YMMV / An American Tail: Fievel Goes West

• Angst? What Angst?: An Enforced Trope; the writers wanted to avoid any angst and pathos and keep things Lighter and Softer (also Denser and Wackier) in order to distance it from the first movie (which is probably one reason why Tanya gets tomatoes thrown at her for singing "Somewhere Out There"). The example that perhaps stands out most is the nonchalant reaction Fievel's family has after Fievel falls off the train; we saw plenty of Fievel's family mourning him in the first film already, and it might have been redundant to dwell on them grieving again — though a child stranded in the desert is a far more dire situation he'd ever been in in New York.
  • Could be justified by the fact that this time, they at least knew Fievel was alive and therefore had faith that he would eventually find his way back to them just like he did before, but still…
• Ass Pull: Fievel somehow turning his cap inside out into a cowboy hat, and back again at the ending. Awesome as it is, it is never alluded to in the first film and just serves the plot and tone of the sequel.
• Award Snub: "Dreams to Dream"—especially with the finale version once again by Linda Ronstadt—is so beloved that people take notice of it getting a Golden Globe nomination (the movie's only nomination for anything anywhere), but not an Academy Award nomination. That said, much like it dominated the Box Office at about the same time as this movie’s release, Beauty and the Beast dominated the Best Original Song category too.
• Awesome Music: The whole soundtrack to Fievel Goes West is great, with James Horner returning to nail the Western feel and Cathy Cavadini's singing often being considered the highlight. "Dreams to Dream" stands out as an Award-Bait Song easily on par with "Somewhere Out There", if not superior.
  • "Way out West" is often considered way better than "No Cats in America," incorporating the sounds of the locomotive as its drumbeat.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Fievel gets sent away from the Indian mice, bouncing on a tumbleweed. While this happens, he is bouncing all the way back to the town while random critters sing "Rawhide" by the Blues Brothers.
  • Tiger dancing to "Puttin' on the Ritz" with a skeleton. Funny as hell, yes, but whaa—?
    • This one might be chalked up to Tiger still being a bit cookoo from the heat; he had been in the desert for a little too long.
• Broken Base:
  • Opinions are nearly evenly divided on whether Fievel Goes West, with its Denser and Wackier tone, was impressively an Even Better Sequel or an embarrassment to all the first movie stood for. The fact that, unlike other Bluth films, An American Tail ended with a Sequel Hook and was actually intended to have a sequel did help swing opinions in its favor when it was announced.
  • Fans have debated the canon status of this film for quite some time. The third movie seems to imply that it was All Just a Dream, but it's vague enough that it can be interpreted as a mere shout-out.
  • A third group of fans also see it as non-canon, not because of the dream but because Don Bluth was not involved. However, while Bluth was responsible for the first movie's gloomier atmosphere, he did not have a lot of creative input, most of which went to Spielberg and writer David Kirschner, who did return for the sequel.
  • The Tanya/Waul fan pairing, which people either love or loathe.
• Contested Sequel: Fans of Fievel Goes West argue it is better than the first movie because it's not as relentlessly dark and heavy focus on the secondary characters offers a more memorable supporting cast (including John Cleese playing a villain). Fans of the original argue that making the sequel more light-hearted completely took away what made the first movie so great in the first place. That the sequel lacked Don Bluth's involvement and feels radically different in art style and tone doesn't help.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Cat R. Waul to his fangirls, especially the ones who ship him with Tanya.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Tanya seems to be way more popular among the fandom than Fievel himself, as is Cat R. Waul. For the latter, being voiced by John Cleese helps.
• Ethnic Scrappy: The Native American mice are practically a culmination of every outdated Native American stereotype one can imagine. Not helping matters is that, unlike other similar depictions of Native Americans, which are grandfathered thanks to Values Dissonance, the film was released in 1991, a time in which society was moving past these old stereotypes.
  • Though for what it's worth, the next film gave a much more agreeable depiction, surprisingly enough. The point being that, when one also considers the controversial way that movie retconned this one, one almost suspects that it was made specifically to apologize for this movie.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Though he didn't die for a few more years, this was Jimmy Stewart's final role, and the ending includes his character, Wylie Burp, walking off into the sunset, with Fievel following. Not only that, but his final lines have some subtle self-projection about his twilight years:
  Wylie Burp: One man’s sunset is another man’s dawn. I don’t know what’s out there beyond those hills; but if you ride yonder, head up, eyes steady, heart open, I think one day you’ll find you’re the hero you’ve been looking for.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Be honest, you were more invested in Tanya’s story than you were Fievel’s. Her redesign and Cathy Cavadini’s vocals definitely help in this regard.
  • That, or John Cleese hamming it up as Cat R. Waul.
  • And of course there are those who are there to hear Jimmy Stewart's final performance before his death.
• Magnificent Bastard: Cat R. Waul lures dozens of mice families to Green River on the promises it is a peaceful frontier where cats and mice live in peace. Waul has his cats put on a facade of civility to convince the mice to help them build up Green River for them as a labor force, and then plans to kill them all once the cat saloon is complete. Though Fievel and his friends defeat Waul and send him off on a train, in the animated series Waul returns to Green River, and despite his lack of resources continues scheming to exploit or eat the mice however he can manage, becoming Fievel's Arch-Enemy who almost gets his jaws around him more than once.
• Memetic Molester: It's not hard to see Cat R. Waul as one too considering the creepy undertones between him and Tanya (a supposedly teenage girl even if you factor in Values Dissonance).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Dancing Buffalo Bones ^ExplanationIn one scene a skeleton gets ready to attack tiger only to drop back down when tiger looks toward it before trying again. after tiger turns enough times, it just starts dancing. Looking up the scene on youtube, you will find plenty of videos that replace the music with another song.
  • "The Laaaaaaaaazy Eye!"
• Presumed Flop: The film is a textbook example of this. Partly due to its status compared to the now-classic first movie, partly because it was released on the same day as Beauty and the Beast and vastly overshadowed by it, and partly because, unlike its predecessor, it wasn't directed by Don Bluth, it's widely believed that it was a box-office bomb. It wasn't. It actually made $40 million on a $16 million budget.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The Fievel Goes West game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System wasn't too bad of a side-scroller, but it wasn't too impressive either. In the early 2000's Fievel even got a game on the Game Boy Advance, An American Tail: Fievel's Gold Rush, which seemed to take place after Fievel Goes West and played a lot like the Super Nintendo game (odd given that Universal had spent so much effort trying to convince everyone that the movie never happened). This trope is played far more straight with the random An American Tail game that came out for the PlayStation 2 in Europe (which actually plays disturbingly a lot like Superman 64). The PC game that follows the first two films is another major offender, being targeted towards younger audiences but having insanely hard puzzles that would stump the target audience in addition to featuring 2D sprites being meshed with poorly rendered stills from the movies.
• Sequel Displacement: When it first came out and for a few years after, though it's slowly gone away.
• Squick: This line, as the conductor is almost eaten by Cat R. Waul:
  "Next stop: mouth, throat, stomach, intestines and, you guessed it, Green River."
• Take That, Scrappy!: Tanya's first scene in the movie has her begin to sing "Somewhere Out There". People throw produce at her to make her stop.
  • Despite having been a popular song, you get the feeling the creators of the sequel kinda hate it, and maybe even hate the first film in general. It's treated as this trope despite neither Tanya nor the song having been hated by most of the audience; only detractors who hated how popular the song got would be amused by the scene. To put it in a modern perspective, picture something like this happening to someone singing "Let It Go" in Frozen II.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Whatever your opinion of the film itself, it boasts some absolutely beautiful and fluid animation for a Don Bluth sequel made without Bluth's involvement. One could argue that the animation is even better than what the original offered (having twice the first film's budget didn't hurt).
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Much like how the first movie made allusions to the challenges newly-immigrated Americans faced in a city environment, this one's main plot (in which the cats are utilizing the mice for labor before simply devouring them) could be seen as referencing the plight of the various minority railroad workers (namely the newly-freed slaves and the freshly-immigrated Irish and Chinese), who tended to get chewed up and spit out by the sheer magnitude of the workload they were burdened with.

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