Irish Heat: Don Bluth, Takes On King Disney : As a new golden age of animation appears to be dawning, an American expatriate once again issues a feature that will go head-to-head with his former employer’s holiday release.But can he really hope to vanquish the studio that wrote the book?

“If I become human, I’ll never be with my father or sisters again,” says the mermaid on the screen.

“That’s right,” says the sea witch Ursula, “but you’ll have your man.”

On the word man, this flamboyant octopus villainess leers like Jack Nicholson--and no wonder. Disney animator Kathy Zielinski fell in love with Nicholson’s leer when she saw “The Witches of Eastwick,” analyzed the movement of muscles and flash of eyes that produce it, and adapted them to a sinister sea creature’s countenance. Such a leer is not only appropriate to a fairy-tale villain; it gives the scene the spark of personality by which animated features live or die.

Disney animation returns to its classic fairy-tale roots for the first time in 30 years with the release of Walt Disney Pictures’ 28th animated feature, “The Little Mermaid,” based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fantasy of a beautiful young mermaid who risks her life for love of a human being. With its score by composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman (“Little Shop of Horrors”), this fairy tale also has the sound of 1980s-style musical theater.

When Walt Disney died in 1966, his studio hadn’t animated a fairy tale in seven years--since “Sleeping Beauty” in 1959. Walt’s late brother and partner, Roy, who died in 1971, was determined to rebuild the animation department as the great story artists and animators of Walt’s day retired, but no one foresaw that it would be another 23 years before the Disneys’ studio would return to the film form that Walt invented in 1937 with “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”--the classic fairy tale retold as a feature-length animated cartoon.

During the 1980s, ironically, there has been a revival of interest in, and enjoyment of, musical theater based on fairy tales. Stephen Sondheim’s musical, “Into the Woods,” Rudolf Nureyev’s version of Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” for the Paris Opera and American Ballet Theatre’s “Sleeping Beauty” have all enjoyed success in recent years. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has written that the most obvious reason for the revival “is a pleasure derived from happy memories of childhood experiences that can now be enjoyed in an adult manner.” For many adults, of course, those happy memories are actually of Disney versions of fairy tales.

The reason that the Disney studio stayed away from its most favored genre for so long, however, was that Disney’s new breed of animation artists didn’t feel ready to risk comparison with the great animation team of Walt’s day.

Now, however, the team that the Disney studio began recruiting in the 1970s feels that its grasp of the essential skills of personality animation is firm enough to challenge the happy memories of childhood experience of the Disney versions of “Snow White” or “Cinderella” (1950).

“We recognized the need to give the new generation time to grow,” said Peter Schneider, senior vice president of feature animation at Disney. “The group that came here in the late ‘70s have finally come into their own. They are out of the shadow of the Nine Old Men, the animation team of Walt’s day.”

The path out of that shadow was strewn with boulder-sized difficulties, however. Twelve of the first post-Walt group of young animators at Disney, who had shared credit with the “Snow White” veterans on “The Aristocats” (1970), “Robin Hood” (1973) and “The Rescuers” (1977), left the studio about one-third of the way through production of “The Fox and the Hound”--causing it to come out in 1981, at least a year later than planned. (Although these were animated films, they were not based on classic fairy tales in the Disney tradition.)

The rebels walked out, led by animating director Don Bluth, in a dispute over control with Ron Miller, Walt Disney’s son-in-law, who had been a member of the committee that ran the studio after Walt’s death. Miller became company president in 1980 and chairman in 1983. In 1984, after the Walt Disney Co. was nearly broken into pieces by two separate takeover threats from financiers, the board forced Miller’s resignation. Bluth and most of his original group now have their own studio in Dublin. Two have returned to Disney.

Last Thanksgiving, when Disney released its 27th animated feature, “Oliver and Company,” which is Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” acted out by dogs and cats in modern-day New York, Universal Pictures released Bluth’s “Land Before Time” the same week. The Disney film stands as the motion picture industry’s all-time highest-grossing animated feature on its first release, yet it did only slightly better than Bluth’s film.

Of the competition, Schneider says: “We hold the ‘more gas stations’ theory. If you put one gas station at a four corners and it does good business, you can put a gas station at each of the four corners, and they’ll all do good business.” “Oliver” and “Land,” he noted, made about $100 million.

The catch is that to succeed, each of the competing animated features must possess the qualities that Walt Disney discovered were essential for any financially successful animated feature. This has led to what might be called “personality wars.”

“ ‘Our most important aim is to develop definite personalities in our cartoon characters,’ Walt Disney told me in 1951, just after the big box-office success of his version of ‘Cinderella’ brought happy days back to Disney animation,” said Schneider. “ ‘Until a character becomes a personality,’ Walt said, ‘it can’t be believed, and you have to believe in these animated stories.’ ”

“In ‘Little Mermaid,’ we have a very powerful theme,” Schneider continued. “It’s that we have to learn to give up our children, to let them be free to do what they want to do--to let them make their own mistakes even though we yearn to protect them. That’s universal. But we strive to express this theme through memorable characters.”

Since Jeffrey Katzenberg took over as the chairman of Walt Disney Productions in 1984, he has demonstrated both in live action (“Good Morning, Vietnam”) and animation that his strong suit is storytelling. Katzenberg and Michael D. Eisner, the chairman of the Walt Disney Co., were brought in by Roy E. Disney, vice chairman and--as the son of Walt’s brother and partner, Roy--a major stockholder. Roy E. Disney gave them the job of turning around a company whose greatest defect seemed to be that it had lost the storytelling knack that made it great in the first place.

“For this company,” Katzenberg said at the time, “animation has a value that is way beyond the specific profits that you measure for a film itself. We create new characters, and these characters will come to life in our theme parks and in our merchandising, so they have a longevity and a value to many other aspects of this corporation that are totally unique.”

Roy E. Disney, Eisner and Katzenberg were agreed that the studio’s 1984 “The Black Cauldron,” the first new animated feature to fail at the box office since Walt’s death, didn’t work because it had a weak story enacted by characters that did not compel belief.

As soon as they took over, they reviewed what had been done on “The Great Mouse Detective,” agreed that the story was slow getting started, and that it would have to be done over before animation could begin.

They also decreed that the animation department must increase its output from a feature every three years to one every year, and that the cost of each feature must drop from the approximately $30 million spent on “The Black Cauldron” into the $10-million range.

Gradually, they have gotten on schedule. Eighteen months elapsed between the releases of “The Great Mouse Detective” and “Oliver & Company,” but “The Little Mermaid” is out only a year later, to be followed, they insist, by “The Rescuers Down Under” in 1990, “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991, and “Aladdin” in 1992. In the next five months, they will also schedule an animated feature for release in 1993, Schneider said.

The cost of “The Little Mermaid,” however, is said to be twice as much as the $10-million range they projected in 1986.

At the moment, though, Disney’s management is sanguine about this because the increasing experience of the animation team is obviously paying off. “The Great Mouse Detective” cost $12.8 million and has grossed about $25 million in the United States and Canada, and “Oliver & Company,” the domestic record-setter, is expected to do well in its foreign release this Christmas, though no character in either film has caught the public fancy as has the title character and his wife in last year’s hit “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Produced in London by Disney and Steven Spielberg and using a number of Disney artists, this combination animation and live-action film won an Oscar for its animation director, Richard Williams, for the creation of Roger and Jessica Rabbit.

The impetus for making “The Little Mermaid” was Ron Clements, a member of Disney’s feature animation division since 1974. Clements worked with Bluth on “The Rescuers” but stayed when the Bluth group left.

As a teen-ager, Clements, formerly of Sioux City, Iowa, had single-handedly animated a 15-minute feature called “Shades of Sherlock Holmes.” This student film helped get him a job at Disney and also served as the inspiration for “The Great Mouse Detective,” about a Sherlock Holmes-like mouse, which Clements wrote and directed with John Musker. Musker, formerly of Chicago, came to the studio in 1977.

Clements’ initial, structure-oriented presentation of “The Little Mermaid” was soon being “plussed,” as Walt Disney used to say, by colorful details and sight gags by Musker. Both artists share a gift for creating characters with definite personalities to flesh out their stories. So, just as Walt Disney’s artists surrounded Cinderella with a cat and mice who became Jacques, Gus-Gus, and Lucifer, the new team surrounded the mermaid with a fish friend named Flounder, an unselfish shellfish called Sebastian (voice by Sam Wright of “The Tapdance Kid”), a silly sea gull named Scuttle (voice by comedian Buddy Hackett), and the evil eels, Flotsam and Jetsam.

There is also, of course, the villainous Ursula, whose contralto growl is supplied by Pat Carroll, fondly remembered by Clements and Musker as Bunny Halper on TV’s “The Danny Thomas Show.” Her propulsion across the painted sea floor, however, is the work of Ruben Aquino, one of the film’s six directing animators. Aquino studied the live-action footage of octopuses taken by Jacques-Yves Cousteau.

“The tentacles flare out and then they push off against the water--at which point they bring all the tentacles together quickly; then they have this tube that they squirt water out--so it’s like a very powerful jet propulsion.” To the eyes of Aquino, the movement had a “sinister quality,” so he exaggerated it into the quintessential movement of an ominous octopus.

In “The Little Mermaid,” producer-director-writer Musker and director-writer Clements put their directing animators in charge of characters rather than sequences, as in “Snow White,” for example.

Ariel, the little mermaid herself, required two directing animators. Glen Keane, who animated the bear-hound fight in “The Fox and the Hound,” is noted for his innovative character designs, so he was asked to make Ariel look different from earlier Disney heroines, and to oversee the animation of the song that defines her, “Part of Your World.” Keane conceived her movements under the inspiration of a photograph of his wife.

Elsewhere in the studio, as the production got into full swing, the other directing animators were trying to make their characters the stars of the show. Mark Henn was animating Ariel quarreling with her father Triton, animated by Andreas Deja; Dunkan Marjoribanks was animating the crab Sebastian as he sings an undersea calypso song.

According to Clements, the competition between Disney and Bluth has resulted in livelier animation at both studios. “The quality level is up because you feel that if you let down, somebody else is going to take over the mantle.”