Cinema: Mousel Tov! an American Tail

A note of welcome social progress. After a half-century's domination by Wasps like Mickey and Mighty, the world of animated film is happily invaded by a Jewish mouse. He is named Fievel Mousekewitz, and the tale told by An American Tail is of his arrival on these shores a century ago as an immigrant from czarist Russia.

Oy, does he have troubles. Swept out of his family bosom and overboard from the ship carrying them to the New World by an Atlantic storm, Fievel bobs into New York harbor in a bottle. Quickly he discovers that American streets are not paved with cheese and that whoever said the golden land was free of cats was, well, exaggerating. Not to worry, though. Fievel (whose voice is supplied by eight-year-old Actor Phillip Glasser) is fully as brave and resourceful as any homogenized Disney rodent. And he is capable of exposing his most vulnerable feelings as few animated critters ever have. This is a mouse who is not ashamed to cry!

Fievel's adventures on his way to reunion with his family are fully consonant with what we have been taught to believe are the experiences of our immigrant ancestors, and they are imaginatively enlivened by being rendered from a mouse's-eye view. The animation and the backgrounds occasionally fall below classic Disney standards, but the characterizations, both visual and vocal, are entirely endearing. Since Director Bluth (The Secret of NIMH) is a Disney graduate who has been bluntly critical of his former studio's current standards and practices in this field, his mouse may have a subtext to match its soul.