WILL FIEVEL AND TANYA MOUSEKEWITZ OF AN AMERICAN TAIL FAME EVER ACTUALLY REPAIR THEIR LOVING SIBLING BOND SOMEDAY, OR MAYBE NOT?
That is the question.
Well, anyway, yes, I actually have once watched, among other classic cartoons or animated feature films, and among other childhood favorites from throughout the 20th century (and perhaps the early years of this 21st century) -- and thus, not only just solely, strictly, or even exclusively anything that used to air on Cartoon Network (like in Dexter's Laboratory, for example) or even on Nickelodeon (like in Rugrats or SpongeBob, for additional examples) all the time back in the good old days of the 1990s or earlier -- the An American Tail movies (which, like The Land Before Time (which is itself something of a kid-friendly if dinosaur-infused mashup of Disney's 1942 Bambi and Disney's very epic 1940 musical film Fantasia's Rite of Spring-scored prehistoric life scenes!) was begun by Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg (and, in The Land Before Time's case, Star Wars creator George Lucas, who had just so happened to be Spielberg's collaborator on 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, and three other films that involved the character of Indiana Jones) way back in the decade of the 1980s) on VHS, perhaps in the decade of the 1990s, or perhaps way back when I was once a little kid myself (so yeah, I actually do have a really good childhood!), and yes, sure, I really liked both the mouse character of Fievel Mousekewitz as well as his sister Tanya from the American Tail movies (or especially the Fievel Goes West version of the latter as voiced by the Powerpuff Girls' Blossom's original voice artist, Cathy Cavadini, in particular although, to be fair, she was originally supposed to be voiced in 1991's An American Tail: Fievel Goes West itself by Lea Thompson of Back to the Future fame, before the late, great James Cameron's Titanic and James Cameron's Avatar movie music composer, James Horner, one day discovered Catherine Cavadini's very beautifully touching song demo of Tanya's Dreams to Dream song during the actual making of AAT:FGW itself!)), but still....
Not long ago, I had once heard some internet users saying that Tanya Mousekewitz was orginally supposed to be the third protagonist of 1991's An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (after her brother Fievel and Fievel's cat friend Tiger, of course!) but then, Steven Spielberg and company eventually decided to chop much of her scenes from the finished film of Fievel Goes West, making AAT:FGW itself as short and sweet as the first Land Before Time film from three years earlier, and that is, from the year 1988 (in addition, the saying that "there's no way to go but up" had also never applied to An American Tail, which is unsurprising, given that the American Tail franchise suffered tremendously from itself, especially ever since Don Bluth himself famously broke up with Spielberg over the latter's and Lucas' interference on the darker and scarier content of the former's work of their second, last, and superior, as well as Bluth's and Spielberg's most memorable effort, the aforementioned The Land Before Time itself).
And also long ago, I have additionally had heard some very unfair comments on the internet, or perhaps especially online, about the Fievel Goes West iteration of Tanya Mousekewitz, and it's not just that that particular version of Tanya herself notoriously tended to argue with her brother Fievel a whole lot, but it's also that her motivations in Fievel Goes West is even stronger than Fievel's, even to the point of her ignoring of Fievel's warnings about the cats or the saloon altogether, and yet, it is also An American Tail: Fievel Goes West itself that had already branded the very character of Tanya Mousekewitz and her relationship with her very own brother Fievel forever!
In fact, many fans of the American Tail films, as well as many fans of the very work of Don Bluth himself, had long felt that the makers of Fievel Goes West (especially as in the people at Amblimation, Steven Spielberg's short-lived London, England, UK-based animation arm of Amblin Entertainment, founded as it was in 1989, a year after the release and success of the classic live action/animation combo epic, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a studio which was actually staffed by some, or perhaps many, of the very same animation artists who had once worked for the late animation maestro Richard Williams (the latter best remembered for being the very man behind the still eternally unfinished animated fantasy epic, The Thief and the Cobbler, the very best version of which to watch nowadays is either the 1992 workprint (aka A Moment in Time) or the Recobbled Cut, the latter being put together by a fan named Gilbert Gilchrist) on the 2D hand-drawn animation content in Robert Zemeckis' aforementioned Who Framed Roger Rabbit back in the 1980s, and which, despite eventually being closed down in 1997 while working on a proposed animated version of the Broadway musical phenomenon, Cats (and thus not the very notorious live action/CGI film version from 2019, no!) and having only produced just three films under its belt (the other two being 1993's We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story and 1995's Balto), also happened to be the direct ancestor of today's DreamWorks Animation, the studio being most famous, above all else, for the Shrek movies) were all terribly unfair with the character arc of Tanya Mousekewitz and her relationship with her brother, Fievel, maybe since the writers of that movie (like Charles Swenson and Flint Dille, the latter being of the original 1986 Transformers movie fame) feared that the Somewhere Out There song from the 1986 Don Bluth original will be way too sappy and far too saccharine for audiences to take in back in the 1990s, they have something very different and, unfortunately for many fans, audiences and critics, something altogether more combative and altogether more argumentative a brother-sister relationship (like the kind that you once saw in every movie and TV show made at the time) in place of the more tightly close-knit sibling bonding between Tanya and Fievel in the Don Bluth original from the year 1986...
And so, that very notorious alteration to Tanya and Fievel's sibling dynamic in 1991's An American Tail: Fievel Goes West had all but struck many fans, critics, and audiences as something of a ruinous trick--and still does struck them all, even to this very day and age, as something of a VERY ruinous trick--and especially as far as what they did especially to Tanya and Fievel's relationship!
In addition, as much as I now liked the very sight of the Fievel Goes West version of Tanya Mousekewitz being all dolled up in her saloon girl gown/dress/outfit thingy as well as her makeup and eye shadows (whenever she closed her eyes to sing, or even blink, especially) --and the sight of which, I now also actually find to be very lovely, quite beautiful, and really pretty a sight to behold -- I still do concede that the spell that Tanya Mousekewitz's saloon showgirl makeover and dress and also her performance of The Girl You Left Behind (also spelled, at least in the actual movie's closing credits, as The Girl I Left Behind) which happened to be her big debut musical number in a rowdy Wild West saloon full of hungry kitty cats (as well as the earlier, and very touchingly beautiful, Dreams to Dream song that was sung by her earlier in the film) have had on me, or many others, especially, was inevitably broken when, just immediately following her cabaret debut song and dance number, Tanya rejected Fievel's pleas for her to escape with him from the saloon (Fievel: "Tanya, let's get out of here!"; Tanya: "I must stay...my public needs me!"; Fievel (again): I can't let you just stay here...it's too dangerous!"), and, after giving Fievel a note to read ("Thanks for the adulation, Tanya"), was almost last seen in the movie when she pulled away from him and danced out of sight from Fievel while blowing kisses at her so-called "adoring public"her way, leaving him devastated before a slow and intricate fadeout (or perhaps even a slow and intricate dissolve) to later that night...and then, they switched all the way over to Fievel and Wylie Burp training Fievel's cat friend, Tiger, to be a dog.
But Tanya later did return on screen, albeit briefly so, during the final shootout/battle climax, of course, just simply to warn the mouse crowd, and even hers and Fievel's own family, the Mousekewitzes, that they are all on a VERY BIG mousetrap, designed and built as it was, for the likes of Cat R. Waul, the latter being an evil cat with the voice and acting chops of John Cleese from the Monty Python comedy Brit troupe, for all of Cat R. Waul and his fellow cats to destroy all the mice (and especially the Mousekewitz family included) in the hopes that all the cats in the whole wide world will make so-called "Mouse Burgers!' out of all the cartoon mice in the whole wide world, only to finally disappear from the remainder of the movie altogether after removing her lovely, pretty, and beautiful saloon girl makeup before finally melting away into the celebrating, dancing mouse crowd, just after all the mice declared victory against the cat gang who had just been kicked out for good of Green River, Utah, just before Jimmy Stewart's last performance as Wylie Burp doing his last speech to Fievel, and just before the end credits started rolling.
Also, the female characters in the American Tail franchise (or especially, any characters not named, or other than, Fievel Mousekewitz or even his vegetarian cat buddy Tiger), like in the 1986 Don Bluth original film's Irish mouse girl, 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 have always had wanted, and just once, for Tanya Mousekewitz herself to actually, really, reconcile with, as well as to forgive, and to perhaps even apologize to Fievel for not getting along very well with her very own brother (and also for ignoring Tanya's and Fievel's own family, the Mousekewitzes, as well) most of the time during Fievel Goes West itself!
Well, even DreamWorks' 2001 classic CGI film, Shrek, for all of that film's anti-Disney satire, and especially, for all of its subversion of the tropes, conventions, etc., of the very classic fairy tales that the Walt Disney Company had just so happened to adapt over the years, just can't bring itself to end like that without assuring all of us in the audience that its very own Gingerbread Man character wasn't left to his fate in the trash can in Lord Farquaad's torture chamber in Dulac, Farquaad's Disneyland-inspired if medieval castle-like theme park., and so, the people who had worked on DreamWorks' Shrek in the year 2001 had made doubly sure to reattach the Gingerbread Man's missing leg with icing towards the very end of that classic 2001 CGI movie.
And so, tonight, I shall leave you with four questions:
Why do fans, critics, and audiences, still complain, especially to this very day and age, about the extended absence of Tanya Mousekewitz, especially between An American Tail: Fievel Goes West's Tanya's saloon cabaret song-and-dance performance number and that film's Wild West Shootout climax?
What really happened to Fievel Goes West's lost Tanya Mousekewitz scenes? (and also, were all of Fievel Goes West's lost Tanya scenes considered to be lost or destroyed forever, perhaps just like the lost scenes that had happened to be cut from The Land Before Time?)
Why do you still think that what the filmmakers behind Fievel Goes West itself had done to Fievel and Tanya Mousekewitz's bonding sibling dynamic was something of a VERY ruinous trick?
And finally, last but not least...
4. Why do you still continue to hold out hope, especially to this very day and age, and for someone to find some way for An American Tail's Tanya and Fievel Mousekewitz themselves (or maybe the older, Fievel Goes West-redesigned iterations of both cartoon brother and sister mice in particular) to properly reconcile their loving sibling bond someday, whether in the near, middle, or far, distant, and very foreseeable future, or perhaps even through fan-made works?
Feel free to answer any of the four questions above as best as possible, but please don't act very mean towards me, because I still won't tolerate hatred of any or all kinds. Thanks, take care, and goodnight.
