Sullivan Bluth Studios

Don Bluth Entertainment (formerly Sullivan Bluth Studios) was an Irish-American animation studio established in 1979 by animator Don Bluth. Bluth and several colleagues, all of whom were former Disney animators, left Disney on September 13, 1979, to form Don Bluth Productions, later known as the Bluth Group. This studio produced the short film Banjo the Woodpile Cat, the feature film The Secret of NIMH, a brief animation sequence in the musical Xanadu, and the video games Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. Bluth then co-founded Sullivan Bluth Studios with American businessman Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy and Morris Sullivan in 1985.

The studio had initially operated from an animation facility in Van Nuys, California, and negotiated with Steven Spielberg and Amblin Entertainment to make the animated feature An American Tail. During its production, Sullivan began to move the studio to Dublin, Ireland, to take advantage of government investment and incentives offered by the Industrial Development Authority (IDA). Most of the staff from the US studio moved to the new Dublin facility during production on the studio's second feature film, The Land Before Time. The studio also recruited heavily from Ireland, and helped set up an animation course at Ballyfermot College of Further Education to train new artists.

After The Land Before Time, the studio severed its connection with Amblin and negotiated with UK-based Goldcrest Films, which invested in and distributed two additional features, All Dogs Go to Heaven and Rock-a-Doodle. In 1989, during the production of All Dogs Go to Heaven, founding member John Pomeroy and many of the remaining American staff members returned to the United States to form a satellite studio in Burbank, California. The studio found itself in financial difficulty in 1992 when Goldcrest withdrew funding due to concerns about the poor box office returns of its most recent films and budgetary over-runs in its in-production films, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park and The Pebble and the Penguin. Another British film company, Merlin Films, and Hong Kong media company Media Assets invested in the studio to fund the completion and release of the three partially completed films.

Bluth and Goldman were drawn away from the studio when they were approached in late 1993 to set up a new animation studio for 20th Century Fox. Sullivan Bluth Studio's films continued to suffer losses at the box office, and the studio was closed down on October 31, 1995, after the release of their final feature, The Pebble and the Penguin. Don Bluth and Gary Goldman went on to head up Fox Animation Studios in Phoenix, Arizona to work on Anastasia, Bartok the Magnificent and Titan A.E.. After this the studio closed.

Banjo the Woodpile Cat, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park and the international distribution of The Pebble and the Penguin were acquired by Disney (via 20th Century Studios) on March 20, 2019; while The Secret of NIMH, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Rock-a-Doodle and the North American distribution of The Pebble and the Penguin are still owned by Amazon MGM Studios (via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), and An American Tail and The Land Before Time are still owned by Universal Pictures (via Amblin Entertainment).