Poster of Don Bluth’s 1987 animated comedy-drama-horror masterpiece, Five Nights at Freddy’s or FNaF for short.
Coming off the heels of his successful Mario Bros. animated feature, Don wanted to tell an original idea based off the legends and rumours of haunted rundown pizzerias and other children’s entrainment centres involving living animatronics. The plot of the film revolves around a group of four animatronics of a failing low-budget pizzeria named “Fazbear’s Pizzeria”, who are capable of feeling human emotions and moving on their own after night, as they try to reflect on their past lives and look after each other.
That is until the night that a new night watchman is hired and a flood of emotions rush in as the animatronics remember that four years ago they were all human children of around ten years old having fun at Fazbear’s with their families for a birthday party until a mysterious man in purple beckon them to follow him downstairs to the pizzeria’s maintenance room numbered “101” where he violently murdered them. Realising that the new night watchman is the man in purple the animatronics attack him and it’s a race against time for the “Purple Guy” as he tries to escape the pizzeria. The cast included Tim Curry as William Afton, the "Purple Man", the serial killer responsible for the "Missing Children Incident", Kelsey Grammer as Fredbear, the main mascot of Fazbear’s, Eric Idle as Bonnie the Bunny, another mascot and Fredbear's best friend, Tara Strong as Chica the Chicken, and Nathan Lane as Foxy the Pirate Fox.
Scene in the film where the “Purple Man” turns the recently slaughtered children into animatronics to evaded the police (to which he succeeded).
The film was noted for its overwhelming dark subject matter and violence and for being a total departure for Bluth Animation. Years after its release with the advent of the internet, an online community around the film was born with some fan speculating whether FNaF was born out of Bluth’s own witnessing of a similar incident (that of child murder) at a ShowBiz Pizza Place location.