YMMV / An American Tail

• All Animation Is Disney: As is the case with a lot of Don Bluth movies (though to be a bit fair, he did work for Disney studios before going on his own independent route). This is not helped by the fact that An American Tail and its sequels were regular showings on Disney Channel and Toon Disney, or that it has an Award-Bait Song similar to the ones that Disney became so well-known for in subsequent years. The closest thing to it being Disney is that many of the animators once worked there. The film was even pitched to Disney, but they rejected the idea that a Jewish fable would make good box-office and dropped it.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation: Tiger's claim to have had three fathers. Was it just him being a buffoon? Were some of his littermates half-siblings with different fathers? Or were there three tomcats who acted as father figures?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The Statue of Liberty's golden copper color in the film wasn't just artistic license; when the statue was first built it really was that color. It slowly oxidized to its current green color over subsequent decades.
• Angst Aversion: The film is notorious for being a bleak, depressing slog of Fievel and his family repeatedly just missing each other while you’re begging them to just look in another direction. This makes an ending that would typically scream Sweetness Aversion into the only conceivable satisfying end that the story could have.
• Animation Age Ghetto: Siskel & Ebert's complaint about the movie was that it was too dark and depressing for children to handle, though they said the same thing about every Don Bluth movie. It still did very well at the box office regardless.
• Award Snub: It can be contested as to whether or not "Somewhere Out There"—be it for the version Fievel and Tanya sing or the finale one with Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram—should've gotten Best Original Song over the actual winner: "Take My Breath Away" from Top Gun.
• Awesome Music:
  • "Somewhere Out There" is the film's Signature Scene for a reason.
  • James Horner's orchestration sets the tone of the film (and the first sequel; see below) quite nicely. In some places, it's hard to believe it was written for an animated film. Horner would win a Grammy Award, his first major statuette, for the score.
  • The Ethereal Choir that sings the words to "The New Colossus" when Fievel sees his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty has been known to inspire chills.
• Base-Breaking Character: Some love Fievel for being a charming and realistically-written little kid, while others see him as annoying and dumb.
• Complete Monster: Warren T. Cat, the greedy leader of the Mott Street Maulers, holds the downtrodden mice of New York in a chokehold, forcing them to pay him off under the guise of "Warren T. Rat" while secretly having his cats pick off a mouse every once in a while to keep them terrified and under control. When Warren stumbles upon the innocent, lost Fievel Mousekewitz in his introductory scene, Warren manipulates him into his clutches and then tosses him to the hold of a cruel sweatshop for a quick fifty cents, sneering "you don't need a family anymore—you got a job!" When the mice finally stand up to Warren's manipulations, Warren simply decides to cut his losses and tries to burn them all alive with a sick laugh.
• Critical Dissonance: Got mixed reception when it was first released, with many critics believing that the plot and characterization wasn't very good. Despite this, it ended up making a lot of money at the box office and out-grossing every animated film ever up to that point.
• Ending Fatigue: The climactic defeat of the cats and Warren would seem to be the perfect setting for the finale, but it's actually just the set up for the Darkest Hour as Fievel narrowly misses his family again and doesn't properly reunite with them until about 10 minutes of runtime later (which feels a lot longer).
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Tiger, enough to where he plays a huge part in the sequel while being minor in the first film.
  • For a time, the Irish mouse who sings during "There Are No Cats In America," despite only having two lines and no name, had an entire subset of the fandom dedicated to him!
  • Bridget. Three guesses as to why.
• First Installment Wins: Though there was a stretch during the nineties where Fievel Goes West was equally as well-known, due to being a decent film with a simple genre hook, and even had a spin-off TV series. Since then, it's slipped back below the original in terms of popularity, even being subjected to Canon Discontinuity in another sequel which says it was All Just a Dream.
• Friendly Fandoms: Fans of this movie are generally on good terms with fans of The Great Mouse Detective even though they were Dueling Movies. The popular Olivia/Fievel Crossover Ship is probably a testament to that. Fans of this movie are also part of the greater Bluth fandom and generally get along with fans of other Bluth movies, too.
• Genius Bonus:
  • When Tiger tearfully mentions that he lost his family, which consisted of 5 brothers, 10 sisters, and 3 fathers. A mother cat's litter can be fathered by more than one tomcat.
  • The Irish mouse specifically notes that the cat that killed his love was a calico. In other words, she was killed by a Black and Tan.
  • Warren's Shakespeare quote just before he sells Fievel to a sweatshop, "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of Earth, / That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!" comes from Julius Caesar, specifically Antony's lament over Caesar's dead body after he was betrayed by Brutus (III, i). Meaning it was a clue that Warren was about to betray Fievel.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Universal Studios at least seems to be under this impression for the series as a whole, making a lot of merchandise and home video releases exclusively available in Europe and not America, in a weird inverted example of No Export for You. DVD releases of the short-lived spinoff series Fievel's American Tails, as well as an odd PlayStation 2 video game adaptation of the first film, were only released in Europe. The first film did do extremely well overseas, so perhaps there is reasoning behind this.
• Genre Turning Point: Before this movie (going as far back as the films of Max and Dave Fleischer,Gulliver's Travels and Mr. Bug Goes to Town), non-Disney American studios making full-length animated features had been tantamount to burning money. The scant handful of exceptions were tied to Merchandise-Driven Cash Cow Franchises (e.g. The Care Bears Movie) or No Budget affairs aimed at adults (e.g. Ralph Bakshi films like Fritz the Cat). This move shattered box office records and was the first to truly challenge Disney in both box office gross and aritstry, paving the way for future non-Disney animated films to find great success.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Try to watch this movie the same way after watching Don Bluth being interviewed by Doug Walker, where he admits the film was heavily inspired by his rarely seeing his numerous siblings anymore, as well as how his marriage to his work, while he isn't ashamed of it, forced him to forego any kind of family of his own.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the (human) Cossacks shown taking part in the pogrom at the beginning looks a lot like Bluth's take on Rasputin.
  • The film was originally going to be a World of Funny Animals like Robin Hood (1973), but it was reworked into a Mouse World due to the belief that films in those kinds of settings don't do well at the box office. Thirty years later, Disney did another film with that kind of setting, which ended up being one of the highest-grossing animated films of all time.
• Iconic Character, Forgotten Title:
  • The movie is sometimes mistakenly called "Fievel". That the sequel does have Fievel's name in the title likely doesn't help.
  • Interestingly, in most other countries Fievel's name is in the title. Take Germany's Feivel Der Mauswanderer (Fievel the Mouse Wanderer), Spain's Fievel Y El Nuevo Mundo or France's Fievel et le Nouveau Monde (Fievel and the New World), for instance.
• Inferred Holocaust: None of the villains in the movie are vanquished. The Cossack cats are supposedly still terrorizing Russia, several child mice are still left in the abusive sweatshop, and while the New York cats are driven away, they quickly shrug off their defeat, noting they can just set up business in Hong Kong, making apparent the protagonists didn't stop the problem so much as moved it.
• Jerkass Woobie: The three orphan bullies, if you stop and think about it. They were lost just like Fievel and they had long accepted that they would never see their families again (and a line from one of them implies that some of them never even knew their families to begin with). At the same time, they push around any other kids like them and look out for themselves rather than help other orphans out.
• Jerks Are Worse Than Villains: The three orphan bullies (If you don't count them as villains) are even more hated by the movie’s fans than Warren T. Rat, who at least had his comical moments.
• Misaimed Marketing: Infamously, if unintentionally (one would hope), done by McDonald's. One of their special promotions tied into the film's winter release was a special offer involving Fievel... Christmas stockings and tree ornaments, despite Fievel being obviously Jewish. The Anti-Defamation League was not pleased.
• Narm Charm:
  • Fievel and Tanya singing "Somewhere Out There", with their little mouse voices cracking when they hit the high notes. To some it might be annoying, but to others, it's so cuuute! Some, however, find it annoying because it's so cute!
  • Gussie Mausheimer's "Wewease....ze secwet...WEAPON!!" Said secret weapon makes up the page image for this work's Nightmare Fuel page.
• One-Scene Wonder: Moe. He's onscreen for less than a minute and has only two lines, but his appearance makes a pretty effective and memorable Jump Scare and he's regarded as one of the scariest characters in the whole movie.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: In 2007, the movie actually got a video game tie-in developed by Data Design Interactive (a notorious shovelware developer). The game is atrocious, suffering from poor graphics, bad controls, music recycled from DDI's other appalling video games (such as Anubis II and Ninjabread Man, just to name a few), and the gameplay itself consists of generic and repetitive mini-games. It also wasn't released outside of Europe. Lucky them.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: "Somewhere Out There" is similar to "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz.
• Values Resonance: Considering the film is about an immigrant family trying to make a life for themselves in America and facing discrimination, as these themes become more timely in the 21st century where immigration is a hot button political issue.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Tony has a female voice actress and is a rare male example of Furry Female Mane, so it's inevitable that there'd be a little gender confusion for some. Not helping is that his name is pronounced exactly the same as "Toni", a girl's name. Though a female character having such blatant Les Yay with Bridget would be pretty unheard of in an animated movie today, let alone in 1986.
• Vindicated by History: The film received mixed reviews when it first came out, including a dreaded "Two Thumbs Down" from Siskel & Ebert. However, airings on TV and the love and respect of a generation who grew up with the film have elevated it to minor classic status, with many considering it one of the best (if not the overall best) films made by Don Bluth.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: 19th century Russia: A Jewish family's house is burned down in a pogrom, forcing them to flee to America. During their voyage, a storm strikes the ship and the family's young son is swept overboard and presumed dead. But he survives and ends up on the mean streets of New York, facing all kinds of dangers, at one point sold to a sweatshop by a villain pretending to help him, and all the while trying in vain to find his family, who mourns his "death" and faces the same kind of oppression they thought they were escaping. The only thing that makes this a kids' movie is the fact that it's an animated musical starring anthropomorphic mice.
• The Woobie: Fievel. The poor kid was knocked off the boat he and his family were on and was washed up on the shores of New York. He doesn't have the first clue about where his family could be, but he does what he can to find them. Along the way, he meets a cat disguised as a rat who sells him to a sweatshop and is later captured by him once he learns about his dirty secret. He encounters several dangers along the way, nearly getting killed on a couple of occasions. Not once during his journey does he see his family and is let down when he thinks that he found his family only to be proven otherwise. Near the end, he tearfully gives up on finding his family, believing that they don't care about him.

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