Don Monahan (left) helps his stepfather, Don Bluth at the Don Bluth Productions booth at Dragoncon 2001.

Gary Goldman: Television is a real lucrative medium for filmmakers, but the reason it's lucrative for the producers is because they are willing to create it for so little. We're more about the art of animation than the business of animation. Obviously, if you do a TV series, and it's successful, it could last for 15 years. When it's done, and when it finally pays for itself, from that time on, it's all gravy. But what have you really created?

Crescent Blues: That's why I asked. I remember the old Johnny Quest. Remember Johnny Quest? I would watch that show religiously. I would kill myself getting home on my bike to watch Johnny Quest. But I look at the cartoons nowadays, and it's like someone said, "Oh, yeah, let me scribble this here." And that's it.

Gary Goldman: Partly it's economics, and those people are willing to work in that economic structure. Because if you're there trying to create a classic -- or something you feel is classic -- that has performance and art involved with it… Now I can't say that some of that's not art. It's still art. There are different varieties of animation art. But the fact is, that they produce, for TV, a half-hour for the same cost of two or three minutes in a feature film. It's a huge difference in economics.

I feel bad for them sometimes, but everybody has choices in life, and they make that choice. Sometimes they just feel that's the most lucrative way to go. Or maybe it's the only way to go -- the only way to get a chance if they've got something new and different that some TV executive says, "That would look good on our programming."

Don Bluth: Also, because of our culture in the United States, animation is aimed directly at the children. So many people have tried for the brass ring, to see if they could try to get it to grow up, so that's actually for adults, because adult tickets cost more. So many of the things you watch on television -- and a lot of the things you see on Cartoon Network -- are very economically made, because it's for kids. And kids don't really see the difference. But I believe, Cartoon Network is trying to grow it up. They've been introducing anime to the American public.

You go to another culture like Japan or South America, and the adults appreciate comic art and animation art as an art form. We in America, for some reason, cannot get that. We've got it so categorized into the nursery that even the kids know it. So when they get to their adolescent years, they say, "Get me away from animation. I don't want to go anywhere near it, because that means I'm still a little kid."

Gary Goldman: In the U.S., it's almost a rite of passage to get away from animation. That's because it's the only kind of films some parents will allow their children to see from the first time they enter a theater, when they're about four or five years old until they're about 11 or 12. When they finally get to go to a PG or PG-13 movie, that's where they want to go.

Don Bluth: The film is secondary.

Gary Goldman: Oh yeah, this gets around to Titan A.E. Fox asked us -- we weren't the first producer/directors on Titan A.E. We were actually in the wings, waiting for our next project. We had been working on a project entitled, Bartok the Magnificent, which was something Don came up with, because they didn't have a project for us, at the end of Anastasia.

Don Bluth: And there we sat with 315 people waiting for work.

Gary Goldman: We kept saying, "You've got to put a little more urgency in what you're doing. We need product."

Don Bluth: Tell them about the budget. The crew was sitting there, taking money.

Gary Goldman: There was an item in the budget called "holding costs." It's a term in budgeting for when you have a person sitting there, being paid, but he isn't producing anything. When you have 315 people, and you have a cash outflow of somewhere around $450,000 - $500,000 a week, going through the door, you want to be producing at least a couple of minutes of animation each week. You need a continuity of product to avoid this situation. And, you do not want to lose your trained staff.

Fox finally came at us with a project (Planet Ice) that had been in the works for about a year and a half, but they really had nothing to show for it other than a lot of pre-production art like inspirational drawings, set designs and paintings that were ideas of what the outer space film would look like. They had three or four sequences that were recorded, and radio tracks were made, but they very flat. They didn't really have much energy to them. They had some storyboarding on videotape that all had to be redone. And, they had already spent about $30 million on it. We were given a budget of $55 million to finish the project. We basically had to start from scratch and move very quickly. The project is 95 minutes long and we did it in just 19 months, that's got to be some sort of record. However, the total cost, with the $30 million in pre-production costs was now $85 million. It was going to take a powerful marketing campaign to recoup that investment.

When they came and asked us to do it, we said, we're not really big into sci-fi. We go to see those movies, but we're not really aficionados. We didn't know the ins and outs. We might do something that's already been done before and not even know it.

Luckily, we had a heck of a lot of people on the crew who were sci-fi freaks, if you will. If Don got an idea and said, "We ought to go here." They'd say, "No, no, no, no. That was done in Star Trek IV."

Don Bluth: We aimed it at teenagers.

Gary Goldman: The key was, Fox was going to be different than the rest of the animation studios. This was the thought of [former Fox Filmed Entertainment Chairman] Bill Mechanic and the president of the animation division, Chris Meledandri. The point is, they both said -- and the marketing people agreed with them -- that they were going to make this movie for teenagers, the 14-year-old boys.

We went, "Wait, wait a minute! Guys, that's the age group -- the 11-and-a-half to 19 year-olds do not want to go to an animated movie. By college, it's OK to go back to animated movies. But in that period of their puberty and young adulthood, they want to go see PG-13 and R-rated movies, not animation. At least not in public."

But they said, "No, no, no. We're going to go here." They really kind of forced us to go there, and when we did it, they created their ads and then they started reacting. About two weeks before the movie came out, somebody raised their hands and said, "The moms don't like these commercials."

We said, "That's OK. If you want the teenagers to go to your movie, you don't want the moms to like the commercials. If you want the six-year-olds to go to your movie, then you want the moms to like your commercials. Teenagers and moms don't agree on anything anyway."

This would turn into a disaster for the chairman, Bill Mechanic…and for our crew. By shutting down the advertising, they basically killed any chances for the film to succeed in the market place, worldwide theater or home entertainment (video and DVD). The events that followed were sad indeed. Bill was asked to resign, and the state-of -the-art Phoenix animation studio was shut down.

For months after, Newscorp claimed that the failure of the motion pictures Fight Club and Titan A.E., plus the high cost of animation had hurt the earnings of 20th Century Fox.

The fact is that there wasn't any real interest in traditional animation other than Bill Mechanic and those close to him. He's the one that knew and believed that the medium could bring enormous profits to the company, if they could market it properly. He's the one who brought Don and I in to start Fox Animation Studios. He was well experienced from his tenure at Disney, as President of International Distribution and of Worldwide Video. But he really didn't have a team that understood the animation territory. And they never really anticipated the battle they would encounter with Disney over the animation domain. Disney is very protective of their dominance in the animation world.

Crescent Blues: It's kind of funny how we work to restrict animated films to kids on a number of levels. Every science fiction and fantasy writer wants to see their book filmed, but the costs for live-action are so prohibitive. You'd think animation would be the ideal way to translate sci-fi and fantasy books into film. Why is there so much resistance to the idea?

Gary Goldman: People don't really know how huge science fiction, fantasy and horror can be. But it does need to be promoted. I'll give you an example. Since the release of Titan A.E. on video, last November, it has only sold about 2.8 million videos domestically and about 600,000 units in Europe. Anastasia sold 13 million units worldwide, since the summer of 1998 and continues to sell, three years later. Titan A.E. only sold a quarter of what Anastasia did. There is really no promotion for the product. Anastasia reached beyond just fantasy, it went to the families. The families grabbed it and held it, even though it didn't do that great in the box office (Anastasia only did about $60 million at the box office), the video's been really successful. That project was heavily promoted for the theatre and for the video release.

I'm sure live action science fiction -- films like Star Trek -- probably sold 20 or 30 million video units. But I don't really know how big it is, and I don't know how many science fiction fans saw Titan A.E. The promotion it got was very little compared to Anastasia.

Crescent Blues: I looked for Titan A.E. [in the theaters], and I kept thinking it hadn't come out yet. Then I heard it had come and gone.

Gary Goldman: Once the advertising stops, the theaters go, "Well, if you're not going to help me out with advertising, why should I keep this in my theater? Nobody's going to know about the movie unless you give me some kind of promotional assistance." The same thing happened to Warner Brothers' Iron Giant.

Don Bluth: It's all driven by money.

Gary Goldman: It is. It's driven by money. The theaters also get money from popcorn sales and things like that. But if that movie's not bringing in the popcorn buyers…they need support [i.e., advertising] from the distributors.

The audience won't go if they don't know the movie is there.

Crescent Blues: That's a great closing line, but is there anything else you'd like to add?

Gary Goldman: You know, we were given a Lifetime Achievement Award just after we shut down the Fox animation studio. At the time I was a little in shock, almost like the lemming that had just gone off the cliff, and I was in free-fall. We went to this Lifetime Achievement Award given by Animation Magazine, and we kept saying, "Does this mean it's time for us to sit down and shut up -- because we're not ready to sit down." We really didn't think it was time for a Lifetime Achievement award.

Don intends on working on until…they'll probably find him someday lying over his desk. But I'm sure that's not for another 20 or 30 more years.

Don Bluth: One more thing, and this is important. We live in an electronic age, a computer age, and because of that, so many young people are starting to go there, exclusively, instead of learning the real, fine skill of drawing. Drawing is a wonderful experience, and it helps you express yourself in a most amazing way.

I once asked a good friend of mine, Chuck Jones, if he could give advice to all the young people out there, who want to enter the film world or the movie world, about animation, what would he say?

He said, "Two things, really. One of them is learn to draw. Get away from this damned computer and learn your drawing skills, because that will serve you on the computer. It's a very human thing to do: learn to draw."

"And number two?" I said.

"Number two," he said, "is get an education, because if you have nothing to say, drawing's not going to serve you at all. You can't just draw and live in that fantasy world. You have to go to school, and you have to get some stuff to put in your head so that the drawing language will serve you."

Those two things, I think, are really good advice. That's all I have to say.

Click here to learn more about Don Bluth and Gary Goldman.

Click here to read award-winning animation writer John Grant's appreciation of Chuck Jones.

Jean Marie Ward & Teri Smith In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including "Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space" in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, was published by Samhain Publishing in 2007.

Raising hell for fifty years from Alaska to the Azores and all points in between, Teri Smith was an Air Force brat who never stopped traveling. She was also a mother, a grandmother (of ten!), a help desk wizard, a financial assistant, acquisitions editor for Samhain Publishing and, most importantly, the Queen Nag of the Known Universe. A multi-published short story writer, her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Jean Marie Ward, was published in 2007. Contrary to common belief, she never stopped living.