An American Tail

An American Tail

Such a depressing story can hardly entertain children. However, this may be so it’s just that there are too many sad difficulties in this movie before the happy ending comes which may make the young audience lose hope.

Fievel is a little mouse who is the youngest in the Mousekewitz family living in Russia during 19th century under a human Moskowitz family. One day, czar’s mounted troops ride past and burn down both houses then papa Mousekewitz take them on an Odyssey to America while they sing “In America There Are No Cats”. Also there are no pogroms (as the lyricists might have added), except that it’s never clear from watching why did czar’s men burned down their homes? The characters are Jewish and it was anti-Semitic.

I guess that would be a bummer for those little tykes at the theatre but what do they think now? That buildings get torched randomly? This grim perspective of an icy indifferent universe reinforced itself aboard ship to America where Fievel amused himself by peering at barrels full of pickled herring with about as much enthusiasm as modern mouse child might tune into Pee-Wee Herman’s Saturday morning show one day; however, there arises fierce storm and little Fievel despite his parents’ frantic pleas goes up on deck to see flying fish and gets sucked away by gale.

Now we come into long middle section of film where grief-stricken Mousekewitzes arrive desolate in New York, while miraculously bottled Fievel washes up on same shores. Orphaned Fievel wanders through heartless streets looking for parents instead he meets some slick criminal types and has many exciting adventures until finally being reunited with family again towards last part.

After the Disney studio stopped making movies like “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “Pinocchio”, Bluth, who is an American director of animated films, directed his second film (the first one was “The Secret of NIMH”), which is called An American Tail. It’s also worth mentioning that Fievel’s story is derived from some aspects of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as well as Pinocchio.

Animation in this film is very detailed, for instance characters have shadows; they worked a lot on it using computers thus making it better than most modern animation where corners are cut during production(they use shortcuts to save time or money). However, the artistic vision seems clearly inspired by animal humanoids created by early Disney artists but where did these people get this idea anyway? Unfortunately my answer would have to be Steven Spielberg because he brought Fievel’s tale into Bluth’s workshop.

I guess what I’m trying say here is that maybe he wanted to tell some kind of Jewish parable through film-making but thought it would be too heavy for live-action so decided on animation instead. But there are so few ethnic clues in this movie that probably only a handful children will realize or care that they’re watching a Jewish family (or even know what being Jewish means). And none those kids should expected anything happier from such sad story.

Watching ‘An American Tail’ feels like sitting through ‘Return to Oz'(Disney 1985) which starts with Dorothy being strapped down receiving electroshock therapy whoever wrote them had some dark thoughts about how children see world. Oh yeah I almost forgot mention after Fievel’s bottle washes ashore he finds out cats exist in America.

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