An American Tail explores corrosive and false midcentury reactionary versions of the American myth that painted late 19th century America as gladly welcoming all immigrants.
These revisionist myths propagated in an attempt at bulwarking coalitions of the newly-white Italian, East European, and Irish against the gains of Black Americans in the civil rights movement.
An American Tail plays with these myths by having the Irish, Jewish Russian, Spanish, and Italian immigrant mice repeat the myth "there are no cats in America" on the boat ride from Europe ('cats' being synecdoche for 'racism' within the movie's metaphor).
However when the immigrant mice arrive in America they discover that not only are there cats in America, America is full to the tits with cats.
The midcentury myth is contrasted with the reality: that immigrants arrived to discover the predator class intact, ready to enforce societal stratification along racial lines by whatever means necessary.
However An American Tail fumbles its metaphor at the end. While the climax of the film, where the cats are driven into the sea (an allusion to the Biblical demon Legion) can be seen as aspirational or instructive it is more likely to be read as its own revisionism.
An American Tail suggests that while the predator class was a reality of American life (confronting revisionism) it is one of the past, driven out nearly a century earlier, succumbing nonetheless to white post-racial fantasies common following the passing of the Civil Rights Act.
Still, while the ending of the film may be overly simplistic, an American Tail is unique among children's media for its willingness to depict the crowding, squalor, exploitation, and abuse that immigrants faced.
The film even includes commentary on the internal racial aggression of the underclass via the use of names (a subject children are likely to understand and empathize with directly) in how Fievel's ally Tony refuses to use Fievel's given name, preferentially calling him Filly.
As this behaviour on Tony's part directly contributes to miscommunication that prevents Fievel's family from reuniting, the lesson in respecting peoples' names, even if they sound weird to you or are hard to say at first, is adequately conveyed to the young audience.
As with much of Don Bluth's work in the 1980s, An American Tail is a flawed but unique and valuable piece of children's media, confronting a young audience with difficult, often complex ideas, emotions, and realities.
