The Small One

The Small One (1978)

Ordered by his father to sell an old mule called Small One, a Hebrew boy in the ancient Holy Land takes the donkey to the Jerusalem market. Finding no buyers there, the boy is about to give up when he meets a kind man named Joseph, who buys Small One and uses the steed to take his pregnant wife Mary to Bethlehem.

Date of release
1978-12-16
TMDB
6.9 / 10 (103)
Runtime
26m
Genres
Animation, Family
Director
Don Bluth

Casting

Interesting facts

The Small One is a 1978 American animated featurette produced by Walt Disney Productions and released theatrically by Buena Vista Distribution on December 16, 1978, with a re-issue of Pinocchio (1940). The story is based on a 1947 children's book of the same name by Charles Tazewell and was a project for the new generation of Disney animators including Don Bluth, Jerry Rees, Henry Selick, Gary Goldman, and John Pomeroy.

Production

By the early 1970s, several of Disney's senior animators had either died or retired, but the continuous success of their recently released animated films convinced studio executives that the animation department was still lucrative but in desperate need for new talent.

The idea for The Small One originated from Pete Young, then an apprentice story artist, who found the book among the studio's optioned properties in their library. Rights to the book were previously purchased in 1960 by Walt Disney. He developed the initial storyboards at home, and pitched it to Ron Miller who claimed it to be a story with "heart".

In retrospect, Bluth stated that "Small One was something I directed to get the crew busy until Pete's Dragon ... [Larson] might have [been involved] in the storyboard area. [But he] didn't get to direction. I think he elected to [teach]". Bluth supervised all aspects of the production, including heavily revising the storyline that it frustrated Young.

Three songs were written by Don Bluth and Richard Rich for the film. They are “The Small One,” “A Friendly Face,” and “The Market Song”.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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