All Dogs Go to Heaven (partially found deleted scenes of animated film; 1989)

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AllDogsGotoHeaven.jpg

A flyer for the film.

Status: Partially Found

All Dogs Go To Heaven is a 1989 animated feature directed and produced by Don Bluth. The film is about a dog named Charlie B. Barkin who is double-crossed and killed by his friend and ex-partner Carface. He is sent to Heaven but ultimately returns to Earth, where he reunites with another friend, Itchy Itchiford, and ends up meeting an orphan girl named Anne-Marie, who ends up changing the way he thinks and acts.

While the film didn't do well critically due to being released on the same day as The Little Mermaid, as well as generally being poorly received due to its writing and overwhelmingly dark themes for a children's movie, it did very well on home media releases, inspired several sequels, and is regarded as a cultural classic.

In the initial test screenings, there were multiple scenes and pieces of dialogue that were ultimately cut from the final film, mostly due to said scenes and dialogue being deemed too dark or intense for a movie. Two known scenes that were cut include the main character, Charlie, being hit by a car (of which only the aftermath is shown in the official release) and a longer sequence of Charlie's nightmare of Hell. As for the dialogue, most of the material that was cut had minor cursing. However, during the song "Let Me Be Surprised", one moment of cursing was partially left in by accident, as Charlie is clearly animated to say "Damn that Carface, I'll kill 'im", but he doesn't say the swear. The "damn" was left intact in the vinyl soundtrack, however.

Theft and Destruction of Full Cuts

Don Bluth reportedly owned a full cut of the film on 35mm film and had plans to get Goldcrest Films, one of the film's production companies, to release a director's cut in the mid-1990s after returning from Ireland. Shortly after, despite being locked up in a storage room, the print was stolen from him. The fate of this particular copy is unknown, though it's likely either been damaged, destroyed, or thrown away.

As for Goldcrest Films' potential copies of the cuts, they did not save any of the original art and, according to co-director and producer Gary Goldman, most of the cells and backgrounds "were destroyed or taken to the dump in the UK" due to storing them in optimal conditions costing too much.[1]

Findings

During summer 2016, Tumblr user SteamRunner went to a summer art program. One of Bluth's studio's animators happened to teach animation at a said program, where she actually showed the entire uncut nightmare scene despite seemingly all cuts of the film featuring deleted scenes being destroyed or stolen.

One of her friends happened to find the whole scene (albeit without a score) in an archive and, in turn, burned it onto three disks (one for Bluth, one for the animator, and one for himself). She then decided to show her class the scene, at which point SteamRunner recorded it with her phone and finally uploaded the video to Tumblr on June 23rd.[2]

The discovery of this scene implies that there are either some full cuts of the film left or that individual scenes were archived.

At least one further deleted shot from the hell sequence that would have included a close-up of the skeleton demon was cut from the final version of the scene and was not present in the recovered footage uploaded by SteamRunner. This brief shot likely would have occurred after Charlie howls in pain due to the demons biting him and directly before the shot of Charlie jumping in reaction to something offscreen that has clearly frightened him. This missing shot's existence was verified after several original production cels from the scene surfaced online.

Gallery

Images

Footage

YouTube mirror of the original video.

Higher quality edit/reconstruction of the scene.

Videos

Scribbles to Screen's video on the subject.

See Also

References