An American Tail - Movie Review

An American Tail Film Analysis

An American Tail is a movie produced by Steven Spielberg about the journey of a young mouse named Fievel Mousekevitz and his family as they emigrate from Shostka, Russia to America to run away from the Czarist rule of the Russian cats. While this is a movie targeted towards children, the story succeeds at describing immigration by showing it through the eyes of animated animal characters. The movie is an allegory that depicts the thousands of immigrants that moved to North America in the 19th and 20th century to escape political or religious persecution. Through the movie's plot, point of view, and characters, the movie depicts the hopes and hardships that came with the immigration process in that era.

From the very beginning of the film, the theme of the American dream is stressed as a significant vision of the European immigrants. In the very first scene of the movie, the Mouskewitzes family is introduced as Papa Mousekewitz, the head of the family, repeatedly mentions to his kids how wonderful life is in America where there are "breadcrumbs on every floor" and a total absence of cats. He compares life in America to life in Russia where mice live in fear of the cats and their attacks. The life for the Russian mice parallels the life of the Russian Jewish living in Russia in the 19th century who feared the Czars and were constantly attacked in pogroms. The same idea is pleasantly represented again when the mice of the town sing together "There are no cats in America." After an attack on the village, the Mouskewitz family decides to escape to America. Here, the Mouskewitzes accurately represent the immigrants from the Second Wave of Immigration in America who was searching for the religious freedom and greater economic opportunities they were deprived of in their homeland where they were suppressed and persecuted. Later on, the idea of the pursuit of freedom is once again reinforced when Fievel meets the French Pigeon that is building the Statue of Liberty after getting lost from his family. The pigeon tells him not to give up on finding the Mouskewitzes because America is "the place to find hope." This scene accurately demonstrates the Statue of Liberty's true representation of freedom in the United States to the immigrants whose first sight of the American land was this monument. As the movie illustrates, the statue was not only a gift from the French that represented the commitment to liberty between France and the United States, but it also served as a symbol of welcome and a representation of hope for thousands of European immigrants as they arrived to America.

Although the Mouskewitzes emigrate to America with high hopes of a brighter future, they arrive to their new home and encounter unexpected hardships, as did many European immigrants when they arrived to America. The long, horrible journey shown in the movie shows the unpleasant conditions of the immigrants on the boats traveling in cramped quarters with hostile conditions for over a week. Then, when Mousekevitzes arrive to America, they come to realize that there are cats in their new home as well. This accurately represents how immigrants while coming to America to escape from their oppressors at home, encountered a new form of "cats" in the United States. These "cats" were the nativists that did not welcome or accept the new immigrants in the United States for fear that the immigrants would take their jobs and their homes. Although the cats play a great adversary for mice, they are at the same time not the best fit in the story. While the cats in the movie were a threat to the mice because they wanted to eat them, the nativists in America mistreated the immigrants because they had no desire to let them "take their land."For example, the scene where Fievel looks into a classroom filled with American "schoolmice" symbolizes the true nativists in a story told to Steven Spielberg, by his grandfather