Producer/Co-director Don Bluth so hated the final results of this movie after production was wrapped up that he and his partner, co-director Gary Goldman, demanded to be uncredited. As a result, a credit of "A Don Bluth Ireland Limited Production" has been placed where the directors' credits should've been.
Was originally meant to be released in the summer of 1994, but was pushed to April of 1995, due to production errors, as well as to avoid heavy competition from movies released during the summer of 1994, such as the U.S. release of The Princess and the Goblin (1991), The Lion King (1994), and The Mask (1994).
Late in production, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) acquired the movie for theatrical release with major opposition and granted the filmmakers a small amount of creative control. With the animators not thrilled and extremely ungrateful for this decision, this left them with less than a year of production time and scrambling from MGM's demands to change the movie. This included but not limited to removing some characters, trimming down and or completely removing some scenes, re-recording the voices and redoing some bits of animation that had to be done quickly because they were starting to reach the deadline. This was also the reason why some of the coloring work was outsourced to Hungarian animation studios. Some scenes that were deleted during the dilemma included a slightly different prologue where and older Hubie and Marina are seen admiring the pebble, an additional scene of Drake hounding Marina into marrying him and a scene where Rocko fights off Drake's skua henchmen.
The last film produced at Don Bluth's animation studio in Dublin, Ireland. The studio was acquired by News Corporation, then-parent company of Twentieth Century Fox which relocated Bluth and a number of his crew to Phoenix, Arizona to work for Fox Animation Studios and the Dublin studio subsequently shuttered.
When the movie was released on VHS in 1995, the film was shown in a pan & scan ratio, most likely to hide some of the missing material from the open matte copy, however, when the movie was released on DVD in 1999, it was released in an open matte ratio, causing much of the missing material and some bits of unfinished animation to be completely exposed to the viewer. All releases of the movie beginning with the 2007 "Family Fun Edition" DVD release keep the movie in a widescreen aspect ratio.