>>413714
>If I remember correctly after Don bluth left Disney he worked on stuff with friends and students from his animation class.
Actually, they were working on Banjo the Woodpile Cat in secret while they were still working at Disney. Once the cat was out of the bag, if you'll pardon my pun, and Disney was not receptive to it, then they pretty much had no choice but to go fully independent. They weren't at Disney purely for the money, but also because they wanted to work on the types of films Disney used to make. But Disney stopped making those. I'd sure say that Land Before Time feels a lot more like a classic Disney film than Oliver and Company.
As for your examples of what Richard Williams wanted to do, I think it's worth noting that it was all way more difficult and expensive back in the day. The fact that animation is worse now just shows how badly skills have declined. So sure, maybe Williams could have aimed lower and gotten it finished, but well... that's not the point, is it? If it was different, it wouldn't be his passion project.
For other animation examples, we can start with Ralph Bakshi. He famously worked on the '60s Spider-Man show. It's a classic and everything, but when watching it, it seems pretty obvious that the guy who made things like Fritz the Cat and The Lord of The Rings wasn't doing that particular Spider-Man show out of passion.
Bakshi would later be the mentor of John K., eventually of Ren & Stimpy fame. But John K is incredibly vocal about how all of his early work was purely for the money, and he hated almost all of it. The dude is a massive animation autist, and wasn't exactly pleased with the budget and management of animation in shows like The Smurfs. Both Bakshi and John K. later got to do animation they were a bit more proud of with The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, and then John K. sold Ren & Stimpy. Nickelodeon was all excited about being experimental and letting the creators really drive the direction of the show. So he really got to make a passion project. But then he found that they were censoring him much more than he would tolerate, and not only was he a perfectionist that would use up lots of time and budget, but he also says he would deliberately deliver episodes late so that the censors wouldn't have time to go over them as closely. He was fired midway into Season 2. Much later, they hired him to do a more adult reboot, but he would later say that they encouraged him to actually make the show more raunchy than his perfect vision. I like the episodes, but a lot of people don't.
Now there's a new reboot. The guy who replaced John K when he got fired, Bob Camp, as well as many others from the original show, were brought back, but quit in disgust because they found that actually the show was run by a bunch of young women who weren't listening to the suggestions of all the old people who were brought back. They were brought purely for their names to be used as promotional material, but really it's a modern SJW show. The guy who was brought in specifically because the original creator was fighting censorship too much and fired is now being vocal about the new show censoring him. That's how bad it is.
For the record, I don't hate Bob Camp's episodes, I think they're quite good, but there is a noticeable step down from John K's episodes, and as John K's involvement slowly disappeared, the episodes got worse. When they first fired him, episodes were almost done. So first we just got episodes where he didn't get to supervise the final edit, then where he got up to doing the storyboards but not the final animation, then eventually there were episodes he only wrote but didn't get to do storyboards. As the influence fades, it can be felt. But still, even the episodes that were entirely without him, with the new showrunner, are still pretty good. But not the new ones.
Alan Burnett, who wrote many acclaimed episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, previously worked on Superfriends. Of particular interest is the episode "The Fear," which is much darker than pretty much every other episode, and is the first time Batman's origin was adapted into film. While Superfriends was very censored and frankly a pretty fucking lame cartoon by later standards, if I do say so myself, it's interesting to see Burnett's early work, where he was trying to do cool stuff, but not quite allowed. He then later wrote excellent episodes like Two-Face, Mudslide, and Riddler's Reform. Two-Face is probably the biggest highlight, as it was also the first time that character was adapted to film, and is probably largely responsible for the character now being so well known. I doubt you'd have seen him in Batman Forever if it wasn't for this episode. (Not that Batman Forever really adapted the episode at all.)
>>413721
Whedonisms also slipped into Toy Story and X-Men 1, which he has writing credits on, and I like those movies.
Speaking of that, Stan Lee wrote all those comics for the money. He always said he wanted to write "the great American novel."
He never realized that he actually did. Or well... he wrote the dialog and managed collaboration as people like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko collaboratively wrote a great American novel.