Don Bluth had a dream job at Disney in 1979 when he handed in his resignation and walked out, convinced the studio had lost sight of the beauty that made its classic films great. The hand-drawn features he made instead, including The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time and Anastasia, made him Disney’s most persistent rival and defined childhoods for a generation of moviegoers. Nearly five decades later, he is looking back at the gamble with unusual honesty.
Don Bluth: Somewhere Out There arrives on Amazon and other digital platforms on Friday, November 20. The 88-minute documentary comes from Copper Pot Pictures and directors Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker, the filmmaking team behind I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story. It first premiered at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival in October 2025, and this release brings it to everyone who grew up on Bluth’s films.
The trailer, which debuted last month at Cartoon Brew, puts Bluth himself front and center:
Rather than leaning on the usual parade of talking heads, LaMattina and Walker built the film around Bluth as its principal storyteller, weaving new conversations with him into hundreds of hours of never-before-seen personal archives. The pair worked through Bluth’s extensive archive at the Savannah College of Art and Design, uncovering unseen footage, original animation artwork and behind-the-scenes material spanning decades. One find, noted by Animation World Network, is a 1980 interview filmed just after Bluth finished Banjo the Woodpile Cat in his garage, raw footage and all.
“Walt died, and the vision that he had in making movies seemed to be getting more and more out of focus,” Bluth recalls in the film. “I had my own private dreams about doing something beautiful.”
The filmmakers admit they expected to make a straightforward celebration. “We went into it thinking, this will just be this kind of straight celebration of Don Bluth because we love all of his movies,” Walker said. “But then you talk to him, and you’re like, wow, this is so much deeper than this.” The finished film does not skip the failures, the bankruptcies or the compromises it took to keep an independent hand-drawn studio alive, and an original score by Fergal Lawler of The Cranberries carries it.
The title reaches back to “Somewhere Out There,” the beloved song from An American Tail, and matches Bluth’s memoir, Somewhere Out There: My Animated Life. The documentary also lands in the middle of a genuine hand-drawn revival moment, one Trevor Decker News explored recently as Bluth’s classics keep finding new audiences.
For anyone who grew up on Fievel, Littlefoot and Mrs. Brisby, November 20 is a chance to hear how those films got made, and what they cost, from the man who left the biggest studio in animation to draw them his way.