Sullivan Bluth Studios was an Irish-American animated film production company established in 1979 by animator Don Bluth. Bluth and several colleagues, all of whom were former Disney animators, left Disney in 1979 to form Don Bluth Productions, later known as the Bluth Group. This studio produced the short film Banjo the Woodpile Cat, the feature film The Secret of NIMH, and the video games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. The Bluth Group went bankrupt in 1984, and Bluth co-founded Sullivan Bluth Studios with Irish-American businessman Morris Francis Sullivan in 1985.
The studio initially operated from an animation facility in Van Nuys, California, and negotiated with Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment to make the animated feature An American Tail. During its production, Morris Sullivan began to move the studio to Dublin, Ireland to take advantage of government investment and incentives offered by the Industrial Development Authority. Most of the staff from the US studio moved to the new Dublin facility during production on the studio's second feature film, The Land Before Time. The studio also recruited heavily from Ireland, and helped set up an animation course at Ballyfermot Senior College to train new artists.
After The Land Before Time, the studio severed its connection with Amblin and negotiated with UK-based Goldcrest Films, which invested in and distributed two additional features, All Dogs Go to Heaven and Rock-a-Doodle. In 1989, during the production of All Dogs Go to Heaven founding member John Pomeroy and many of the remaining US staff members returned to America to form a US wing in Burbank, California. The studio found itself in financial difficulty in 1992 when Goldcrest withdrew funding due to concerns about the poor box office returns of its most recent films and budgetary over-runs in its in-production films, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park and The Pebble and the Penguin. Another British film company, Merlin Films, and Hong Kong media company Media Assets invested in the studio to fund the completion and release of the three partially completed films.
Bluth and Gary Goldman were drawn away from the studio when they were approached in 1994 to set up a new animation studio for 20th Century Fox. Sullivan Bluth Studio's films continued to suffer losses at the box office, and the studio was closed down in 1995 after the release of their final feature, The Pebble and the Penguin. Don Bluth and Gary Goldman went on to head up Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona to work on Anastasia and Titan A.E.
Hubie, a shy, gullible but kindhearted penguin, is in love with the beautiful and kind Marina, but lacks self-confidence leading him to be bullied by the much more impressive, but vain and cruel Drake, who also wants Marina, but clearly for lust. One night, Hubie and Marina manage to confirm how they feel for each other, but Hubie cannot quite find a perfect pebble to propose to Marina with. He wishes on a star to make his dream come true and he receives an emerald from the sky. Ecstatic, Hubie rushes to find Marina but is stopped by Drake, who demands Hubie to give him the pebble. Hubie refuses, so Drake throws him into the water. Hubie narrowly escapes from a leopard seal and climbs on to a piece of ice where he is swept away from Antarctica.
A lonely old woman longs for a child, and is given a seed by a good witch. When planted, the seed grows into a flower, and inside the blossom is a tiny girl the size of the old woman's thumb. The old woman names the girl Thumbelina and raises her as her own.
The film begins in a Kingdom of Trolls, where Stanley (Dom DeLuise) has a magical green thumb with the ability to bring flowers and plants to life at a touch. When he is discovered doing so, the other trolls take him as prisoner to Gnorga (Cloris Leachman), the Queen of the Trolls, who concludes that Stanley "gives a bad name to trolls everywhere" and demands that he be turned to stone. At the behest of her consort King Llort (Charles Nelson Reilly), Gnorga instead banishes Stanley to Central Park where, after a series of mishaps, Stanley hides himself under a bridge. In New York City, two young siblings named Gus and Rosie (Phillip Glasser and Tawny Sunshine Glover) learn that their father Alan (Jonathan Pryce) and mother Hilary (Hayley Mills) cannot take them to Central Park. while left alone with their nanny, Maria, Gus takes Rosie to the Park himself. While playing with Gus's toy boat, which is later accidentally smashed, Rosie befriends Stanley. When Queen Gnorga discovers Stanley happy in exile, she creates a flood to drown them by making Gus cry, but Stanley enlarges Gus's toy boat to escape. Soon after, Stanley shows the children his own ideals, depicted as a world of his own.
Chanticleer is a rooster, whose job is to wake the sun up every morning, but the Grand Duke of Owls, who hates sunshine sabotages him to make it look like the sun comes up on its own without Chanticleer's crow. Detested by the farm animals, he leaves the farm to look for work in the city. Afterward, perpetual darkness and rainfall threaten the farm with flooding. Turning out to be a story read to a young human boy named Edmond, it seems that the flooding has found his family and when his mother goes to help them stop it, he calls out to Chanticleer and is heard by the Grand Duke himself who takes a dislike to Edmond's attempts to foil his plans. He turns him into a kitten to devour him, but he is saved at the last second by Pattou, a bloodhound from Chanticleer's farm. He is accompanied by Snipes, a claustrophobic magpie, and Peepers, an intellectual field mouse, as well as several animals from the farm hoping to find Chanticleer and apologize to him for their behavior. Edmond accompanies Pattou, Snipes and Peepers to the city while the rest of the animals remain at Edmond's house. En route, they are attacked by Hunch; the Duke's diminutive nephew, assigned by him to stop Edmond and the others from finding Chanticleer. They narrowly escape and enter the city.
In 1939 New Orleans, a roguish German Shepherd named Charlie B. Barkin escapes from a dog pound with the help of his friend, a dachshund named Itchy Itchiford. They return to a casino riverboat on the bayou, which is formerly run by Charlie with his partner, a bulldog named Carface Caruthers. Not wanting to share the profits with Charlie, Carface persuades him to leave town with 50% of the casino's earnings. Charlie agrees, but is later intoxicated and murdered by Carface. He is sent to Heaven where a whippet angel named Annabelle (who was named in the sequel) tells him that a gold watch representing his life has stopped. He steals and winds it, sending Charlie back to Earth, but is told that if he dies again, he will go to Hell. After reuniting with Itchy, they discover that Carface is holding an orphan girl named Anne-Marie (presumably kidnapped from the orphanage by Carface), who has the ability to talk to animals and gain knowledge of a race's results beforehand, allowing Carface to rig the odds on the rat races and become rich. They rescue her, intending to use her abilities to get revenge on Carface, though Charlie tells her that they plan to give their winnings to the poor and help her find parents.
Near the end of the Cretaceous, a series of catastrophic events are causing intense drought, and several herds of dinosaurs seek one of the last livable places, a paradise known as the "Great Valley." Among these, a diminished "Longneck" herd gives birth to a single baby, named Littlefoot (Gabriel Damon). Years later, Littlefoot plays with Cera (Candace Hutson), a "Three-horn," who was trying to smash a beetle until her father (Burke Bynes) intervenes; whereupon Littlefoot's mother (Helen Shaver) names the different kinds of dinosaurs: "Three-horns," "Spiketails," "Swimmers," and "Flyers," and states that each has historically remained apart. That night, as Littlefoot follows a "hopper," he encounters Cera again, and they play together briefly until a "Sharptooth" appears. He attacks them, before Littlefoot's mother comes to their rescue. During the fight, she suffers severe back and neck injuries from the Sharptooth's teeth and claws. At that same time, an "earthshake" opens a deep ravine that swallows up the Sharptooth and divides Littlefoot and Cera from their herds. Littlefoot finds his dying mother, and receives her final words of advice in favor of his intuition.
In 1885, Shostka, Russia, the Mousekewitzes—a Russian-Jewish family of mice—who live with a human family named Moskowitz are having a celebration of Hanukkah where the father gives his hat to his son Fievel and tells of a wonderful place called America, where there are no cats. The celebration is interrupted when a battery of Cossacks ride through the village square in an arson attack and the Cossack cats likewise attack the village mice.
Mrs. Brisby, a timid widowed field mouse, lives in a cinder block with her children in a field on the Fitzgibbons' farm. She prepares to move her family out of the field as plowing time approaches, but her son Timothy has fallen ill. She visits Mr. Ages, another mouse and friend of her late husband, Jonathan, who diagnoses Timothy with pneumonia and provides her with medicine. Mr. Ages warns her that Timothy must stay inside for at least three weeks or he will die. On her way home she encounters Jeremy, a clumsy but friendly crow. They both narrowly escape from the Fitzgibbons' cat, Dragon.
In a woodpile in Payson, Utah during the 1940s, a kitten named Banjo (voiced by Sparky Marcus) decides to chase chickens around. His sisters, Emily and Jean, tell their parents and Banjo's father (voiced by veteran voice actor, Ken Sansom) soon stops him and makes him promise not to do it again. But Banjo continues to be mischievous in many ways. After getting in trouble for jumping off the roof of a chicken coop, Banjo decides to run away from home and hitches a ride on a feed truck to Salt Lake City.