Bluth, Goldman and Pomeroy had been working on their own animation project in Bluth's Culver City, California garage for five years before bolting Disney. On their own, they put themselves on a crash course to finish it, and the 30-minute "Banjo, the Woodpile Cat", which eventually aired on ABC in 1982, won them critical praise and served as a resume that got them an assignment to animate a two-minute musical sequence for the feature "Xanadu" (1980). With the nicely textured "The Secret of NIMH" (1982), based on the Newberry Award-winning children's book "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N*I*M*H", Don Bluth Productions showed it could compete with Disney, but the picture disappeared quickly from theaters, despite rave reviews, when MGM failed to promote it. After a second film project dissolved during the 1982 animators' strike, the Bluth team jumped at the chance to animate interactive video arcade games for the San Diego-based Cinematronics company.
Bluth and his people designed the groundbreaking video games "Dragon's Lair" and "Space Age" before the bottom fell out of the arcade market and stopped their cash flow dead. Though Don Bluth Productions would go bankrupt, a semi-retired mergers and acquisitions broker named Morris Sullivan entered the picture as their "guardian angel", providing the sorely-needed business savvy to keep the new Sullivan Bluth Studios solvent. Sullivan would be the impetus behind their move to Ireland to take advantage of that country's lower production costs and government incentives for the arts. Impressed with "The Secret of NIMH", Steven Spielberg also came to Bluth about this time with the idea that became "An American Tail" (1986), but after the success of it and the subsequent "The Land Before Time" (1988), both released through Universal Pictures, Sullivan Bluth severed its connections with Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, passing on the opportunity to do the animation for "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988), which would have put them back on the Disney payroll.
The next two features from Sullivan Bluth, "All Dogs Go to Heaven" (1989) and "Rock-a-Doodle" (1991), fared worse than the pair with Amblin had, and the studio declared bankruptcy. The company eventually became the property of Rupert Murdoch, and Bluth's sixth feature (and first one sharing directorial credit with Goldman), "Hans Christian Andersen's Thumbelina" (1994) came out under Warner Bros' 'Family Entertainment' banner. "The Pebble and the Penguin" (1995) was the last gasp from Ireland, but the 1994 deal Bluth and Goldman signed with 20th Century Fox promised deeper pockets and another opportunity to go toe-to-toe with Disney. Grafting warm and family-film motifs onto turbulent aspects of modern history and mythology, Bluth-Goldman brought forth the anxiously-awaited debut offering from Fox Animation, "Anastasia" (1997). Though certainly a cut below the best of Disney, it grossed more than either "An American Tail" or "The Land Before Time", establishing a nice little beachhead for further attacks on the behemoth.
Basically an animation traditionalist to this point, Bluth had favored old-fashioned children's stories, naturalistic character movement and uplifting values. Rather than concocting new recipes for success, his "Disney-Lite" had offered solid animation with thriftier techniques, hampered by weaker characters, storytelling and songs. Fox Animation's next move was a cautious one, releasing "Bartok the Magnificent" (1999, a prequel to "Anastasia") straight-to-video, but perhaps they were just marking time before their ambitious attempt to win over a teenage audience. Moving away from kiddie fare, Bluth and Goldman picked up where they had left off with their innovative video game "Space Age", embracing "cutting-edge" sci-fi animation for "Titan A.E." (2000). This meant a departure from their more traditional work as 65 percent of the movie was CGI (computer generated imagery). Set in the 31st century, "Titan" boasted an over-the-edge rock-and-roll score underneath the action, which Fox hoped would help them capture a niche wholly separate from the Disney audience.