Animation in the Eighties

Faith has been studying immigration, so today we watched "An American Tail."  I hadn't watched it since its theatrical release, as far as I can remember, and was newly horrified at what passed for an animated feature in 1986.  I should have known we weren't in Kansas anymore when they ran all the credits before the movie actually started.  (Remember when they did that?)

Eric: Is it over?
Me: No, it's just starting.
Eric: Then why are there words on the screen?

Flat animation, absent characterization (Why is the father mouse the only one who seems to care when Fievel is lost?  The mother mouse is oddly unemotional about it.), weird visual tropes (Oh, look, Fievel's sticking his tongue out of one side of his mouth; the movie seems to think that's shorthand for 'Look how adorable our mousey hero is.'), lazy writing (the sudden and instant friendship that is embraced by Fievel and the cat voiced by Dom DeLuise) .  And that doesn't even get into the cat who somehow believably disguises himself as a rat.  Shouldn't relative size be a problem?

I remember loving "The Fox and the Hound" when I saw it in theaters.  When it came out on video in 1994, I bought it, eager to revisit it, and found myself bored out of my mind trying to sit through it.  I no longer wonder why I liked it so much as a child, however, if "An American Tail" was symptomatic of its competition. 

(On a side note, what the heck do animators have against cats?  They're always the bad guys in the talking animal movies, even when they don't bizarrely growl and raven like dogs as they do in "An American Tail.")