Fievel is rescued by the French pigeon Henri (Christopher Plummer), who is overseeing the completion of the Statue of Liberty, the Lady without her face on. Bluth and company recreate the tenements, the sweat shops, the harbor as it was 100 years ago. It's 1885, and the teeming shores are ethnically diverse, with mice from many lands seeking the American dream. Luckily, Fievel (the voice of seven-year-old Phillip Glasser) washes into New York Harbor safe in a bottle. All the better to understand the mighty motivations of young Fievel, who's separated from the Mousekewitz family on the voyage to America. Bluth, whose similarly socially conscious "The Secret of NIMH" was about a widowed mouse and a race of super-intelligent rats, has not come far afield. There's lots of music, mostly mild-mannered, to sweeten this rather serious story by "Sesame Street" writers Tony Geiss and Judy Freudberg. A family of Russian mice flee the Cossacks for the cobblestones of New York - where, as the show-stopping song says, there are no cats and the streets are paved with cheese, oh ho, the streets are paved with cheese. It's not as grabbing as many of the Disney classics, but it builds on that tradition.ĭirector Don Bluth and a cadre of other Disney emigres create this classically drawn and effect-filled tale whose characters themselves are refugees. It's a melting-pot movie for little Americans, full of immigrant dreams and as patriotic as Frosted Flakes. "An American Tail," with a family of Russian mice, a gang of rats and a cockroach in a cameo appearance, is the amazing storyteller's first animated feature. Whatever the impulse, here comes another mousecartoon, this one from the stupefying Steven Spielberg. DOES IT ever strike you as odd that rodents give us the willies, but we're forever starring them in kiddie cartoons? Perhaps the hairy little cheese-nibblers have been typecast because of Mickey.
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