This story begins three years ago with the incredible success of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” a movie that inventively blended live action with animation. Even as its produc-
er, Steven Spielberg, was celebrating the movie’s distinction as 1988’s top grossing feature, he was worrying about pink-slipping the hundreds of animators who brought Roger — not to mention Jessica Rabbit — to life.
How, he wondered, could he keep this crackerjack team of animators working all year round?
The answer came in the form of Amblimation, a new animation studio created by Universal Pictures and Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment. Located in a renovated race-car factory on the outskirts of London, England, the studio employs more than 250 animators, ink-and-paint artists and technicians from 15 countries around the world. It was here that work began three years ago on “An American Tail: Fievel Goes West,” a further adventure of the Mousekewitz family directed by “Roger Rabbit” veterans Simon Wells and Phil Nibblelink.
Since its inception, Spielberg has decreed that Amblimation will release at least one animated feature a year — much like Disney, which is launching “Beauty and the Beast” this Friday, the same day that the “Tail” sequel debuts.
“I have much more fun making an animated movie,” says Spielberg, who recently directed “Hook,” due Dec. 11. “You can make an $18 million animated feature look like a $100 million live-action movie. You can animate anything — the universe, all of creation. It’s the last frontier of the imagination.”
Spielberg, director of “Jaws” and “E.T.,” was instrumental in imposing a live-action feel on “Fievel Goes West.”
Says production manager Cynthia Woodbyrne, “Steven really pushed us to use more live-action techniques. He looked at our storyboards and said, ‘There are too many cuts. Save your cuts for when you want to build tension.’ He wanted us to keep the camera moving all the time.”
The results include a 360-degree pan of a Monument Valley-like vista and a “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-like ride through the sewers of New York City.
“This movie has more style than the first one,” says Spielberg. “The characters are affected more by their surroundings — by the lighting and the sunsets. It’s stylized without being arty. It has a rich, deep style.”
In the original “Tail,” the Mousekewitz family emigrated to America to escape the wrath of some nasty Old World cats. In the sequel, disappointed that the streets weren’t paved with cheese, they wind up in a poor mouse tenement, where they dream of the wide open spaces of the Wild West. Fievel, in particular, longs to become a big, bad lawman like his hero, Wylie Burp (voiced by James Stewart), who, in reality, is a booze-hound gunslinger.
“It’s a real pastiche Western,” says Woodbyrne of the movie’s plot. “We studied a lot of old John Ford movies and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. We had a good time with it.”
Since a villain can make or break an animated feature, special care was taken to find the perfect fat cat to tussle with Fievel. John Cleese of “Monty Python” and “A Fish Called Wanda” fame was the first choice for the role of Cat R. Waul, an elegant but ruthless master cat crook.
In hopes of humanizing Cat R. Waul, the animators watched videotapes of Cleese reading his lines. “We wanted to give the character some Cleesisms,” says Wells. “Now, you feel as if the character is John Cleese rather than a cat with John Cleese’s voice.”
Other voices are supplied by Dom DeLuise, who reprises his role of Tiger, the lovable cat; Amy Irving, who plays Tiger’s girlfriend, Miss Kitty, and John Lovitz, who provides the voice of the tarantula, T.R. Chula.
The original “Tail” was directed by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who left the studio over a dispute with Ron Miller, Walt Disney’s son-in-law and former company president. Did Bluth run into similar creative differences with the folks at Amblin?
“It was his choice not to do the sequel,” executive producer Frank Marshall says tersely. “So we went ahead and decided to do it ourselves. As far as style goes, we’ve adapted our own.”
And how would they describe that style?
“It’s fast,” laughs Wells.
Adds Woodbyrne, “What we found out with ‘Roger Rabbit’ is that people like the Warner Bros. style of cartoons where the characters are bouncing off the walls, having a good time. ‘Fievel Goes West’ has that Warner sensibility, which is what makes it different from, say, Disney’s style.”
This is Spielberg’s fourth foray into feature-length animation. He produced, along with partners Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, the first “An American Tail,” which grossed $47 million. In 1988, he oversaw Robert Zemeckis’ “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “Land Before Time.”
Since then, animation has been enjoying a revival. Hollywood’s seven major studios have an animated film either in the pipeline or awaiting release.
“I think there are two reasons for that,” muses Spielberg. “Animation took a long hiatus in this country while Saturday-morning television co-opted it for merchandising. Kids are real smart, though, and they were sort of turned off by the whole enterprise. What turned it around for me was when Don Bluth made ‘The Secret of NIMH.’ I was so amazed by that because it brought back that old style of 1930s and ’40s Disney animation.
“I hired Don to do ‘American Tail.’ It was a big success and that, in turn, galvanized Disney. Animation just sort of fell in place again. Then movies like ‘Little Mermaid’ and ‘Roger Rabbit’ really pushed it over the top.”
There will be more animated feature films from Amblimation. Next year, the dinosaur-populated “We’re Back” rolls into theaters; then, in 1993, comes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.”
Using computer-generated animation might help Spielberg and company meet their movie-a-year quota with less blood, sweat and tears. But the director insists that computers will never replace human craftsmanship. “Computers are on their way but we have religiously stayed away from them,” says Spielberg. “Each animator turns out about three seconds of animation per week. … It’s still an artist and a canvas — that personal rapport that happens. I’d hate to see that go away.”
