An American Tail 1986

[6.0/10] I so wanted to like this movie. It’s a story centered on Jewish immigrants. It’s directed by Don Bluth. It’s produced by Steven Spielberg. It analogizes the immigrant experience to mice and cats roaming around versions of New York City and other locales miniaturized to be below the notice of humans. There is, in a vacuum, so much going for this film.

But at the end of the day, it’s an inert piece of cinema, more a random series of showcases than a genuine story. There’s a basic premise to An American Tail that gives the film what little structure it was. Fievel Mousekowitz gets separated from his family while on a boat to America and searches for them after washing ashore in New York City, meeting a variety of new friends and foes along the way.

There’s power in that central idea. I’ll confess to being rather upset when a strong wave washes Fievel away from his parents when I saw this movie as a child. Even knowing, as an adult, that the film has a happy ending, I still found myself bothered by Fievel’s near misses at reuniting with his mama and papa and siblings once he arrives in the Big Apple. To the same end, you’d have to be made of stone not to feel something when Bluth lights the puddles of New York City gutters in golden hues and shows the lost little mouse leaping into his parents’ loving arms once more.

But there’s very little compelling in between. An American Tail doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a bunch of slice of life vignettes that are loosely connected to one another. Fievel, as a naive little five-year-old (or whatever the five-year-old equivalent is in mouse years), doesn’t really have agency as a character. He theoretically makes choices, but more deliberately, he’s a curious little moppet with no impulse control, following whatever sight or sound draws him into the next bit of slapstick or zany character.

The result is that the movie plays like a series of shorts strung together, and gets tiresome pretty quickly. It’s an “And Then” sort of film, where our rodent protagonist just stumbles headlong into each new chapter of the story, without previous events motivating what happens next. When each new incident in a movie just sort of happens, rather than being the natural extension or negation of what came before, the story feels hollow and unsatisfying, like this one does.

Some of that might be more forgivable if the characters were more memorable or had any depth to them. But almost every figure we meet in An American Tail is some kind of stereotype or one-dimensional nothing. There’s the streetsmart Italian kid, an young Irish rabble-rouser (and the two fall in love in two seconds based on absolutely nothing, a local Tammany Hall wheeler-dealer and drunkard, a rich dame of a certain age, and any number of other one-note wastes who barely count as texture.

The closest thing the film has to better-sketched characters are a French bird with a “never say never” attitude and a cat who actually likes mice. The problem is that both of them basically only hang around for a single song and then become all but irrelevant to the rest of the movie. Even Fievel, who literally (and, in theory, figuratively) grows over the course of his adventures, is basically a cipher, defined by little more than the fact that he’s curious and falls headlong into wacky situations because of it.

The only other player in the film with even a second layer to him is Warren T. Cat, the malevolent feline and villain of the piece who masquerades as a rat to serve as an erstwhile ambassador between the mice and the cats, while secretly selling the rodents out for protection money and throwing poor kids into workhouses. He’s not really developed with any goals or an arc or anything, but the twist is a compelling one given what it stands for.

His presence connects with the element of An American Tail that is both its most laudable feature and its greatest source of missed potential -- its commentary on the immigrant experience. Warren is a symbol of predatory forces that claim to be a part of an immigrant community and having its best interests at heart, while surreptitiously selling them out to feather one’s own nest. It’s not just a cool villain twist for the fake rat, but adds genuine subtext.

In the same vein, Papa Mouskewitz declaration that there are no cats in America is a metonym for immigrants imagining their new home as a place free from the problems of the old world, and facing the reality that every place has its problems and predators. Tiger counterbalances Warren, and shows that not everyone you fear from the outgroup is bad. And there’s strength in the notion of all the immigrant mice banding together and being able to stave off those who would see them harmed or disrupt their lives.

And yet, most of this is shuffled to the background, swept aside to make way for the next kinetic sequence or musical number or ethnic caricature. Plenty of those sequences are nice to look at. Bluth and company know their way around swirling waters and chase sequences, and there’s even some budding but eye-catching CGI and rotoscoping at play. But like so much in the film, the take on immigrants settling in the United States is glancing at best.

The film does include a few solid throughlines and setups and payoffs. The emotional connection between Fievel and his dad serves most of them. The grand contraption that finally scares off the aggressor cats is an approximation of the “Giant Mouse of Minsk” that Fievel suggests after his dad regaled him with the tall tale. Similarly, part of Fievel’s wandering habits often comes down to hearing what he thinks is his father’s violin, creating a musical motif for his desire to return to the warmth of familial embrace. As aimless and scatterbrained as this script feels, there’s a few good structural elements that help give it some kind of shape.

That is, unfortunately, not really enough to save it. An American Tail isn’t bad. It’s eminently watchable, with one good song in particular (“Somewhere Out There”), a few nice sequences, and quality subject matter as it translates the immigrant experience for a pint-sized audience. But the film ends up being as wobbly and leaky as the boat that ferries Fievel’s family to America. Spielberg’s and Bluth’s hearts are plainly in the right place, which makes you want to like this movie, but unfortunately the film itself doesn’t do enough to earn that affection.