Jordan White - An American Tail (1986) 35th Anniversary Panel with T. Daniel Hofstedt (Animator)

Steven Spielberg's first foray into the animation field turns 35 this year, and since he's more of a producer than a director as people were coming to him to get ideas made back in the 1980s, he turned to Disney veteran Don Bluth for the directing duties, as he was bringing back the classic style that Disney ditched, and Don Bluth's success started to get people noticing, so Don Bluth's second film was An American Tail with Steven Spielberg.

Don Bluth was not taking interviews, John Pomeroy was teaching an all day masterclass on the same day, I didn't know if Gary Goldman would respond, and Mark Christiansen only freelanced on the film for a few months. Instead, I'm talking to character animator T. Daniel Hofstedt, and this was his first big feature film break. Time does fly for him, and he did offer some excellent lessons that can apply to more than just an animation career. He was able to double check his animation on analog tape based systems without digital assistance before people started using digitizer tablets for animation, or in layman's terms, CG.

He also is a teacher of animation himself.

Spielberg's first entry in the animation art form may as well have been one of the seeds that the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s and later, Dreamworks. It showed that a non-Disney produced feature could deliver heart and warmth and emotion just as well as the Mouse House themselves, and to execs, bigger box office returns.