Off the [well] beaten path

Disney is responsible, in my mind, for making animation a mainstream thing. Adults and children alike have enjoyed Disney films, and will continue to enjoy them as long as they keep coming out. (It doesn't hurt Disney's prospects at all that they fused with Pixar to make the most fantastic animated movies in the world. And on a side note, Pixar started as a computer company selling 3-D graphics-capable software and hardware. In order to demonstrate their products' capabilities, they began making animated shorts, and thus Pixar - and Wall-E and and Toy Story and Monsters Inc and Cars - was born.) So Disney is popular, and will remain so, but some other folks have made successful and great animated features,and they deserve to be recognized, even though you may not have seen them due to Disney's huge status and wide-ranging fame.

Don Bluth was an animator at Walt Disney Studios in the 70's, but left in 1978 after deciding that Disney films had lost their magic. He opened his own studio with a couple other animators who left with him from Disney, and in 1982 they put out a great animated film called The Secret of NIMH. This movie, which I watched probably 20 times when I was a kid, is such a perfect piece of magical storytelling, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It deserves its PG rating, and parents should watch this film with their younger children, but the parents will enjoy it too. It is dark and funny and has more than a few memorable characters. Don Bluth's studios also put out An American Tale in 1986, which is another wonderful non-Disney animated movie.


If you really can't stand children's films, then check out 1976's Once Upon A Girl, an X-rated pornographic animated movie about the characters from Mother Goose romping around and basically fucking one another. It was animated by Disney animators as a sort of "rebellion"...so at least you know the quality is pretty good. My favorite part is the Jack and the Beanstalk segment, wherein Jack goes up and has a fling with the giant's wife, also a giant. The moral of the story is, he fits anywhere!


If that's too hardcore for some of you, as I understand that it might be, check out Heavy Metal, a sci-fi piece of animation with a ton of robot-on-robot violence and futuristic scenery taken directly from the magazine of the same name. It's a fun movie, albeit a little outlandish and often choppy in its storytelling. If you like sci-fi, action and sex, then Heavy Metal is something you should see. The soundtrack is full of good music too: Sammy Hagar, Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Blue Oyster Cult, Stevie Nicks, and many others.

Back to the tepid side of the pool, my GF would kill me if I didn't bring up The Land Before Time, from Universal in 1988. I don't remember liking this movie that much myself, but I haven't seen it since the theaters, and any film that ends up producing 12 sequels must be worth checking out. If you like dinosaurs, (and really, who doesn't?), then this movie is for you, and your kids...and probably your kids' kids too.

So things aren't always so Disney-centric. If you start to feel that all the animation is coming from one place, just search a little harder to find the hidden gems. The movies I've mentioned aren't out of print, nor were they obscure cult films...except that fairy tale porn one...and they can found in any rental outlet. I only bring this up because these days it seems that larger corporations are taking over, and that everything we use and see is from one or two places. This list goes to show that even in the heyday of hand-drawn animation, others were doing their own thing without the help of a distributor power-house like Disney. To close, here's a list of some other wonderful animated films that don't start with an image of the Magic Castle.

All Dogs Go To Heaven (1989)


Akira (1988)


The Professional: Golgo 13 (1983)


The Water Babies (1978)


The Phantom Tollbooth (1970)


The Hobbit (1977)


Fritz the Cat (1972)


Wizards (1977)


Watership Down (1978)


Charlotte's Web (1973)


Project A-ko (1986)