Wealth & Money Quote by Don Bluth

The sting here is less about a single bad movie and more about how the industry rewrites its own logic whenever it’s convenient. Don Bluth isn’t speaking as a random fan; he’s speaking as the architect of a hand-drawn era that watched its cultural value get measured, then dismissed, by the blunt instrument of box-office math. His bafflement is pointed: if the original didn’t “make money,” why would a sequel exist at all? The question exposes the real answer without stating it outright: because “didn’t make money” often means “didn’t make the kind of money the gatekeepers wanted, on the timeline they demanded.”

The subtext is about ownership and authorship. Bluth’s Secret of NIMH was idiosyncratic, dark, craft-forward - the kind of animated film that builds a long tail of devotion even if it doesn’t explode on opening weekend. A sequel, especially one made without the original creator, becomes a corporate hedge: exploit residual recognition, target the home-video market, sand down the weird edges, and call it “demand.” His incredulity reads like a quiet accusation that passion gets invoked only after the fact, once the rights are there and the risk is lower.

Context matters: Bluth’s career was a counterargument to Disney complacency, built on the belief that animation could be intense, ornate, and emotionally sharp. The sequel represents the opposite impulse - content as product maintenance. His “I cannot explain” isn’t confusion; it’s a refusal to dignify a cynical equation with an artist’s rationale.