The challenge of staying animated

Back in Dublin for the first time in several years to promote his new movie, Titan A.E., Gary Goldman claims he fondly remembers the nine years he spent in Ireland with co-director Don Bluth, although he admits that the animation company the pair founded here had its fair share of difficulties. "We thought when we came here in the mid-1980s that it would be easy to raise money to make independent movies, because of the tax advantages. And we'd no sooner got here than they repealed that law, I think because there'd been a lot of abuse going on."

In the 1980s, Sullivan Bluth (as it was called at first) was held out as the great white hope for a burgeoning Irish animation industry, which would train and employ hundreds of skilled young people in producing quality feature films. The reality was rather different, with the company lurching from one financial crisis to another, culminating in Goldman and Bluth's departure in 1994, after selling out to a Chinese investment corporation the year before. Prior to that, the company had been mired in legal conflict with Belgian investors, about whom Goldman is still bitter.

"It got really ugly," he recalls. "I remember all of us going down to the Four Courts, wearing our Don Bluth entertainment jackets, waiting for the result. It was very dramatic, and it wasn't until the purchase that we had any money. People worked for 11 weeks with no payment. It was a very traumatic time."

After finally managing to sell the company, the offer of starting up an animation division with 20th Century Fox in Arizona offered a welcome level of security: "We'd always thought that our biggest problem was that we could make movies but the money was at risk because we didn't have guaranteed distribution. So maybe this was the combination we needed to get our films out and get audiences in to cinemas to see them."

The large shadow of Disney hangs over Goldman and Bluth, who both started as animators with that studio before becoming disillusioned with its decline in the 1970s. "They'd gone from spectacular, wonderful movies like Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi and Cinderella - the kind of movies we wanted to be involved with," he recalls. "But in the 1970s they weren't making those kinds of movies any more. We tried for seven and a half years to change things, but they didn't want to change. They thought it would cost more money. We said it just needed more effort."

He traces the decline from The Jungle Book (1966) onwards. But why does he think Disney lost interest in its most famous product? "I don't know. There was a power struggle in those days, and we used to hear rumours of infighting in the Disney family. In 1984 they produced a movie called The Black Cauldron which was probably the ultimate low. It looked like television put on the big screen. Poor television, at that. It was an expensive film which did nothing at the box office, and there was serious talk about closing the Disney animation department."

By that time, Goldman and Bluth had decamped to set up their own company, joining up with Steven Spielberg and Universal Studios to make An American Tail. He agrees that the success of that film was one of the reasons Disney started taking animation seriously again. "An American Tail grossed $45 million, and they realised they could make money out of animation, if they just did it better."

"Within a few years they had released The Little Mermaid, which really started to get back to old-style Disney values. We were pleased for them. We even put a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter congratulating them. But they didn't respond in kind - they went after our movie, The Land Before Time, with a vengeance. From The Little Mermaid onwards it got a little ugly. They're very tough in the marketplace. They're not going to let you play. We warned Fox, when we got to the marketing of Anastasia, to beware. Because we'd been experiencing it for 15 years. Everywhere we went in the world - Germany, Japan, Brazil, Spain - it was happening. In Spain the Disney marketing people were calling the Fox marketing people, apologising that Disney had ordered them to crush Anastasia any way they could."

He describes the way that companies like Disney throw their weight around, "telling cinemas that if they didn't co-operate they mightn't get another Disney film. We did the same thing with Spielberg and Universal: `If you don't co-operate you don't get the next Steven Spielberg movie'. As an animator this was shocking to me, when you're hit with this business side. But I'm sure it's like that in all businesses."

With Titan A.E., he admits, the intention was to find a niche in animation which was not already filled by Disney. Originally conceived as a live-action film, the decision was made by Fox to make it in animation form. "Fox gave it over to us and gave us 19 months to make it," says Goldman. "Nineteen months! It takes us two years to make a movie normally. Visually, I think it works, and I'm hoping that what the scriptwriters have brought to it will appeal to the science fiction audience."

He enjoyed the new challenge of combining classical, hand-drawn animation with computer-generated images (CGI), and sees the distinction between animation and live action film-making becoming increasingly blurred. "Think about something like The Matrix, which was one of my favourite movies of last year. Movies like that are becoming more cartoonish, and animation is becoming more like live action. They sort of meet in Toy Story. The next step, I suppose, is human characters created digitally. And then it's gone too far!

"There are different types of animation. In fact, the best CGI animators are still classically-trained. But my heart is in classical animation. There's things you can do with it that will tug your heart in a way that nothing else can."

Since we talked, the news broke that Fox had shut down its animation division in the wake of the disappointing performance of Titan A.E. at the US box office. Even with a major studio behind you, it seems, making animated features outside the walls of Disney is as difficult as ever.