Morris F Sullivan:MORRIS F SULLIVAN, who has died aged 91, ran a financial consultancy in Los Angeles before helping to establish an animation studio in Ireland populated by ex-Disney artists.
In 1979, three of Disney's top animators - including Don Bluth - left the company with a group of artists who felt production values were being compromised for the bottom line. The maverick studio they set up in Van Nuys was struggling financially when a golf partner persuaded the semi-retired Sullivan to step in.
The animators screened their 1982 film The Secret of NIMHfor him, and Sullivan responded: "I'm your guardian angel. I'm going to make this work for you," Bluth said in 1989. "He came along at a time when we were desperate, and he saved us."
Sullivan became owner-president of what was eventually known as Sullivan Bluth Studios, which produced An American Tailin 1986. The studio soon moved to Ireland, where animated features could be made for less.
"My father was somewhat of a natural risk-taker," said Terry Sullivan Maphis, one of his daughters. "He orchestrated the move to Dublin . . . to capitalise on the Irish government's special tax subsidies to film-makers."
Sullivan Bluth was a major influence in the development of Ireland's animation industry, according to Dublin's National College of Art and Design. At its peak, the studio employed about 400, and its feature films included The Land Before Time(1988) and All Dogs Go to Heaven(1989).
The company struggled after a major investor withdrew financing, and Bluth and another animator left to set up an animation studio for 20th Century Fox. Sullivan Bluth closed in 1995.
Morris Francis Sullivan was born on December 8th, 1916, in Seattle, Washington state, to Frank and Pauline Sullivan. His father owned a lumber company. Sullivan studied business finance at Seattle College and married in 1941.
He moved to La Crescenta, California, in 1948 and - after the ninth of his 10 children was born in 1954 - to a bigger house in what is now La Cañada Flintridge, in Los Angeles county.
In 1960, he founded MF Sullivan and Co, a corporate mergers and acquisitions firm, in downtown Los Angeles.
His wife, Rose, died in 1971 and a daughter, Maureen, died in 1998. He is survived by nine children, David, Kathleen, Patrick, Michael, Kelly, Mary, Tim, Terry and Dan; nine grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
• Morris F Sullivan: Born December 8th, 1916; died August 24th, 2008