An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (also known as An American Tail II: Fievel Goes West) is a 1991 American animated Western musical comedy film directed by Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells (in their feature directorial debuts), with producer Steven Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment and animated by his Amblimation animation studio and released by Universal Pictures. A sequel to 1986's An American Tail, the film follows the story of the Mousekewitzes, a family of Russian-Jewish mice who emigrate to the Wild West. In it, Fievel is separated from his family as the train approaches the American Old West; the film chronicles him and Sheriff Wylie Burp teaching Tiger how to act like a dog.
Fievel Goes West was the first production for the short-lived Amblimation, a studio Spielberg set up to keep the animators of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) working. It is also the only Amblimation film to use cel animation, the last in the series to do so, and the last to be released in theaters. While the animation medium was transitioning to computers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Spielberg wanted almost all of the animation of Fievel Goes West to be hand-drawn, describing animation as "an arts-and-crafts business". He also wanted the animation to have a "live-action" feel. Phillip Glasser, Dom DeLuise, Nehemiah Persoff, and Erica Yohn reprise their roles from the first film for Fievel Goes West. Tanya's original voice actor, Amy Green, was replaced by Cathy Cavadini, and new characters were voiced by John Cleese, Amy Irving, Jon Lovitz, and James Stewart in his final film role. James Horner returned as a composer and wrote the film's song "Dreams to Dream", which garnered a Golden Globe nomination.
Premiering at the Kennedy Center on November 17, 1991, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West began its American theatrical run on November 22. This was the same day Walt Disney Pictures' Beauty and the Beast (1991) was distributed, making it the third instance of two animated films being released on the same date. Fievel Goes West was promoted with a wide array of tie-ins and started in the top ten at the box office. The film grossed $22 million in the United States against a budget of $16 million. Some film journalists and executives attributed this to having to compete with the Disney film.
Upon its release, Fievel Goes West received mixed reviews from critics: while its animation, score, and voice performances were praised, most criticisms targeted its story, pacing, and lack of character development. However, it found success when it came to home video sales, quickly reaching the top of the video charts when released on tape in March 1992; at the time, the film held the record for shortest theater-to-home-video transfer, and it has since gained a large cult following. In addition to garnering more home media releases, television airings, and video game adaptations later on, the film has made numerous 2010s retrospective best-of lists from online publications, especially best Netflix-available Western films. Fievel Goes West was followed by a short-lived CBS series named Fievel's American Tails and two direct-to-video films: An American Tail: The Treasure of Manhattan Island (1998) and An American Tail: The Mystery of the Night Monster (1999).
Plot
In 1890, five years after emigrating to the United States, the impoverished Mousekewitz family are still struggling against the attacks of mouse-hungry cats. Fievel spends his days thinking about a bloodhound-sheriff called Wylie Burp, while Tanya dreams of becoming a singer. Meanwhile, Tiger's girlfriend, Miss Kitty, leaves him to find a new life out west, remarking that perhaps she is looking for "a cat that's more like a dog".
A British aristocratic cat named Cat R. Waul launches an attack on the mice, forcing them to flee into the sewers. There, they come across a cowboy mouse, who is in fact a marionette controlled by Waul, who tricks the mice into moving out west. Tiger tries catching up with his friends, but is thrown off course by a group of dogs. While on the train, Fievel wanders into the livestock car and overhears the cats' intentions to eat the mice. After being discovered, Fievel tries to flee but Waul has his hench-spider, T.R. Chula, strand Fievel in the middle of the desert. Devastated over his loss, his family arrives in Green River, Utah.
Upon arrival in Green River, T.R. Chula blocks up the water tower, drying up the river. Waul approaches the mice and proposes to build a new saloon together, although intending to trick the mice into doing the bulk of the work and eat them afterwards. Meanwhile, Fievel wanders aimlessly through the desert, as does Tiger, who has found his way out west as well, and they pass each other. However, they each figure that the other is a mirage and continue on their separate ways. Tiger is captured by a local mouse native tribe and hailed as a god. Fievel is picked up by a hawk, dropped over the native village and reunites with Tiger, who chooses to stay while Fievel catches a passing tumbleweed, which takes him to Green River. He reunites with his family, but they are oblivious to Waul's plans. At the saloon, Fievel overhears the cats' plan yet again and is discovered once more by Waul, who tries eating Fievel, but is thwarted when he hears Tanya singing. He sends Tanya to Miss Kitty, who is now a saloon-girl cat and she reveals that she came at Waul's request. He tells Miss Kitty to put her on stage and Tanya performs for the cats. Meanwhile, Fievel is chased by T.R. Chula and taken prisoner, but flees.
Despondent, Fievel speaks with an elderly bloodhound sleeping outside the jail, discovering he is actually Wylie Burp. Fievel convinces him to help and train Tiger as a lawman and as a dog. Though initially reluctant, Tiger relents at the suggestion that a new persona might win back Miss Kitty. They return to Green River to fight the cats, who attempt to use a concealed giant mouse trap on the mice at sunset during the opening of Waul's saloon. Tiger, Wylie Burp and Fievel fight the cats, during which Miss Kitty and Tanya discover the trap. Tanya rushes to the mice and, using her singing abilities, helps them escape. Seeing this, Waul uses a giant revolver as a makeshift cannon on the fleeing mice, but Fievel intercepts him. As T.R. Chula takes Miss Kitty hostage, an incensed Tiger rescues her, and the heroes use the mouse trap as a catapult to send Waul and his henchmen out of Green River. The cats fly into a mailbag, which a passing train picks up and leaves. Enamored by his new personality, Miss Kitty reunites with Tiger. Tanya becomes a famous singer and the water tower flows with 1,000 gallons again, making Green River bloom with thousands of flowers. Fievel finds Wylie Burp away from the party, who hands him his sheriff badge. Fievel is unsure about taking it but realizes that his journey is not over.
Voice cast Phillip Glasser as Fievel Mousekewitz Cathy Cavadini as Tanya Mousekewitz Dom DeLuise as Tiger Amy Irving as Miss Kitty James Stewart as Wylie Burp John Cleese as Cat R. Waul Jon Lovitz as T.R. Chula Nehemiah Persoff as Papa Mousekewitz Erica Yohn as Mama Mousekewitz Patrick Pinney as One Eye Jack Angel as Frenchy Mickie McGowan as Saloon Lady David Tate as additional voices
Production Development A sequel to Steven Spielberg's An American Tail (1986) under the working title An American Tail II was put into pre-production by David Kirschner in April 1988 after he finished producing Child's Play (1988); when announcing the project that same month, he summarized that Fievel will "fight the cat-tle barons. It's like a John Ford western with Jewish mice". Kirschner started pre-production as Spielberg was setting up filming for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) in Europe. He was not involved in the production and post-production, and admitted in 1993 that he disliked Fievel Goes West as "entertainment without character". The screenplay was written by Flint Dille, who was led to the position by writing for Spielberg's Tiny Toon Adventures (1990–92).
Spielberg produced the live-action animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), which was the top grossing motion picture of 1988. As a way to keep the movie's animators working, due to the closure of Richard Williams Animation, Spielberg formed Amblimation, a collaboration of Universal City Studios and Amblin Entertainment, whose offices were located in London. Fievel Goes West was its first production and over 250 crew members from 15 different nations worked on the project starting May 1989. At the time, Amblimation was also developing We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story (1993), Balto (1995), and a screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats which never saw completion. In December 1988, Universal announced that they would release an animated film every eighteen months and begin production on An American Tail II in early 1989.
Don Bluth, who had partnered with Spielberg on both the original film and The Land Before Time (1988), was set to direct and have Sullivan Bluth Studios provide the animation; owing to creative differences, however, they parted ways. As Bluth explained, "the business deal wasn't such that it helped our company". With no Bluth in sight for the sequel, Spielberg instead relied on ex-Disney animator Phil Nibbelink and ex-Richard Williams storyboard artist Simon Wells, the great-grandson of science-fiction author H. G. Wells, to direct the project. Nibbelink and Wells had both previously worked with Spielberg as supervising animators on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Bluth said in April 1992 that he regretted his decision, admitting that he disliked the final product of Fievel Goes West and "maybe we could've helped that film a little more".
With John Cleese as the first choice for Cat R. Waul, he was approached in 1989 by one of the film's producers at what Cleese vaguely called "the Italian Oscars". He accepted the offer based on his enjoyment of the first American Tail and "I love sound studios anyway – there's none of the hassle and boredom and time wasting you get in television". Cleese was paid his lowest fee in ten years for the role, however, which made him very unwilling to publicize his involvement with Fievel Goes West. According to Cathy Cavadini, there was another woman initially planned to voice Tanya but left the project, so Cavadini replaced her. Spielberg met James Stewart at a party asking him to voice Wylie Burp, and all of Stewart's lines were recorded in ten days; his last involvement in a Western was in The Shootist (1976).
Animation
Don Bluth's departure from the project resulted in the animation of Fievel Goes West lacking the Disney-isms of the first film's animation. Instead, its animation is faster-paced and contains more elements of Warner Bros. cartoons. Spielberg instructed his animators to take on a "live-action" method to animating the film, where the characters are affected by parts of the environment such as lighting. Spielberg also directed for the camera to constantly move in sequences such as the sewer ride sequence and a 360-degree pan shot of the film's desert vista. These types of crane and dolly shots replicated certain shots in Spielberg's Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and were considered groundbreaking for the time.
Apart from one computer-generated shot of the valley's ground, all of the film was hand-drawn animated; the process was so intensive that it took at least one week to complete a minute of animation, around sixty artists to paint approximately 230,000 cels, and a week for a single animator to finish three seconds of animation. As Fievel Goes West was a parody of Western films, the animators heavily studied the works of John Ford and Sergio Leone.
Sound design