Commercially successful and moderately critically successful on release, the film went on to gross $84.4 million at the box office and to create a franchise which includes television series, video games, merchandise and thirteen direct-to-video sequels.

The film’s success, combined with Don Bluth’s An American Tail and the 1988 live-action/animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, led Steven Spielberg to found his own animation studio, Amblimation.

Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film “two thumbs up” with Siskel considering it to be “sweet more than it was scary” and “quite beautiful”, praising its straightforward story and recommending it over Disney’s Oliver and Company - released the same day.

Many reviewers compared the film to films from Disney’s Golden Age with Steven Rea of the Philadelphia Inquirer stating that it “looks and sounds as if it came out of the Disney Studios of the ‘40s or ‘50s’ while Candice Russel similarly remarked how it worked ”by evoking the simple virtues of this art aimed at children, as it was in the beginning when Disney animated Mickey Mouse”. Many reviewers consider it to be “a sort of prehistoric Bambi”, with David Kehr of the Chicago Tribune stating “that Bluth gets even half the way there is proof of a major talent” and that it is “as handsome and honest an animated feature as any produced since Walt Disney’s death; it may even be the best.”