If there's anyone we have to thank for the first Disney Renaissance, it might well be Don Bluth. A former Disney animator, he left the studio in 1979 due to creative disagreements over Disney's animation style. In OTL he created a series of quality animated films and games with mature themes and technically accomplished animation over the 1980s that forced Disney to step up its production game: Dragon's Lair, The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, and The Land Before Time. Sadly for Bluth, when Disney really hit its stride after The Little Mermaid in 1989, his career as a leading independent Hollywood animator was capsized by the tidal wave (with the exception of 1997's Anastasia) and he retreated to semi-retirement from the industry in Arizona.
But he was certainly not the last defector from Disney animator to become a major competitor; John Lasseter and Jeffrey Katzenberg also forcibly left Disney due to creative differences, but their post-Disney careers have been significantly more successful than Bluth's. I don't consider myself much of a Don Bluth fan per se, but I've sometimes wondered whether Don Bluth could've been a successful independent animation mogul, like OTL's John Lasseter before the Disney takeover of Pixar.
So this post is a mix of a Plausibility Check and AH Challenge. Was it ever possible for Don Bluth to become the leading, non-Disney animation mogul in America by 2017? What would a Bluth-dominated animation industry look like?
And if you think the odds were stacked against him, with the POD no earlier than his founding of Don Bluth Productions on September 13, 1979, your challenge is to make Don Bluth the equivalent of OTL's John Lasseter. An eventual return to Disney is allowed, but only after the bulk of his most influential movies are produced.