An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991) was the first feature film from Amblimation, Spielberg’s animation unit, which, three films later, would move from the UK to the US and become DreamWorks Animation. Céu worked on this film as a supervising animator, leading a team of very young artists and working alongside some of today’s animation stars, who were still just starting out at the time.
Comments from Céu:
Fievel Goes West was a production by Steven Spielberg and Robert Watts. Based on an original idea by David Kirschner, with a screenplay by Flint Dille and Charles Swenson, it was directed by Simon Wells and Phil Nibelink.
At the time, Simon joined the company as one of the lead artists at Richard Williams’ studio, who had just completed Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Phil was a Disney animator, having appeared in nearly every film of that generation, including The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver Queen, and The Black Cauldron.
The art director was Neil Ross, who produced many stunning paintings that drew me into his office almost every day.
1st row: Simon Wells, Phil Nibelink, Uli Meyer with Harald Kraut, Kristof Serrand
2nd row: Glen Sylvester, Greg Manwaring, Thierry Schiel (under Isabelle Beaudoin working supervision #notreally), Rob Stevenhagen
3rd row: Shane Doyle, Scott Santoro, Panagiotis Rappas, Raul Garcia
4th row: Nancy Beiman with Calvin Leduc, Neil Ross, Peter Western, Bibo Bergeron
Last row: Luc Chamberland prays to Kinder Egg with Roy Meurin, Steve Cav with Rudi Bloss and glimpses of Andre and Denise, Denise Dean, Patrick Mate
Among many others, the supervisors and lead animators who worked with me were Uli Meyer, Kristof Serrand, Glen Sylvester, Thierry Schiel, Rob Stevenhagen, Roy Meurin, Shane Doyle, Greg Manwaring, Scott Santoro, Panagiotis Rappas, Calvin Leduc, Luc Chamberland, Peter Western, Bibo Bergeron, Raul Garcia, and Nancy Beiman.
In this blog post, I share some short GIFs of my favorite scenes, among those I worked on with my team. I had a great team of assistants, some of whom, including Rudi Bloss, Stephen Cavalier, and Denise Dean, are still good friends. There were also Andrea Simonti, Dave Webster, Ennio Torresan, Marco Trandafilov, and Fabio Lignini.
The Scorpion Sequence, where Fievel has a quick and surprising fight with a Scorpion in a desert pit, became a huge hit for me at the studio. At the time, I was testing some concepts from “Arachnida” about how to animate spiders and scorpions. I even had a real tarantula living in a cage at my house, which I occasionally brought with me to visit the team. The impact of the finished animation in the pencil test was so good that both the directors and producers asked the other departments to finalize the colors and backgrounds for the sequence as quickly as possible.
For the Cat Attack Sequence, everyone in the studio animated something, as the entire sequence was very complicated, full of rats and cats jumping and running. I had a lot of fun doing it because I started analyzing live footage of crowd movements and noticed some interesting things I wanted to work on more. So, when Simon Wells and associate producer Steve Hickner came to hand me and my team the Puppet Speech Sequence, I offered to animate the crowd in a more detailed way, giving each individual personality and incorporating some random patterns I was studying at the time. They were a bit surprised, because this wasn’t the usual reaction from animators, who hate crowd scenes. I remember Hickner responding, “Well, Spielberg loves crowd scenes!”
There were already plenty of different mice to use in crowd scenes, but not enough for my sequence. So, we developed a new set, based on caricatures Ennio had drawn of artists from the studio itself. To animate Fievel in this sequence, I kept him moving at a very slow pace, contrasting with the quirky puppet and the restless crowd. Animating the puppet was my biggest challenge. At the beginning of the sequence, the audience doesn’t realize he’s a wooden toy, but just a slightly different mouse from the West. Slowly, his strings and “puppet personality” are revealed, as is Raoul the cat, hiding above and manipulating him. The cat’s voice is by former Python member John Cleese. And being a Monty Python admirer myself, this only added to the joy of working on this sequence. At Simon’s suggestion, I animated one of the puppet’s movements, like the Silly Walk sketch. The entire sequence became very popular among the studio’s artists, largely because of all the caricatures, and even earned an article by Nancy Beiman in a specialized magazine.
Céu D´Ellia
