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tenjad129 · 5 months ago

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The Dream-Quest of Tanya Mousekewitz

WARNING: This is a modified repost of an old blog post from my now-deleted UlyssesBobMac tumblr account, and so, proceed with caution or something...

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, young and old, this may seem a very unusual procedure speaking to all of you in a very long while...

But with all four Funko Pop figures from An American Tail of Fievel (pictured), Papa, and Fievel's cat friend Tiger coming on my very doorstep this month, followed by a Funko Pop figure of the Fievel Goes West version of Fievel's sister Tanya (also pictured) coming on my doorstep this coming November , I have this most unusual subject to discuss with all of you:

Now, my appreciation sometimes for the beautiful, the pretty, and the lovely in any kind or type of animated character (whether 2D hand drawn or traditional stop motion animation in the past or especially 3D CGI in more recent times) may have reportedly been stoked maybe when I was a little boy, or perhaps even during some kind of long ago day care screening of one of the lesser known non-Disney animated classics of the early 1990s, An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, which would be Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells' 1991 Amblimation-produced sequel to Don Bluth's original 1986 An American Tail film.

While everyone else teared up over the late great James Stewart's last performance (as the voice of the cowboy dog Wylie Burp) -- "one man's sunset is another man's dawn" as he will put it just before the end credits....

And while just about everyone else was roaring about the antics and humorous exploits of Fievel's cat friend Tiger (voiced by the equally late Dom DeLuise, who also voiced Dee Dee's imaginary friend Koosy in Genndy Tartakovsky's Dexter's Laboratory)…

Even now, I was mostly enthralled, especially nowadays by this nine minute long segment that occurred between about 44 minutes and about 53 minutes within the 75-minute movie itself:

Now, This sequence, occurring as it was between 44 and 53 minutes into the 75 minute long An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, takes viewers into the world, and especially the dream world, as well as the fulfillment of the 'epic dream-quest', if you will, of Fievel's older sister Tanya Mousekewitz (the Fievel Goes West version of whom some certain Don Bluth fans still can't stop complaining about for not getting along very well with her brother, who happened to be Fievel himself).

In the beginning of the sequence, after a villainous cat dropped Fievel (who ends up being trapped in a wine bottle by T.R. Chula the Spider-Man thingy)...

(Hold it RIGHT there, Catty Are Waul!)

Said cat -- Cat R. Waul, who happened to be voiced by John Cleese of Monty Python fame -- discovers Tanya the mouse girl singing the beautiful and lovely song 'Dreams to Dream' (through the combined singing and music scoring talents of The Powerpuff Girls' Blossom's original voice actress, Cathy Cavadini and the late great movie music composer James Horner) to herself while doing chores for her family, The Mousekewitzes...

Just before she sings and dances with a paintbrush before singing and dancing with Cat R. Waul's front paw...

Very beautiful song, isn't it? Anyway, Cat R. Waul took Tanya back into the Green River Saloon that he happen to run, and presents Tanya to Tiger's cat girlfriend Miss [Sophia] Kitty (voiced by Amy Irving, Steven Spielberg's already-divorced wife at the time)…

After an argument between Miss Sophia Kitty and Cat R. Waul, Miss Kitty then comforts the frightened Tanya...

Before allowing her to fulfill her epic dream quest to sing a song or two to the whole entire world, and that is when Tanya gets a very beautiful, lovely, pretty, and VERY stunning saloon show girl makeover:

But after Cat R. Waul finally gets to introduce Tanya on the saloon dance hall stage, she is frightened a little bit...

But Miss Kitty pushes her anyway to the front of the stage, where all the cats booed her very presence...

And this is when Tanya summons up the courage to let a very BIG, LOUD, glass-breaking HIGH singing note fly out of her singing mouth to get everyone's attention while at one point the camera zooms into the inside of her singing mouth....

While unintentionally freeing her little brother from the wine bottle that he's trapped in for most of the segment, of course!

And then, while Chula chases Fievel around the saloon, Tanya finally does a catchy song and dance performance called The Girl You Left Behind, another song that Cathy Cavadini contributed to the Fievel Goes West soundtrack in collaboration with James Horner, and also known as The Girl I Left Behind according to the film’s official end credits roll.

Alas, the spell that Tanya's saloon performance had just cast on even me is soon broken, when, at the end of that nine minute long scene from Fievel Goes West, Tanya rejects Fievel's pleas for her to escape with him from the saloon, and after fetching Fievel a note to read ("Thanks for the adoration..."), was almost last seen in the movie when she pulled away from him and dances away from Fievel after kissing the public away, leaving him devastated before an intricate fadeout or perhaps even a slow and intricate dissolve to later that night...

And that was when they switched all the way over to Fievel and Wylie Burp training Fievel's cat friend Tiger to be a dog. (Although Tanya did return to simply warn the mice crowd and the Mousekewitz family that they are on a mouse trap, only to disappear after removing her saloon showgirl makeup and melt and disappear into the celebrating, dancing mice crowd after the mice declares victory against the cat gang of Green River, Utah, just before Jimmy Stewart's last performance as Wylie Burp doing his last speech to Fievel before the end credits).

So it REALLY dawned on me that many fans of An American Tail (1986), or anything else that Don Bluth himself had ever worked on or even involved in, thought that the makers and writers of its notorious 1991 Don Bluth-less sequel, Fievel Goes West, including writers Charles Swenson and Flint Doyle as well as directors Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells were very unfair to the character of Tanya as well as the relationship between Fievel Mousekewitz (voiced by Phillip Glasser) and his sister Tanya (voiced in Fievel Goes West by The Powerpuff Girls' Blossom's voice actress Cathy Cavadini), and not just because there wasn't enough scenes of Tanya in Fievel Goes West itself, but it's probably because since the writers and makers of An American Tail: Fievel Goes West fear that the original Don Bluth film's signature song 'Somewhere Out There' was way too sappy for 1990s audiences at the time, they ultimately ended up having something something very different in the place of Fievel and Tanya's more tightly knit relationship in the original Don Bluth-involved film of An American Tail, and unfortunately for many fans, something much more argumentative a brother and sister relationship, like the kind that one sees in a whole lot of movies and television shows that were made in the 1990s at the time, and it still seemed to them to be something of a ruinous trick, and still does strike some AAT fans as being something of a VERY ruinous trick, certainly as far as what the makers and writers of Fievel Goes West did to Tanya as well as Fievel and Tanya's sibling bond with each other.

And so, there had always been, and always would be some unfair complaints about the Fievel Goes West version of An American Tail's Tanya: Not just because there wasn't enough scenes of her in FGW, but also because her wish and goal and motivation to be an actress and/or a singer was much stronger than Fievel's to the point that she ends up arguing with and ignoring her own little brother altogether. And it was Fievel Goes West that branded Fievel and Tanya's sibling relationship forever!

Also, the female characters in the American Tail franchise (or especially any character who is either not named or other than Fievel or his cat buddy Tiger), like the Don Bluth original film's Bridget, for example, were at their very best memorable especially from afar and at their very worst passive if just plain marginal, just like Tanya herself!

Damn, I always wanted, and just once, for Tanya to actually, really reconcile with, as well as forgive and even apologize to Fievel for not getting along very well with him most of the time in Fievel Goes West!

But still, the beautiful, lovely, pretty, gorgeous, and stunning image of Tanya Mousekewitz, sister of An American Tail's Fievel himself, clad as she was in her saloon showgirl outfit, makeup, and eye shading, and so vividly, so beautifully, so subtly to life by a team lead by Dutch-born animation artist Rob Stevenhagen (who, along with co-directors Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells and character designer Uli Meyer had also previously worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Richard Williams and for Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg back in 1988), was still burned into my memory even to this very day and age.

Now, the subplot in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West that involves Fievel's sister Tanya Mousekewitz and her epic dream-quest to sing a song or two to the whole, entire world at large, even in a saloon and dance hall pack full of kitty cats, was now my most favorite part from An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991) itself, for a few reasons:

1) First of all, I thought what Tanya first sang in the fully excerpted nine minute sequence posted above (the aforementioned Dreams to Dream as sung by Cathy Cavadini for the movie) is guaranteed to REALLY TOUCH my own heart all the way down to its very core (just as Cavadini's song demo of Dreams to Dream did to the aforementioned James Horner's, so much so in fact, that he successfully persuaded one of the movie's producers, Steven Spielberg, to hire Cathy Cavadini as the new voice of Tanya in Fievel Goes West, though, according to Cavadini herself, Tanya was already voiced for that movie by somebody else replacing Amy Green, the original voice of Tanya in the Don Bluth movie).

2) Secondly, I thought that 'this (Tanya singing Dreams to Dream as well as her pretty saloon girl dress and makeup and her subsequent saloon dance hall singing and dancing performance) has got to be the loveliest and most beautifully stunning (if one of) things or scenes that I have ever, EVER seen outside of Disney's 1990s Renaissance revival, and not long before the rise of the Toy Story studio PIXAR or even Spielberg's own DreamWorks Animation (the latter now being famous and legendary as the studio behind the Shrek films)!'

3) The third thing I thought was "I hope someday, Fievel's sister Tanya could take center stage in her very own story (or at least especially one outside of that one subplot involving her within Fievel Goes West)!"

and especially...

4) Finally, and last but not least, the fourth thing is that, given my reaction even when watching An American Tail: Fievel Goes West especially as a child myself, I REALLY and always wanted Fievel and Tanya Mousekewitz (or the Fievel Goes West incarnations or designs of both characters, in particular) to end up fixing and reconciling their tightly knit sibling bond sometime beyond the events of Fievel Goes West itself even after not getting along well by the end of that 75 minute long cartoon movie from the early 90s. And it would still seem that I always sympathized with both Fievel as well as the version of Tanya as she appeared in Fievel Goes West itself, a sort of sentiment that some or many fans of the American Tail movies hopefully shares with me. And in a way, and even though I must still have to make my lifelong dream movie epic entirely my very own, my lifelong dream movie epic idea and project, though I still don't know what may be its ultimate name, shape and form yet, should also be my very own way of making such a childhood or even lifelong wish come true one day, even if, in so many other ways, my lifelong dream movie epic project and ideas should also especially be a sort of reboot of An American Tail: Fievel Goes West itself (even if it may come complete with similar visual character or creature designs to Amblimation's design variations for An American Tail: Fievel Goes West on the Don Bluth-type animated cartoon mouse character designs as they were visually depicted in now classic stuff such as Don Bluth's work on The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail) , among many other inspirations and influences on me and the movie epic of my lifelong dreams, though, again, I still don't know what its ultimate name, shape and form should really be!

I mean, I also liked the Fievel Goes West character redesign of Tanya (the art of which comes complete with two tufts of brown hair at the front, and a GREAT BIG brown, furry ponytail sticking from the back of her head) more than the incarnation of her with the Eastern European headscarf in the Don Bluth-involved original.

Now, to be fully truthful, saying that Fievel Goes West lives not only in the shadow of Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) but also in the shadow of Don Bluth's Original American Tail as far as even the American Tail franchise goes may well be a VERY big understatement of facts.

The cinematic and animation worlds seems to be divided into two different camps: those for whom every frame of animation art featuring Fievel of An American Tail fame should be enshrined in some golden vault or even some kind of golden archive, and those for whom Steven Spielberg presented and produced for us all around the world the first two American Tail films (both the Don Bluth original and especially the Amblimation-produced Fievel Goes West) as well as the original 1988 Land Before Time movie (with Don Bluth as well as with Star Wars creator George Lucas) and only the respective original films of An American Tail and The Land Before Time are [STILL] worth remembering.

As usual, the truth may lie somewhere in the very middle in between. Was everything starring American Tail's Fievel the mouse or Land Before Time's little sauropod dinosaur protagonist Littlefoot all that good or great? No, not always quite.

Were the original American Tail and Land Before Time films from Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg (and plus, in the case of the first Land Before Time movie itself, Star Wars creator George Lucas) the only worthy films ever to come out of their entire respective franchises? No, not at all!

But anyway, yes, it is true that after Bluth's breakup from Spielberg over the latter's interference on the former's work on Land Before Time, things started to become progressively tough for both Don Bluth himself and Steven Spielberg's VERY own theatrical big screen animation production and presentation output, and that An American Tail: Fievel Goes West is admittedly still notorious in so many Hollywood circles and especially among the Don Bluth fandom for lacking in the dramatic or nightmarish soul and spirit that everyone had come to know and love about the original 1986 Don Bluth American Tail (in fact, some thought Fievel Goes West to be way too wacky, way too comedic, and especially, way too lighthearted in tone) and the fact that, as a box office failure coming and going in the shadow of Disney's 1991 animated Best Picture Oscar nominee, Beauty and the Beast, it contributed to the eventual decline or downfall of Steven Spielberg's cartoon animation production and presentation output (despite the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit three years earlier, and a further three years on from Fievel Goes West itself, Spielberg cofounding DreamWorks with David Geffen and ex-Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg 30 years ago in 1994), but actually, Fievel Goes West will always and forever be best remembered perhaps for featuring Jimmy Stewart's last performance (as the voice of the aforementioned Wylie Burp), and it certainly is not as terrible, bad, or insulting as the critics and reviewers of the time would label it.

But anyway...

WHAT are your own memories of and also your own opinion on Tanya Mousekewitz and her quest to sing a song (or two) in Fievel Goes West?

P.S. PLEASE just try and be safe from all that Hurricane Milton chaos down there, ladies and gentlemen, if you happen to be somewhere down in Florida...

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