Fox Animation Studios was an American animation production company owned by 20th Century Fox and located in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox Animation. It operated for six years, until the studio was shut down on June 26, 2000, ten days after the release of its final film, Titan A.E.. Most of the Fox Animation Studios library was later acquired by Disney (via 20th Century Studios) on March 20, 2019. Anastasia is the studio's most critically praised and commercially successful film, as well as the most commercially successful film by Don Bluth.

History

Founding

After the financially unsuccessful release of the Don Bluth Entertainment-produced film Thumbelina on March 30, 1994, animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman were hired by Bill Mechanic, then-chairman of 20th Century Fox, to create a brand new Fox animation studio. Mechanic and John Matoian, president of Fox Family Films, also brought in Stephen Brain (Executive VP at Silver Pictures) as Senior VP/General Manager to oversee the startup of the studio and run day-to-day operations of the division. The company was designed to compete with Walt Disney Feature Animation (owned by The Walt Disney Company – which would later acquire certain Fox assets in March 2019, including the rights to Fox Animation Studios' film library), which had phenomenal success during the late 1980s and early 1990s with the releases of films such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994). Disney veterans Bluth and Goldman came in 1994 to Fox from Sullivan Bluth Studios, which had produced The Secret of NIMH (1982), An American Tail (1986), The Land Before Time (1988), and All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), among other films. Before Bluth came to Fox, the studio distributed three animated features during the 1990s which were produced by outside studios – FernGully: The Last Rainforest (1992), Once Upon a Forest (1993) and The Pagemaster (1994), the last two of which were both commercial and critical failures. Even before, Fox distributed Hugo the Hippo (1975) by William Feigenbaum and József Gémes, two Ralph Bakshi features, Wizards (1977) and Fire and Ice (1983), as well as Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (1977) by Richard Williams. Also, Fox distributed Asterix Conquers America (1994) in France and the United Kingdom.

Productions

Fox Animation Studios did not achieve the same level of success as Disney's animated crop, due to increasingly stiff competition from Pixar and DreamWorks Animation with their computer-generated animated films and the declining revenues of the Disney Renaissance. The films used digital ink and paint similar to Disney's CAPS software, more specifically the Toonz software program. The studio's first theatrical release Anastasia (1997) was a critical and box-office success (and was and still is the most successful film by its director Don Bluth), but their second and final theatrical release Titan A.E. (2000) got mixed reviews and was a costly flop, losing $100 million for 20th Century Fox. Nearly a year before its closure, 20th Century Fox laid off 300 of the nearly 380 people who worked at the Phoenix studio in order to "make films more efficiently".

Shutdown and legacy

On June 26, 2000, the studio was shut down after six years of operation, resulting from poor financial returns. Their last film set to be made would have been an adaptation of Wayne Barlowe's illustrated novel Barlowe's Inferno, and was set to be done entirely with computer animation, which would have made it 20th Century Fox's first fully computer animated film, predating Ice Age, which was released in 2002. Another film they would have made was The Little Beauty King, an adult animated film directed by Steve Oedekerk, which would have been a satire of the films from the Disney Renaissance. It would predate DreamWorks' Shrek, which was released in 2001. Fox Animation Studios' only other productions were the PBS television series Adventures from the Book of Virtues (1996–2000) and the direct-to-video spin-off to Anastasia, Bartok the Magnificent (1999), along with sub-contract work for DreamWorks Animation's The Prince of Egypt (1998). Out of all the television shows, sequels and spin-offs based on Don Bluth properties, Bartok was the only one to actually have Bluth and Goldman as directors. The former headquarters for the studio sat unused and abandoned until it was torn down in 2017. An apartment complex was built on the site in 2019. As of March 20, 2019, most of the studio's library is now currently owned by The Walt Disney Company due to its finished acquisition of 21st Century Fox, with the exception of The Prince of Egypt, which is currently owned by Universal Pictures via DreamWorks Animation, and Adventures from the Book of Virtues, which is owned by PBS.

Filmography

Animation service

Cancelled projects