Somewhere Out There

Lyrics as performed by
Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram

from the movie An American Tail (1987)

Somewhere Out There

written by James Horner, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil

Somewhere out there beneath the pale moonlight
Someone's thinking of me and loving me tonight

Somewhere out there someone's saying a prayer
That we'll find one another in that big somewhere out there

And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star

And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby
It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky

Somewhere out there if love can see us through
Then we'll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true

And even though I know how very far apart we are
It helps to think we might be wishing on the same bright star

And when the night wind starts to sing a lonesome lullaby
It helps to think we're sleeping underneath the same big sky




Somewhere out there if love can see us through
Then we'll be together somewhere out there
Out where dreams come true

The film starts off on Chanukah in 1885, opening in the village of Shostka, Russia, and it shows the story of the life of a family of Jewish-Russian mice who emigrate to escape a pogrom after their village is destroyed by Cossack raiders. Believing in the American dream they head to New York City because "there are no cats in America." Once there, they immediately discover that there are indeed cats in America and plenty of them, and begin living in a typical late 19th century immigrant manner: working in a sweatshop, living in horrible conditions, and submitting to a feline protection racket as an alternative to being eaten.

The film follows Fievel Mousekewitz (his first name comes from that of Steven Spielberg's grandfather), who is separated from his family during a storm as the boat approaches America; the movie chronicles Fievel's search for his family, and his struggle against the cats, including their money hungry leader, Warren T. Rat, a cat who disguises himself as a rat. The mice must call upon the strength of their legends from the Old Country, in particular the Giant Mouse of Minsk, to rout the cats onto a boat bound for a far-off country and make a better life for themselves.

An American Tail is an allegory for the terrible conditions immigrants to the United States faced at the turn of the century (the mice represent the Jewish immigrants, and the cats their antisemitic tormentors) and the film is similar in this respect to Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus. It also illustrates the hope (of a new, better life) that America represented to these immigrants at that time.

The ethnic and even religious backgrounds of characters are made somewhat starker than is normal in animation. This is most true in the case of Fievel's family, but it is also true with other characters. For example, characters discuss their lives "back home" in Ireland, Sicily, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere (the Sicilian mouse describes how his mother went to beg for mercy from Mafia cats that had taken his brother, only to be killed herself, with her rosary thrown to the ground in the process). Later, a dead mouse is shown clutching a rosary and a cross.

Art Spiegelman has in fact publicly accused Spielberg of plagiarism due to the fact the Jews are depicted as mice in An American Tail just as in Spiegelman's earlier Maus, a metaphor Spiegelman had adopted from Nazi propaganda.^[1] Even though Maus appeared collected not sooner than in 1986 just as the film, it had been printed as a series in Raw magazine years before that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Tail