending to be Anastasia but gradually realizing that she actually is her—came from Twentieth Century-Fox CEO Bill Mechanic, and it took Bluth some time to overcome his trepidation about the potentially macabre violence to find a way into the story. Of course he did this by centering the narrative around Anastasia’s identity as it relates to her family. As he puts it:

“Where did I come from?” Anastasia is wondering throughout. “What is my future?” “What do I need to do to find peace and joy?” I loved figuring out Anastasia’s questions with her. I’d been wrestling with them since I first returned to the LDS church back in college. I sought the truth of their answers through prayer, listening for the quiet voice of the Holy Ghost; Anastasia finds her truth in following her heart.^xviii

Or put even more simply, Bluth recalls Mechanic pitching the concept to him thus: “‘So,’ Bill asked, ‘even if Anna is not Anastasia, don’t you think that maybe the little Romanov princess is still out there somewhere, searching for her family?’”^xix While it was precisely this search for the truth about her family that resonated the most with Bluth, to make a commercial film Mechanic also created the character Dimitri as a foil and love interest for Anastasia, and it’s clear that once the familial reunion is over and the remaining story centers entirely around this romance that the narrative lacks strength.^xx Even the film Ice Age, which Fox took away from Bluth after Titan A.E.’s financial failure and gave to Blue Sky Studios instead, was about the creation of a family out of a group of mammals and an abandoned human toddler, and the animals’ quest to restore that child to his father. The mismatched animals overcoming their differences to become a family themselves echoes the earlier Land Before Time, and the search for a family for a helpless human child mirrors All Dogs Go to Heaven, so one can only wonder how Ice Age would have been different with Bluth at the helm—or, perhaps, if Bluth’s fingerprints from his initial work on it remain evident in the finished film.

A search for parents, or what mythologists have called a father quest, is thus central to Bluth’s best work. Fievel’s and Banjo’s quests are perhaps the most straightforward in this respect; they have each been separated from their parents and work throughout the film to find their way back. As Spielberg pitched the idea to Bluth, An American Tail’s story is about “a young mouse lost in a strange land, yearning for his family and happiness….”^xxi Early on, as the Mousekewitz family crosses the ocean, Fievel’s sister Tanya suggests that maybe they should have stayed in Russia. “We’ll be all right,” her father replies. “As long as we stay together we’ll be all right.” There is no more concise summary of Bluth’s primary theme than this, and Tanya, taking the message to heart, feels that her brother is alive long after her parents have given him up as dead. It is she who sings the ballad “Somewhere Out There” with her brother. Though physically separated, the siblings express their love for each other and their joint faith that if this “love can see us through, then we’ll be together somewhere out there, out where dreams come true,” words that could apply equally to a heavenly or an earthly reunion. This song, reprised over the closing credits by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram, won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year, showing just how powerful its message of familial connection proved to the general public.

In Titan A.E., a science-fiction film about the last humans after Earth is destroyed, Cale Tucker starts out as a boy bonding with his father in the woods of Colorado just before the Drej, an advanced alien species, attack—he has no siblings and his mother is never mentioned. As they flee the planet Cale’s father sends him on an escape ship while he himself must go on the mysterious Titan. Years later, after the Drej’s victory and the scattering of the remaining human race, an adult Cale is convinced that his father abandoned him: at one point he spits out the words “I don’t have a father,” and at another he says he will show just how similar to his father he is by abandoning the people he loves. Still, despite his bitterness Cale is very much on a father quest, using the ring his father gave him to track down the Titan, seeing his father’s image in a hologram video message once onboard that ship, and, fundamentally throughout the film, trying to find out what happened to him and why he never returned; in the end he fulfills his father’s mission of defeating the Drej and saving humanity, thus becoming like him and taking his place as the head of a new generation.

All Dogs Go to Heaven is about Charlie Barkin, a German shepherd who is a cad and con artist but not a truly bad guy.^xxii When he’s murdered at the film’s outset, he manages to return to earth to exact revenge on his dastardly ex-partner Carface, although he soon is caught up living the high life with a gambling scheme of his own. Unique among Bluth’s characters, Charlie has no preexisting family at the beginning of the film and does not remain with a family at the end, as he must accept his death and return to heaven. He does have a best friend Itchy, who he treats poorly, and partway through the film he takes a homeless human orphan named Anne-Marie under his wing. Her driving goal is to find a mommy and daddy to adopt her, which Charlie cynically promises to do, although with no intention to make good, as her ability to talk to animals allows her to predict the winners of horse races, a profitable scam for Charlie. When Anne-Marie finds a rich young couple who are interested in caring for her Charlie steals her away, an act immediately followed by him having a vision of his future suffering in hell. But as he learns to value Anne-Marie more than himself, he and Itchy help restore her to these adoptive parents and, in the final scene as Charlie is about to journey to heaven, he blesses both Anne-Marie and Itchy, virtually sealing them together as a family in their newfound home. Understanding that Anne-Marie is in this sense the film’s main thematic character, while Charlie is an enabling guide like Crazy Legs, Nicodemus in The Secret of NIMH, and Rooter in The Land Before Time, shows that Bluth’s paradigm holds firm: she begins the film with no parents and through her own efforts—and a deus ex machina of all New Orleans’s dogs coming together to show her potential parents where she is—she eventually finds her way into her new home.

It’s similarly easy to miss which characters play out this theme in Rock-a-Doodle, a film which is generally considered of lesser quality than Bluth’s earlier work but which came out only two years after All Dogs and contains many of the same motifs. Loosely inspired by the 1910 play Chantecler by Edmond Rostand, the film responded to the phenomenal success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) by mixing live action and animation; this would keep costs down as well, and Bluth could draw on his experience years earlier as an animation director on the similarly executed film Pete’s Dragon (1977).^xxiii Rock-a-Doodle tells the story of Edmond, a human boy whose family farm is threatened with destruction by a storm. When he calls for the missing rooster Chanticleer, a character in a story his mother was reading him, an evil owl named the Grand Duke appears instead, transforming Edmond into a cartoon kitten and thus sending him, with some barnyard friends, into an animated city to find Chanticleer and convince him to return to the farm and raise the sun with his crowing. The story sessions began simply with the search for the rooster, and Bluth reports that it only came to life when one of the animators suggested putting the family farm in peril as well. “Now the story had heart,” he says.^xxiv Of course the journey into the metropolis mirrors that of Banjo, though where that film is based on the parable of the prodigal son, this one has more in common with that of the lost sheep: Edmond is the shepherd seeking out the one member of the farm-animal family who has gone astray. At the end there is a double familial reunion: first the prodigal Chanticleer is persuaded to repent and rejoin his family, who literally cheer him on as he rediscovers his courage to crow and banish the Grand Duke; and then with Edmond who, with the family farm—their home—safe, returns to his true form and the waiting arms of his mother. Edmond thus saves his original family while gaining an entirely new one as well, and the film ends with him returning, now as himself, to his animated barnyard brothers as Chanticleer sings a final celebratory song about the sun.^xxv

The fact that both Anastasia and Littlefoot in The Land Before Time are seeking after grandparents rather than parents can have two effects: first, the projecting of an ancestral line back beyond the heroes’ immediate parents, something already mentioned as of particular interest to Latter-day Saints; second, the invitation to read the relationship typologically, with the grandparents representing Heavenly Parents—another doctrine unique to Mormonism—rather than mortal ones. Their home therefore becomes an archetype of heaven, a land existing outside of time in a pre- or post-mortal glory. After the revolution destroys the Romanovs, Anastasia’s grandmother says, “What had always been, was now gone forever,” a statement equating the reign of the tsars with premortality and accompanied by a view of the palace seeming to float on clouds; Parkinson makes this connection as well in referring to the “St. Petersburg palace as a regal, pre-existent, celestial home.” Even though Anastasia is trying to get to Paris rather than the Winter Palace, her search for her grandmother, who, due to Anastasia’s amnesia, she only gradually remembers through the course of the film, becomes a metaphorical journey showing that we are all descended from a heavenly king and queen who we can return to again one day.

The aged sage Nicodemus in The Secret of NIMH—a film about a widowed mouse and her children who are threatened by a farmer about to plow up their home in his field—also fills the role of an ancient or heavenly progenitor to a degree: his first words to Mrs. Brisby are, “Come closer, my child,” positioning himself as a fatherly or grandfatherly figure. But, as I’ll discuss in a moment, he is more of a guru or prophet who guides her in her quest, serving as a gateway guardian who escorts her into a new realm of knowledge. In fact, Mrs. Brisby’s case is somewhat similar to that of Charlie, who serves as a father figure to Anne-Marie, yet she remains unique among Bluth’s protagonists as the only one who is literally a parent and not a child. But even she, a widow, longs to know the mystery of her husband Jonathan’s disappearance, which she learns when she encounters the scientifically enhanced rats of NIMH—his premortal family from before he met her. As she connects with them, Nicodemus shows her, through magical means, where her husband came from and how he died, bringing her closure and connection with Jonathan once again. Also, as mentioned, her goal throughout the film is to save her children from the farmer’s plow, which is going to dig up their home any day. Since her son Timothy is too ill to go outside without dying, she embarks on a quest to save them, which she can only do by learning about her husband’s experience at the NIMH laboratory. By learning about her family’s past—in other words, by turning the heart of the children to their fathers—she is able to tap into a new power of her own to save her children as well—a true example of the heart of the fathers turning to the children—with Mrs. Brisby standing as the link between generations.

Turning to the second point of Bluth’s plan-of-salvation typology, in connection with his emphasis on family, at the outset of their journey Bluth’s heroes always receive a talisman that specifically links them back to previous generations. On a metaphorical level, these are emblems which tell each of them—and vicariously each of us—who they are: the talismans identify them as members of not just a mortal but also an eternal or heavenly family, as Anastasia’s amulet does when her grandmother sees it and no longer considers her an imposter. In their physicality these talismans are very like the Mormon temple garments that are given each initiate as a reminder of Adam and Eve, our first parents, and their covenants with the Lord, and, simultaneously, the signs, tokens, key words, and new name each initiate learns as they pass through the temple rites; this is explicit in Anastasia when “Anya” receives the new name Anastasia, that of her forgotten royal self. For Mormons these tokens are very physical items which, in the most literal interpretation of temple theology, must be presented to Jesus Christ at the entrance of the Celestial Kingdom. Bluth’s genius lies in making his talismans equally physical objects while allowing them to retain enough mystery for a range of symbolic interpretations.

Mrs. Brisby is actually well along in her journey before receiving the Stone, an amulet consisting of a red gem set in a necklace, from Nicodemus. At this point she has already learned much about who her husband was and who she and her children are, and later, at the film’s climax, she is able to use its power to magically raise her cinderblock house from the mud and save her children from drowning. It’s worth noting with The Secret of NIMH that heroes’ talismans are often presented by a guardian or gatekeeper figure—such as Obi-Wan Kenobi giving Luke Skywalker his father’s lightsaber—something Bluth was very aware of in adapting O’Brien’s book, though he describes these characters with a distinctly Christian term:

Mrs. Brisby had her guardian angels too. The first, the Great Owl, is surrounded by the bones of little creatures he has eaten (including a lot of mice). He charts the course that Mrs. Brisby must follow to save Timothy. “Go to the rats,” he says. “They must move your house to the lee of the stone.” The second guardian, Nicodemus the rat, gives her both knowledge—the history of the rats—and a mysterious amulet, which has the power to save her family if she can figure out how to harness it. These two guardians are the same spirit in two different forms.^xxvi

Though no other Bluth protagonists receive their talismans from a guardian as typologically powerful as Nicodemus, the talismans they receive are still always connected to knowledge as well, particularly knowledge about one’s family or royal heritage. Of course as Bluth says here, the talisman is always presented early on, essentially as a free gift, while the knowledge of how to use it must be sought after and earned over the course of the film, a pattern that holds remarkably consistent across all his movies.

In An American Tail, Fievel receives his hat as a Hanukkah present, his father telling him that it has been in the family for three generations, thus linking the boy to his ancestors in the film’s opening scene. It is through a misuse of this object—he throws the hat onto the ship’s deck during a storm and yells back to his father that he has to go get it—that he is washed overboard and presumed drowned, sending him on his journey to survive alone in America. And it is when his mother discovers it on the streets of New York that she realizes her lost son is still alive and they begin their search for him. When the family reunites, the hat, which had always been too big, of course now fits, symbolizing Fievel’s maturation to the point where he can take his place in his family lineage: “My son, now you are a mouse,” his Papa proudly proclaims. Anastasia’s grandmother Marie similarly gives her her necklace, which is inscribed “Together in Paris,” and music box in the film’s very first scene as a symbol of their family, the last moment before they are separated by Rasputin’s malicious curse. The music box plays a duet that they sing, “Once Upon a December,” dealing explicitly with lost memory and finding home in the past. It’s in Anastasia that the concept of a veil of forgetfulness about our premortal heavenly existence—a key component of the plan of salvation—is the strongest, as all Bluth’s other protagonists remember their past lives but, due to her amnesia, Anastasia cannot. Thus when she sings the song on her own partway through the film, its lyrics—about “things I almost remember,” a mysterious person who “holds me safe and warm,” “figures dancing gracefully across my memory,” and, “things my heart used to know, things it yearns to remember”—evoke an aching to regain that lost estate, words made particularly poignant because she sings them while seeing visions of her dead father and other spirits dancing in the great ballroom that used to be her home. Essentially a leitmotif invoked throughout the film, this song as much as the amulet and music box is how she and her grandmother recognize each other in Paris; when properly used, the necklace is a key to wind the box, and thus the music and the amulet reunite Anastasia with her ancestors and heavenly family: two matching tokens accompanied by the appropriate key words—“Soon you’ll be home with me”—delivered simultaneously in a duet between Anastasia and Marie.

Likewise in Titan A.E., Cale’s father gives him a ring at the moment of their separation at the hands of the Drej, telling him, “As long as you wear it there’s hope. I will see you again. I promise.” If Fievel’s hat, Mrs. Brisby’s amulet, Littlefoot’s leaf, and Anastasia’s necklace and music box all symbolize their connection with their forefathers, Cale’s ring turns out very literally to be a map that will guide him to his father’s ship. But as with these other talismans it only works when on his own hand, illuminating its variable star charts through his flesh according to what he needs at that point in his journey. In this way, Cale’s ring is reminiscent of the Liahona, a divinely crafted compass from the opening chapters of the Book of Mormon when the prophet Lehi and his family are journeying through the desert to find a new promised land. The Liahona shows them the way to go, but only when they are faithful; otherwise its spindles cease to function and its mysterious writing becomes useless (1 Nephi 16:10, 26–29). Similarly, Cale’s ring only works for him, forcing the Drej or traitorous Captain Korso to try to manipulate him or extract its information violently. Still, because Cale, like Lehi’s son Nephi, is diligent and faithful he reaches the Titan first and is able to bring the mammoth ship back to life, just as Nephi constructs a ship to carry his family across the sea. Perhaps more interestingly, just as Nephi saves his entire family and thus gives birth to the Book of Mormon civilizations, so is Cale’s talisman unique among Bluth’s films because his ring is intended not just for his own salvation—like Fievel’s hat or Anastasia’s necklace—but that of the entire human race and every species from Earth, making it a talisman for brothers and sisters as well as parents. The pilot Akima represents these lost humans, and does so in a way reminiscent of Anastasia: unlike Cale, Akima cannot remember Earth, so she surrounds herself with useless items from it and passes on the stories of the past. “I barely remember Earth,” she says, “but the older ones used to tell us about it, so we’d never be completely lost. No matter how hard things got, and they were hard, those memories kept us going. Once we had a home. The Titan is our chance to find one again.”

Charlie in All Dogs Go to Heaven once again presents an unusual case. He receives his talisman, a clock on a chain, not from a parental figure but from his business partner Carface moments before he has Charlie killed; in heaven a beautiful canine angel—another true guardian figure—tells Charlie that the clock now represents his mortal life on Earth, and when it stopped ticking he did as well. Slipping away from this celestial guard, Charlie steals the clock, winds it up, and plunges back to mortality, keeping it close from that point on in order to preserve his life. This, then, is a selfish talisman, given by a murderer and used only for self-interest. However, as Charlie learns to care for Anne-Marie and Itchy the importance of the clock fades until, at the climax, he is forced to choose between rescuing it from sinking into the ocean or rescuing Anne-Marie from drowning. He chooses the latter, recognizing that love and family—Anne-Marie—are more important than even his own life. The clock indeed stops ticking and Charlie dies, but Anne-Marie is saved and united with Itchy and her new parents. Charlie, for his sacrifice, is redeemed from hell and returns to heaven, having learned that “whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25). His talisman, then, has to be rejected rather than appealed to, but his lesson—that salvation comes through love and familial relationships—is the same.

Magical amulets are so important for Bluth that we even see one in a promotional trailer he made to raise funds for a film that he never got to produce. Around 1983 Phil Mendez, an old friend from Disney, approached him about a movie concept called Jawbreaker, a fantasy adventure like Dragon’s Lair and Bluth’s other video game Space Ace (1984) about a boy who’s sucked into a world of fantastic creatures and is given a large curved tooth set in gold. The villain, an evil king creature, declares that he wants it and sets his minions out to capture it from the boy hero, so although we don’t learn its purpose from this single trailer it’s obviously highly valuable. The very name of the film, of course, implies a connection with teeth, and the fact that Bluth would structure an entire trailer—and a crucial one intended to obtain the financing necessary to keep his studio open and his employees in their jobs—around a talisman like this shows just how much importance he places on them as narrative devices. One can only speculate if this tooth would have carried the same thematic focus on family and discovering one’s true identity that Bluth’s other talismans have, but my own supposition is that it would.^xxvii

The third point of Bluth’s typology is the nature of his antagonists, who oppose his heroes’ attempts to return to their celestial homes. His films avoid moral grey area in favor of a stark dichotomy: “The many movies that Gary and I put together,” he says, “hold plenty of drama because they’re about the forces of good fighting the forces of evil.”^xxviii Elsewhere he writes: “In my mind, in my faith, good and evil aren’t abstract, they’re Jesus versus Satan battling for our souls. You might have your own personification of good and evil—you’re free to choose. I bring it up not to prescribe what you should believe but to explain why I don’t make what I call ‘vanilla’ villains.”^xxix He’s right—his villains are not mere antagonists seeking their own goals in opposition to the protagonist, but truly embody evil and seek the hero’s utter destruction. In this way they seem distinctly reminiscent of Mormon doctrines about Satan or Lucifer, who opposes each of us in our journey back to our Heavenly Parents, seeking instead the damnation of our eternal souls. As with the film’s generally anomalous nature, All Dogs Go to Heaven’s villain Carface is an outlier with the strongest psychological motivation of any Bluth villain: he wants to kill Charlie and transform their club into an organized crime syndicate; that is, to increase his own profit and power. The same description applies to the power-hungry rat Jenner in The Secret of NIMH, who is jealous of Nicodemus’s authority and wants to lead the rats himself. But beyond this, Bluth’s antagonists seem driven not by psychological motivation but by pure unadulterated hatred or an impersonal but indefatigable destructive impulse, the same way Mormonism holds that Satan and the third of the host of premortal spirits who followed him after the war in heaven tempt each of us to forsake righteousness and happiness here in mortality.^xxx These anonymous hosts are seen in the faceless scientists who track the rats of NIMH, the cats who mercilessly attack the mice throughout An American Tail, and the evil Grand Duke in Rock-a-Doodle who despises the light not for any logical reason but because of his very nature.

Rasputin in Anastasia is a former holy man and member of the court who becomes an undead monster after literally being swallowed in the black water of an icy river and cast down to purgatory, making him, with his obsessive hatred of Anastasia and her family, a perfect embodiment of Satan. As Bluth says, “The historical Grigori Rasputin was a treasure trove of evil, so I pitched him as the villain to the seven writers. His name means ‘Debauched One.’ He was a fallen monk who drew close to the Romanov family, claiming to have powers to heal their son, Alexei, the youngest of the five children, heir to the throne, and a hemophiliac.” He describes Rasputin’s death—famously including many failed assassination attempts before he finally drowned in the Malaya Nevka River—then says he “asked the writers, ‘So what if Rasputin had somehow defied death and knew that Anastasia was found? What if he blamed the Romanov family for his suffering, and vowed to destroy Anastasia? And how creepy would it be if he returned as a rotting corpse, to exact his revenge?’”^xxxi Bluth might as well be discussing Satan with this description of a personage cast out from all ecclesiastical and political authority, now denied the opportunity to live in his own body, and vengeful against the mortals he considers responsible for his fall. And like Mormonism’s version of Satan, Rasputin does the majority of his dirty work by controlling others. The February Revolution is shown as a result not of social unrest or economic forces, but of Rasputin’s magic that controls the mindless masses, thus creating an army of automatons who destroy the heavenly family that the Romanovs represent. These rioters could stand for men and women who have chosen to follow Satan, but they also imply the disembodied souls who forsook their own agency to follow Lucifer in his fall. This point is even more forcefully made with the ethereal green phantoms that Rasputin commands later in the film, who know Anastasia’s true identity even when she does not and who can invade her mind as well as attack her body. In fact, the Drej in Titan A.E. seem to grow directly from Rasputin’s spirits to become the apotheosis of Bluth’s typological villain: they are formless beings of pure energy, housed inside exoskeleton armor, stopping at nothing to destroy every last Earthling. Their unrelenting pursuit combined with their incorporeal nature make the Drej the perfect representation of Satan’s minions. “What are they afraid of? So what did the human race ever do to the Drej?” Cale asks Akima. “It’s not what we did,” she replies. “They’re afraid of what we might become.”

Fourth in Bluth’s typological pattern, resurrection is an integral component of all of his climaxes, not just individually but in the context of family. While resurrection figures into many versions of the hero’s journey, it is uniquely important in Mormon theology as the moment when families that have been sealed in temples will be literally reunited in a glorified state. Similarly, Bluth’s “dead” characters are always reborn not on their own but in the moment they come together with their lost family members again. “Our little boy back from the dead!” Fievel’s Mama cries as she throws her arms around him. Charlie, who begins All Dogs Go to Heaven by escaping death row—nearly his first words in the film are, “What are you trying to do, kill me?”—is indeed killed, twice, and literally ascends to heaven, received there by an angelic host, while Anne-Marie, who herself contracted pneumonia and then nearly drowned, wakes, restored to life and health, to her new home and parents, with a sleeping Itchy—whose injured leg testifies to his own brush with death—beside her. Three times the angel calls Charlie to come home—a number which mirrors the moment that temple initiates step through the veil into the celestial room—which he does after testifying to Anne-Marie that, as an eternal family, they will be together again: “You know goodbyes aren’t forever,” he says. And in Rock-a-Doodle, Edmond is seemingly choked to death by the Grand Duke as he fights to save Chanticleer. After the rooster vanquishes the evil owl, Edmond lays on a funerary bed with his friends gathered around him in a tableau reminiscent of the scene in which Snow White also comes back to life—Snow White being the film that originally made Bluth fall in love with animation. First Edmond transforms from an animated kitten back into his live-action self, then his friends succeed in reviving him as their voices crossfade into that of his mother. This final resurrection reminds us that it is Edmond and not the rooster Chanticleer who is the true protagonist of this movie. Even Stanley in A Troll in Central Park is restored to his physical self after the evil queen transformed him into a stone statue.

The resurrection theme, however, is best deployed in Anastasia and Titan A.E. Bluth is very careful with his character names, and in crafting his story for Anastasia he takes advantage of the fact that this historical princess’s name literally means, as her friend Vlad says, “she will rise again,” or, more simply, “resurrection.” More than any other Don Bluth film, this is exactly what Anastasia’s journey is about: the return to life of a protagonist who the whole world—including the hero herself—has presumed dead for over ten years. The stream of imposters in Paris shows just how miraculous it would be for Anastasia to have actually survived the revolution, and Marie gives up hope that she’s alive precisely in the very moment before they finally meet. Together they realize who Anya is, and Anastasia returns to life not only for her grandmother, but for herself as well—her old life is restored to her, the cloudy memories finally becoming clear and real, just as Mormons believe the veil of forgetfulness about premortality will be lifted after every person’s death and resurrection. Anastasia’s final decision is to continue hiding her identity from the world—perhaps a narrative necessity since the historical Anastasia was never found—but she enters that new life armed with her family and the knowledge of her royal heritage.

While Anastasia’s name—and thus the title of her film—means “resurrection,” Titan A.E. is named after the mythic Greek characters that included the literal parents of the Olympian gods in Cronos and Rhea, and the figurative father of mankind in Prometheus, who gave man gifts such as fire, knowledge, and even civilization. This makes the film’s title a reference to divine parentage not just for Cale alone but for all mankind, a species-wide genesis, and it bestows this meaning on the ship Titan as well: while Cale is searching for it, he’s actually searching for his father, and perhaps unwittingly for the power to become a father of mankind himself. The A.E. of the title stands for “After Earth,” another titular foreshadowing of rebirth, this time on a planetary scale. After being betrayed by Korso while traveling on a ship called the Valkyrie—another mythological name of the beings who escort dying Norse warriors to a new life with Odin in their glorious post-mortal home of Valhalla—Cale and Akima bring an old derelict ship named, appropriately, the Phoenix back to life, raising it from the scrapheap and reaching the Titan before anyone else. The Titan itself, like Prometheus anciently, holds the key to resurrect the dead Earth in a new planet. A cryogenic ark that, like Noah’s scriptural ark, contains the seeds to repopulate all of Earth’s living things, the ship simply waits for Cale to provide the spark of life, an energy which is given when he harnesses the power of the Drej, destroying them in the process, to revive the ship and transform it into a new home world. Earth, which had been annihilated to dust, literally rises like a phoenix from the ashes, becoming a place where he and Akima, like Adam and Eve, can start the repopulation of humanity and the old Earth’s entire ecology. Earlier films have an intimation of this only: Mrs. Brisby’s children are saved from death and the memory of her husband is reborn; Anastasia is reborn to her grandmother; Fievel is reborn to his parents; and Charlie ascends to heaven, entering a new family as he leaves behind Anne-Marie, Itchy, and their new parents in a family linked to him across the chasm of death. But in Titan A.E., the entire Earth is reborn, as Malachi and Joseph Smith taught. Smith wrote to the Saints in Nauvoo that “the earth will be smitten with a curse unless there is a welding link of some kind or other between the fathers and the children” (D&C 128:18), and Cale literally enacts this linkage, reconciling and connecting with his own dead father and thus regenerating the entire planet and symbolically resurrecting all mankind.

Bluth’s fifth typological characteristic is his frequent use of a deus ex machina device to resolve the central conflicts of his films: this term from ancient Greek drama—“God in the machine”—refers to an actor portraying a god such as Zeus or Apollo being lowered down onto the stage via a mechanical device to solve all the characters’ problems that they are unable to resolve themselves. While generally considered weak storytelling in modern screenwriting practice—with the protagonist succeeding due to outside events rather than their own efforts—in certain cases it can instill an air of grace or transcendence into a film’s conclusion. In Bluth’s films it can be simple, like Anastasia catching a whiff of her grandmother’s peppermint oil, but quite often it’s both literal and pronounced: after Crazy Legs’s prayer God sends the truck, and the power of the Stone retrieves Mrs. Brisby’s children from certain death. After Charlie saves Anne-Marie, dying in the process, his spirit visits her and Itchy as they sleep in their new home. Outside, a giant monster made of oozing blackness rises high over New Orleans, its burning red clouds filling the streets and even the bedroom as it calls Charlie down to hell. Immediately, however, a simple blue light literally comes down from heaven, floating towards the beast and destroying it with a simple touch. It then follows Charlie into Anne-Marie’s room and, in the voice of his guardian angel, grants him access to heaven. This celestial intervention to save Charlie’s soul and fulfill the promise of the film’s title is perhaps the most overtly religious moment in all of Bluth’s films. The appearance of Banjo’s delivery truck is miraculous, to be sure, but this instance of God’s goodness destroying the embodiment of evil rises above the simply miraculous to become truly transcendent.

The final point of Bluth’s typology is that he frequently identifies the west or open spaces as a physical location where he can situate the metaphorical heaven of his characters’ journeys. Anastasia travels westward from St. Petersburg to Paris then sets off again after defeating Rasputin and determining to marry Dimitri; Charlie ascends to a literal heaven after his work on Earth is complete; and Banjo’s farm is full of sunlight and laughter, compared with the darkness and sorrow of Salt Lake City. In An American Tail this paradise is shown with incredibly stark contrast to the squalid city streets where Fievel has been living. In the film’s closing moments he and his family fly high above New York Harbor on the backs of his pigeon friends. They circle the freshly finished Statue of Liberty, a symbol of a new land of freedom, and we now see its face clearly for the first time. But it is the view of the golden sunrays over New Jersey that transfixes Fievel. It is all America, Henri the pigeon proclaims. “Can we go see it?” Fievel asks, to which Henri responds, “Oh, you will.” The sound of a chorus confirms that this unadulterated country, pushing westward toward an open expanse, represents a promised land, Fievel’s ultimate celestial kingdom, where he and his family can be happily united forever. Cale and Akima’s vision at the end of Titan A.E. is the same but larger: rather than having a virgin continent before them, they have an entire virgin world, complete with a rainbow and all its Biblical connotations.

The Land Before Time thoroughly fuses all of the preceding points. The film’s concept came from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who wanted to make a film about dinosaurs by using animatronics—Spielberg’s Jurassic Park would come out just five years later. But in the mid-80s they thought animation would be the ideal medium for their story, so they recruited Bluth after the success of An American Tail. Set in the age of dinosaurs, the film tells the story of the young brontosaurus Littlefoot. Initially his herd consists of himself, his mother, and two grandparents. The land is parched, so his mother teaches him about the Great Valley, a place “filled with green food . . . more than you could ever eat. And more fresh, cool water than you could ever drink. It is a wonderful, beautiful place where we can live happily with many more of our own kind,” a remarkable promise since Littlefoot is the last of their herd. But she is killed by a Tyrannosaurus rex, called a Sharptooth, before they can even get underway. Separated from his grandparents, Littlefoot assembles a new herd of orphaned or abandoned herbivorous youngsters and begins leading them to the Great Valley to find their parents. Despite internal dissensions and the continuous threat of the prowling Sharptooth, Littlefoot eventually succeeds in leading his friends safely into the Great Valley, where they are reunited with their families, including his grandparents.

Bluth describes his reaction to Spielberg’s initial pitch: “Another perfect story, in my book. Don’t we all yearn for home? And if we get separated from our home and our people, won’t we undergo great hardships to find our way back? The story certainly struck a chord with me.”^xxxii And, indeed, it’s easy to see Bluth’s dominant typology at work here. First, families: Littlefoot begins his journey with his family, and after their violent separation he longs for his dead mother while striving to reach his living grandparents. Second, talismans: before her death his mother gives him an amulet in the form of a “tree star,” a leaf shaped like a star, as a reminder of who he is and where he comes from; thereafter he tenaciously protects it as a memento of her while he becomes the spiritual and literal leader of his people. It brings him comfort and connects him with the voice of his mother, even though it is not needed for him to be recognized by his grandparents. Third, antagonists: the Sharptooth who relentlessly pursues the children apparently does so out of pure malice rather than any psychological need or even hunger. Like Rasputin who has been cast out of the Romanov court, Sharptooth is a dinosaur like Littlefoot, but in name only: he is the only dinosaur that doesn’t speak, that has been reduced to the level of an animal, and he is ultimately destroyed by falling from a cliff into a dark lake, another symbolic recreation of Lucifer’s fall from heaven. “To me,” Bluth writes, “that terrifying, brutish, ravenous, relentless T. Rex personifies the evil in our world. It’s a force that can and will chew up hopes and dreams. That’s why love and friendship’s victory over this beast is so satisfying.”^xxxiii In fact, when Spielberg viewed the film’s final cut he pointed out that the monster was actually too scary—“What we don’t need is mothers in the lobby comforting their crying children,” he said—so the Sharptooth’s most terrifying moments were cut.^xxxiv Fourth, resurrection: Littlefoot finds his way back to his grandparents, thus apparently returning from the dead, but more obviously his friend Petrie, a pterodactyl who was pulled into the lake by Sharptooth, is thought dead by the group of friends but emerges alive. Fifth, deus ex machina: after exhausting all his abilities to find the Great Valley and giving up hope, Littlefoot is led the final few feet by his mother’s spirit, which descends from the sky in the form of a cloud—a true deus ex machina performed via the act of linking families together across death and generations. And sixth, a paradisical new home: the Great Valley serves throughout the film as the goal of a new Edenic refuge. Spielberg originally called the destination the Green Valley, but Bluth changed this to the Great Valley, a name that carries more mythical weight.^xxxv And when Littlefoot reaches it, the title The Land Before Time, which at first blush simply refers to the film’s Mesozoic setting, gains new meaning as a place that is an extra-temporal heavenly state—as the Book of Mormon prophet Alma said, “all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men” (Alma 40:8), and it feels as though Littlefoot and his friends can now safely exist outside of time entirely. The Great Valley is indeed a premortal/post-mortal abode, separate from the time of mortality and the barren volcanic world that Littlefoot has just traversed. Here, his ancient grandparents come to represent Heavenly Parents he vaguely remembers from his infancy so long ago.

The Land Before Time demonstrates Bluth’s plan-of-salvation typology exquisitely well, but there are also certain ways that the narrative extends this typology to include more specific parallels with other archetypal patterns and Mormon theology. For instance, we can posit Littlefoot as a type of Christ figure: his birth is auspicious, he inexplicably has no physical father, and he is described as the herd’s “last hope for the future.” When he receives his talisman it is not just handed to him like Fievel’s hat or Charlie’s clock, but descends upon him in a pillar of light like the Holy Ghost at Christ’s baptism. While all Bluth heroes have what could be described as sidekicks, here Littlefoot’s motley group can be more accurately described as disciples. They must choose to follow his leadership or risk losing their own lives—and certainly their chance of reaching the promised valley.

But this interpretation only takes us so far, as there is no Passion or atonement process and even Littlefoot’s resurrection symbolism is thin and largely deflected onto Petrie. Thus a second and perhaps more consistent reading is to see Littlefoot as a prophet like Moses who guides his people to their Promised Land. Encouraged by the voice of his dead mother, Littlefoot is described as the only one who knows the way. Surprisingly, this theme of a prophet figure is by and large absent from Bluth’s other works: Nicodemus acts rather like a prophetic guide to Mrs. Brisby, but that is in connection with his role as a guardian figure and supporting character. Amongst Bluth’s protagonists, Charlie unites Anne-Marie and Itchy into a family, and Fievel concocts the plot that vanquishes the cats, but they are not prophets. Cale comes the closest, as his map guides the Valkyrie’s crew toward the Titan, but with Littlefoot there is a very explicit element of faith present. Nobody doubts the validity of Cale’s ring, which is why everybody, good and bad, wants to have it. But Ducky, Petrie, Spike, and especially Cera are constantly faced with the issue of whether to believe in Littlefoot’s visions or not. Cera is the true doubter, leading an insurrection just before the climax that almost results in everyone’s deaths. Ultimately, even Littlefoot himself doubts, although his mother’s spirit, which appears immediately after they kill the Sharptooth, serves as definitive proof that his calling was divine.

There is, however, a third way to interpret the film, one that connects it to the historical LDS Church as well as to Mormon theology. Key to this interpretation is the simple fact that the Great Valley lays explicitly to the west, as the dinosaur caravan is told to follow the shining circle—the sun—day after day. This aligns with the use of the westward journeys in An American Tail and Anastasia, and the search for a safe home in literally every film from Banjo to Titan A.E., but through its repetition of daily marches on foot over increasingly rough terrain, The Land Before Time emphasizes the journey itself more than any other film and thus becomes a representation of the 1847 pioneer trek that brought the Saints to Utah. In both cases their previously acceptable surroundings in the east are no longer hospitable; the migrants have never seen the valley but believe they will reach it if they obey and persevere, walking every step of the way; the land becomes more arid and mountainous as they get closer; and the Great Valley itself—a simple rechristening of the Great Salt Lake Valley, as the pioneers called it—is surrounded by deserts and mountains but proves fertile itself (something admittedly true in Utah only after irrigation). Littlefoot is both a Joseph Smith—he sees a figure descending in a pillar of light and receives heavenly visitors—and a Brigham Young—as he leads his followers across the plains. His final moment of doubt and heavenly affirmation even reflects that of Brigham in the 1940 film Brigham Young, who questions his calling until the seagulls, like Littlefoot’s mother’s cloud, come down from the sky to wipe out the crickets and prove he was hearing God’s voice all along. Much more importantly, The Land Before Time’s evocative closing line of narration might as well describe the settlers of Utah: “And they all grew up together in the valley, generation upon generation, each passing on to the next the tale of their ancestors’ journey to the valley long ago.” This line echoes what I was taught growing up as a pioneer descendant in Salt Lake City, and it even predicts the final line of the Church’s pioneer film Legacy five years later: after telling her grandson about the history of the early Church, the protagonist Eliza admonishes him, “And make sure that this legacy of faith may never die.” In both films, a heritage comes from the faith of one’s ancestors long ago, but it is the modern generation’s responsibility to keep that spirit alive.

What Bluth has done here, therefore, is to create a typological plan-of-salvation structure overtly patterned on the trek of the Mormon pioneers, creating a three-way equation between the dinosaurs’ physical journey, the pioneers’ physical journey, and everyman’s spiritual journey back to a heavenly home. The shadow of the pioneers has been consciously drawn, and by situating his narrative in physical, tangible, and relatively recent historical events the film opens up new meaning on Church history: the pioneer as an archetype of each of us in mortality.

It could be argued that Bluth’s faith simply influenced his narrative choices through his morals and values and other aspects of his LDS worldview, all of which filtered into his films unconsciously simply because of who he is. That very well may be true; for example, he may have never thought about Mormon pioneers while making The Land Before Time, but as someone who had absorbed the pioneers’ heritage over his entire lifetime, when presented with a film about a struggling caravan of pilgrims he subconsciously drew upon that heritage and Mormon culture to inform his story, and this may be true of every aspect of the plan-of-salvation typology found throughout his films that I’ve discussed. But while the cause(s) may never be known, the result remains the same: that Don Bluth’s films are steeped in a narrative typology that invokes not just the monomythic hero’s journey generally but the Mormon concept of the plan of salvation specifically and in great detail. And while this could be coincidental or subconscious, the strength of the examples in his films, along with the consistency of the pattern across twenty-one years of filmmaking, lead me, like Benson Parkinson, to conclude it is often deliberate. It seems Bluth meant it in 1989 when he said, “Everything I do is centered around the gospel. Even our films are, although the secular world would never realize it.”^xxxvi With this essay, I hope to have shown at least some specific ways that this is true. Don Bluth’s animated films are not just a treasured corpus that contributed to global cinema and changed the course of animated films worldwide, but they are an underappreciated piece of the religious and artistic tradition of the Latter-day Saints.

 

Randy Astle

 

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[i] Don Bluth, Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life (Dallas: Smart Pop Books, 2022), 236–237.

[ii] Ibid., 297–300.

[iii] Ibid., 357.

[iv] Ibid., 86.

[v] Elayne Wells, “LDS Filmmaker Keeps Gospel at Core of Work,” Church News (November 25, 1989), 6.

[vi] Benson Parkinson, “Review of Anastasia,” Association for Mormon Letters, February 24, 1998, www.aml-online.org/reviews/b/B199872.html (accessed October 19, 2004).

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Bluth, Somewhere Out There, 129–130.

[ix] Ibid., 46–47.

[x] Ibid. 118. Bluth’s interpretation is a uniquely LDS one, as he adheres to Joseph Smith’s teaching that Jehovah was the premortal Christ and not God himself; also note his use of the popular Mormon term, again from Joseph Smith in D&C 130:22, “personage of spirit.”

[xi] Trent Toone, “An inside look at key moments in the life of Don Bluth, animator, film director and Latter-day Saint,” Deseret News, July 15, 2022, https://www.deseret.com/faith/2022/7/15/23170177/key-moments-in-the-life-of-don-bluth-animator-film-director-latter-day-saint-lds-hollywood-disney?_amp=true (accessed August 2, 2022).

[xii] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: FontanaPress, 1993), 91. (The book was first published by Princeton University Press in 1949.) Latter-day Saints may be interested in the rest of Campbell’s description: “The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into a temple—where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal.”

[xiii] The project was originally under the direction of another Mormon, veteran animator Eric Larson, who as one of Disney’s original “Nine Old Men,” or chief animators in Disney’s classical years, ran a training program for new talent in the 1970s. According to Bluth, it was Disney President Ron Miller who reassigned the project to Bluth and a corps of his colleagues: see Somewhere Out There, p. 178. It’s evident throughout his autobiography, however, that Bluth, who was a prodigious enough artist that he was hired into the studio without ever going through Larson’s program, had little regard for it: see p. 153, 189, and 163, where he says, “The training program was being touted as teaching animators, but as far as I was concerned, all they were learning was technique. I believed that wouldn’t be enough for a director who had to follow in the Nine Old Men’s footsteps.” Larson’s surprise and hurt at having the project suddenly taken away from him was a major blow and influenced his decision to retire. Though not cited as a direct reason for Bluth’s departure from Disney a few years later, this event and the studio’s dissatisfaction with the finished film seem to be relevant to his general attitude towards the Disney studio. This conflict between two LDS animators is one of the most interesting and consequential interactions between Mormon filmmakers in the mainstream film industry. (For a brief profile of Larson, see my book Mormon Cinema: Origins to 1952 (New York: Mormon Arts Center, 2018), 295–297.)

[xiv] J. Michael Hunter, “The Mormon Influence at Disney,” Mormons and Popular Culture: The Global Influence of an American Phenomenon, Vol. 1, ed. J. Michael Hunter (Santa Barbara: Praeger Publishers, 2013), 61. Bluth has an extensive musical background, and his two songs were the title song, “Small One,” and “The Merchant’s Song.” The film was assistant-directed by the Mormon Richard Rich, who wrote an additional song, and scored by the Mormon Robert Brunner. Mormon actor Gordon Jump provided the voice of Joseph.

[xv] Bluth, Somewhere Out There, 24-26 on the kitten itself, 172–176, 189, 190, 198, 202 on the film’s production and release. On p. 176 he reinforces that it was a film to train his team: “Banjo could never have been made at Disney. It never made us any money, but then, it wasn’t meant to. It was meant to teach, and that it did very well.”

[xvi] Malachi 4:5–6, in the final words of the Old Testament; 3 Nephi 25:5–6, when the resurrected Christ recites this passage to the Nephites; JS—H 1:38-39 in the Pearl of Great Price when the Angel Moroni quotes it to young Joseph Smith; and D&C 2, when this statement of Moroni’s was deemed sufficiently important that it alone was excerpted from his message and included in the Doctrine and Covenants as well.

[xvii] Bluth, Somewhere Out There, 286-288.

[xviii] Ibid., 306.

[xix] Ibid., 302.

[xx] Ibid., 303. It’s interesting that while working at a studio the size of Fox that Bluth had a team of up to twenty writers in story meetings, including the actress and writer Carrie Fisher. That he could translate his interests to the screen so well while guiding such a large writing team is a credit to Bluth’s skill as a screenwriter and team leader. See p. 303, 305.

[xxi] Ibid., 237.

[xxii] Humorously, the character of Charlie was modeled on Gary Goldman’s own dog Burt, named after Burt Reynolds, the actor who eventually provided Charlie’s voice. Bluth, Somewhere Out There, 248. Bluth describes the genesis for the story and the development of the screenplay on p. 257-260.

[xxiii] Ibid., 271. In addition to these two films, Bluth would return briefly to a live action-animation combination in the 2004 music video for the rock band the Scissor Sisters, though the majority of the animated material is shown on its own rather than sharing the screen with live-action footage. A copy of the video is available at “Scissor Sisters – Mary,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZuq9dCWqLk (accessed December 7, 2022). Bluth also believes strongly in shooting live-action footage of humans as a model for rotoscoping or animating human characters freehand; he even avers that the live-action “version” of Anastasia is superior to the finished film. Somewhere Out There, p. 308-309.

[xxiv] Ibid., 271.

[xxv] Ibid., 263, 271-273.

[xxvi] Ibid., 204.

[xxvii] Bluth discusses his work on this project, along with several other aborted film ideas, in Somewhere Out There, p. 227. He makes no mention of the tooth amulet here, but it’s apparent in the trailer itself. “Don Bluth’s Jawbreaker,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uUMPoynRc (accessed December 1, 2022).

[xxviii] Bluth, Somewhere Out There, 322.

[xxix] Ibid., 251.

[xxx] See, for example, Isaiah 14:12–14, Revelation 12:4, and D&C 29:36.

[xxxi] Bluth, Somewhere Out There, 305. He elsewhere says that Rasputin is motivated by power—like Carface and Jenner—but I don’t think this holds true throughout the film. There is no way Anastasia’s death would increase his power; at best, he is motivated entirely by spite against the Romanovs.

[xxxii] Ibid., 246.

[xxxiii] Ibid., 251-252.

[xxxiv] Ibid., 252.

[xxxv] Ibid., 246, 248.

[xxxvi] Wells, “LDS Filmmaker Keeps Gospel at Core of Work,” 6.