Ever since Snow White, Disney had been struggling with two separate animation issues: effects sequences and the process of transferring animation art to film without going disastrously over budget. Some film tricks—using cornflakes to create something that more or less looked like snow, for instance—had helped with the first, and the xerographic process introduced in One Hundred and One Dalmatians had been a lifesaver for recent film budgets. But some of those techniques also caused problems: the cornflake technique could often be tricky to film, and the xerographic process generally resulted in characters outlined with thick black lines, and limited the ability of animators to add the subtle color shadings that had been featured in Pinocchio and Fantasia.
But in the 1980s, something new and miraculous entered the picture: computers. They could, animators thought, solve multiple issues: the transfer process; effects shots (Disney animators had been thrilled by the computer animation created by Pixar for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan); and even—possibly—filming. They decided to try to insert computer generated images into their next upcoming film. And, they thought, they could also try out a new animation transfer technique, animation photo transfer (APT) for a few scenes.
Unfortunately, audiences were introduced to both in Disney’s second all time greatest animation flop: The Black Cauldron.
Disney had optioned Lloyd Alexander’s popular, award winning novel back in 1971, and started story development in 1973. No one, however, worked much on the film until the late 1970s, with actual production starting in 1980. The film would, the animators agreed, start off on the now traditional Disney note, showing off the multiplane camera: that is, the shot where the camera peers through a large gap between trees and then moves through the trees, to give the illusion that the camera, and thus viewers, are moving into the story. After that opening, however, The Black Cauldron would be something new: focused on high fantasy instead of talking animals or fairy tales, without a single song or dance sequence, but with a level of animation not seen, animators promised, since Pinocchio and Fantasia days. (In reality, Sleeping Beauty, but even by the 1980s, that film was still a somewhat sore subject with the animation department; it would be another decade before the studio would view it with pride.) It would also, they decided, be aimed less at small children, and more at teenagers.
That teenage focus allowed animators to add a few bits that made The Black Cauldron the first Disney animated film to earn a PG rating, thanks to some scary skeleton scenes, a heavier than usual amount of cartoon violence, and a somewhat inappropriate moment with a frog hidden in a woman’s cleavage. The issue here isn’t so much a woman hiding a frog in her cleavage—I expect the MPAA would have been fine with that sort of thing—but that the frog is actually a transformed guy that the woman wants to have fun and not at all suitable for a G rating times with, which the MPAA was a bit less fine with.
Four years later, the animation department showed the final film to Roy Disney (Walt Disney’s nephew) and Jeffrey Katzenberg. It was a nervous moment for all concerned. Roy Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg had just started their jobs a few days earlier: Katzenberg as a personal pick to head Walt Disney Pictures by new CEO Michael Eisner, who had worked with him over at Paramount, and Roy Disney, who had asked Eisner if he could head the animation department, bringing his wealth of experience to the job. The animators wanted to impress their new bosses.
In that, the animators failed.
Badly.
Roy Disney later recalled watching the film with a sinking “Oh, no, feeling,” though he was reportedly polite about it at the time. Katzenberg, however, was so horrified that, in an episode that became part of Disney legend and was still retold in awed voices decades later, he marched into an editing room with the film and began personally cutting scenes from the film. He had removed two or three minutes from the film (accounts vary) before animators, convinced that nothing in the film could be cut, dragged Eisner in to settle the issue.
Eisner wasn’t all that impressed with the final film either—although he, at least, was somewhat more tactful, telling later interviewers that the film had advanced the art of animation and was beautifully done, even if the story sucked. (I paraphrase his more nuanced observation.) He also shared the concerns that the scary scenes might be too much for young viewers, especially since a recent live action Disney release, Return to Oz, had been criticized for, among other things, being too terrifying for children. To be fair, The Black Cauldron is nowhere near as disturbing, but Eisner wanted to restore the Disney brand with friendly movies, and apart from one or two characters, “friendly” is perhaps not the best word to describe The Black Cauldron.
In the end, about twelve minutes were cut. The animators were removed from their nice, cheery building to a warehouse two miles away. Eisner faced starting his new Disney CEO career with a box office bomb. Everybody was very sad, except for film critic Roger Ebert, the one person who unabashedly loved the film, but then again, he didn’t have to work in a demoralized animation department. Tim Burton, who contributed to early work on the film, was so sad that he fled traditional animation entirely, heading off to work with live action and stop motion animation for all of his future work.
What went wrong? Well, to start with, although the animators all started with more or less the same idea, and more or less the same inspirations from Star Wars and various early 1980s fantasy films, by all reports, they generally worked in multiple, completely separate units, rarely communicating with each other. This in turn helped give the film a severely disjointed look, with characters often appearing to be designed for completely different films.
Disney had played with this idea before, of course, giving the three fairies in Sleeping Beauty a different, rounder look than other characters in the film, and giving Madame Medusa in The Rescuers a distinctly flamboyant look to set her apart. Here, however, the results were considerably more random: about all I can say for the Fair Folk, for instance, is that they share the look of “small” and “glowing”—otherwise, some resemble the ordinary, non magical characters, some the good magical characters, some the evil magical characters, some the evil non magical characters, and some nothing in particular.
The Disney executives, however, were less concerned with character design, and more worried about another aspect: story, or rather, the lack of it. Problem elements include the characters all meeting up, rather randomly, in an Evil Castle, then escaping, then going back to the Evil Castle again, and escaping, rather randomly. A magical pig more or less wanders off midway through the film and nobody really worries about her even though the entire original point was to protect the pig at all costs. The happy ending requires six characters to act completely out of character, and even allowing for the fact that they’ve all been taken over by pod people, it still makes no sense. Characters continually walk over or in some cases jump right into plot holes. At one point, Princess Eilonwy is dismissed as just a scullery maid. It’s meant, I think, to be an insult, but since the other two characters with her are correctly described as a pig keeper and a failed bard, it comes off more as brand new information for viewers.
Some of the plot holes probably came from Katzenberg’s decision to pull twelve minutes from the film, but it’s hard not to think that the reported lack of communication between the multiple separate units working on the film didn’t contribute to the problem.
The characters, too, had issues. Taran, the main protagonist, alternates between bland and whiny and back again: in his whiny stages, he is often cruel, when, that is, he isn’t dooming the world. The whininess was perhaps partly inspired by Luke Skywalker, a clear influence on the film. But where Luke’s whininess at least came from his desire to do something instead of just moping around a moisture farm, and a later desire to halt the Empire’s “We don’t really need any of those planets, do we?” march across the galaxy, Taran’s whininess, made explicit in the film, comes from a desire to have others see him as a hero. Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen die while Luke is out trying to find his droids and learning about Princess Leia and the Force; the magical pig is kidnapped while Taran is daydreaming about people applauding his heroism.
And Taran has a pretty bad habit of being hypocritical and rude. He turns on Gurgi just a few hours after they meet, calling the little creature a “miserable coward”—just because the creature isn’t exactly excited about entering a dark, gloom filled castle filled with dragons and the forces of evil. I’m with Gurgi here, Taran: that’s not cowardice, just common sense. And that’s not even considering that this scene happens just minutes after Gurgi was just brave enough to follow Taran after he was attacked by dragons, and still wants to be Taran’s friend despite the kid’s general rudeness.
The minor characters are not much better. Eilonwy is nice enough, despite a tendency to giggle too much, but bland—so bland, indeed, that she’s the one of only three Disney princess who never made it into the Disney Princess lineup. (The other two are Frozen’s Elsa and Anna who, as right now, are not “official” Disney Princesses even though they often seem to be treated as Disney Princesses and make appearances with other Disney Princesses. It’s a Disney Mystery.) That omission may have stemmed at least in part from Disney’s lack of enthusiasm for The Black Cauldron in general, or from the realization that one Disney Princess with no personality whatsoever (hi, Aurora) was enough, but it’s also quite possible that the people behind Disney Princess just forgot her. I can’t blame them; most of the time the film forgets her too. Daalben is a run of the mill elderly wizard mentor who is exactly like every other run of the mill elderly wizard mentor, except with less personality: I couldn’t help wishing that Gandalf would show up and boom, “YOU CANNOT WIZARD!” I can tolerate him only because he’s barely in the film. Fflewddur Fflam works only because he’s voiced by Nigel Hawthorne, but he’s not given much to do. The Fair Folk (in this film, not the book) are more or less Smurfs with the ability to fly, only more irritating and in more colors. The pig is, well, a pig. Gurgi is cute, but absent for much of the film, and one cute character is not enough to save a film.
What does work, oddly enough, is the relationship between Taran and Eilonwy: this is Disney’s first attempt to build a romance between two human characters, instead of presenting us with “This is a beautiful princess, and this is a beautiful prince,” and more or less leaving matters there. Taran and Eilonwy talk, exchange the occasional shy glances, and work together. It’s a romance I can buy. But, like Gurgi, this is not quite enough to save the film.
The villains were, if possible, even less memorable. John Hurt did what he could with the voicing for Skeletor I mean the Horned King—who in most scenes looks like Skeletor, except in the scenes where he looks like a less convincing Skeletor—but what he could was not much. It’s never exactly clear what Skeletor whoops Horned King is trying to accomplish in the film other than spread around vast amounts of radioactive looking green stuff and send dead people traipsing through the land: after all, he already has a castle full of living minions, who, unusually for a Disney film, seem relatively competent, and it’s not clear what else he really needs or wants. The three witches are almost ur-examples of every single negative cliché said about evil women, or women desperate for sex, and it’s not exactly clear what they’re trying to accomplish either, apart from maybe trying to make more frogs. Disney’s films had often triumphed or fell thanks to the villains, and here, I have to say the word we are looking for is “fail.”
This left only one thing to praise: the animation. In some parts of the film—notably in the final, surreal scene with the Black Cauldron bringing back the dead—this was brilliant. Animators were also able to use new colors, mixed specifically for the film, and highlighted in that Black Cauldron scene. Unfortunately, that was also a scene that Katzenberg cut, fearing it was both too scary and not particularly plot driven, so viewers didn’t get to see all of the new colors. A few scenes contained clever cartoon gags and transformations. Gurgi, however annoying, at least looks adorable in the best of the Disney tradition. And, for most of the film, the animators were able to return to their beloved, softer colored lines, mixed with slender black lines, for the inking process.
Above all, the film included the very first computer generated images in an animated Disney film: some bubbles and the cauldron itself were created with the help of a computer.
And then there’s the rest of the animation, which, to be kind, varies. The first ten minutes had genuinely sloppy animation, of the sort not seen since Snow White, with various animation cels actually missing. This sloppy animation had taken up about ten seconds of Disney’s first landmark feature: it takes up ten minutes here, inexcusable in a film created in the 1980s. At several points, the dirt cheap and generally lousy animation for He-Man is at least cleaner, and arguably better.
Note: the later DVD release cleaned up some of this, as well as providing an ok, if not great, transfer, but you can still see several of the animation issues—which become even clearer if you see the film, as I originally did for this ReadWatch, through Amazon.com’s streaming service. Fond though I am of blaming Amazon for most problems in life, in this particular case, I really can’t blame Amazon for the obviously missing animation cels which cause some of the characters to shimmer or jump, or the scenes where colors are bleeding outside of the lines. These issues don’t exist in the Amazon and Netflix transfers of other Disney flicks, but they do here, as well as in some of the scenes in the DVD release. It’s bad.
Even the best moments are often marred by the dialogue. During one of the cauldron scenes, for instance, the spectacular animation effects have to deal with this:
Eilonwy: Please, Taran! No! You can’t!
Taran: My mind is made up!
Gurgi: Wait master! Gurgi not let you jump into cauldron!
Viewers: Nah, Gurgi, it’s ok. Let him jump into the cauldron.
Gurgi: Please, master, not go into evil cauldron!
All of this unconvincingly delivered, except maybe the bit from the viewers. It’s no wonder that Katzenberg, Eisner and Roy Disney regarded the final result with dismay.
Their worst fears were realized when The Black Cauldron was released in July 1985. The majority of critics—Roger Ebert aside, who was wrong here—hated it, and audiences shunned a Disney animated film with no songs, almost no jokes, and a PG rating. It was one of the greatest box office duds of 1985, earning only $22 million at the box office, against a $45 million budget, beaten at the box office not only by Back to the Future, but by a re-release of E.T. Four weeks later, Disney pulled the film from theaters and placed it deep, deep within its vault until 1998, when it was released on VHS to limited fanfare, and a later 2010 DVD.
Some viewers felt it should have remained in the vault.
Animators had hoped that The Black Cauldron would allow Disney to return to its glory days, no longer relegated to children’s entertainment. And they’d hoped that the CGI would jumpstart a new era of Disney films. (Eventually, it did, but not quite yet.) But as with The Fox and the Hound, its greatest legacy came from its production problems, which led to multiple changes. The demoralizing experience persuaded Tim Burton to give up on animation and head towards live action films. (In other words, if you hate, hate, hate Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman or any of Burton’s other works, this might be the film to blame.) And Michael Eisner ordered animators to abandon their decades-long process of developing a script from concept art and storyboards, and to use instead the more standard live action process of developing storyboards from a script, a process he hoped would bring the studio back to focusing on story.
That is, if Disney continued to make animated films at all. The studio had only managed to produce three films in one decade (Winnie the Pooh, released in 1977, mostly contained material animated earlier). Of those, only one had been a major hit, and one had been a financial disaster. The animators trained by Walt Disney had almost all retired or were about to retire. Eisner and Katzenberg felt doubtful.
Newly returned Roy Disney, however, who had been part of the investment group that had prevented a hostile takeover of Disney and brought Eisner on board—thus giving him some clout—argued that animation was still the cornerstone and the key to the entire company. Plus, the animators had also been working very hard on a second film that also contained some computer animation, due to come out very soon.
It featured two mice. A good omen.
The Great Mouse Detective, coming up next.
Mari Ness lives in central Florida.
I liked this movie when I watched it for the first time. But then, I also had never heard of the Black Cauldron or Prydain before it. I felt the story was interesting, so I searched for the books, read them and loved them. It was a surprise to me to read later that this movie was so shunned by people elsewhere. Different tastes, I guess. I just love a good fantasy tale.
The funny thing is, reading this, I can’t necessarily disagree with any of it. But I remember getting the VHS when it came out of the vault in my early teens and I loved it. Part of it was perhaps the novelty of it being a slightly darker film with no songs (although, I would have liked some, because I grew up on Disney musicals). But I always kind of dug the creepy vibe and I liked Eilonwy a lot. At least she was along for the ride and (kind of) doing stuff, instead of her story solely being about finding romance. And I DID find their awkward romance adorkable. I definitely don’t remember having the negative reaction to Taran you do here; I suppose I’ll have to rewatch.
(Also, when I watched it, I’d never read or even heard of the books, nor did I know anything about its reputation.)
But – yes yes yes yes about the blue witches!
PS – I love almost all of those Tim Burton movies (not a huge fan of Batman, actually) so…yay for it flopping, I guess! In fact, I was on the bus today and we were talking about movies, and the guy I was talking to said, “I guess you’re a big Tim Burton fan, huh?” because (by chance), a few of the movies I had mentioned were Tim Burton movies. And then I was like, “Well, yeah, I guess I am!”
The movie may not have been that good, but it was the first story to really interest me in the fantasy genre. Before seeing this I had thought fantasy was too childish to pay any heed to, and I was a child at the time. Without the Black Cauldron, I wouldn’t have ventured into Jim Henson’s movies, The Dark Crystal and The Labyrinth, which are some of my favorites of all time. Sadly I didn’t connect to fantasy novels for many more years which I regret since so many classics were being written at the time.
My link to novels is probably unique. It was during high school band when we were to be doing a musical piece inspired by an old fantasy trilogy: Johan de Meij’s Symphony No. 1 “The Lord of the Rings“.
I’m actually reading Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles right now thanks to this series reminding me about their existence. I just started the 2nd book, The Black Cauldron, yesterday.
The real shame is that the Lloyd Alexander books are fantastic. One of my favorite series ever. There was no good reason to have this be a mess. All they had to do was make the actual book.
I was excited to see this, and so was my young son. But we went home very disappointed. It just felt like a horrible mishmash, with a bad script, so many different artistic styles mashed together without a common vision, and a lot of just plain clumsy animation.
Never saw this one in the theater; I remember bad reviews, and it came out during that late-adolescent “too old for cartoon movies” phase. When I did get the DVD from Netflix I was unimpressed. Does Disney still own the Prydain rights? I’d love to see a non-terrible adaptation.
Oh, and here’s an article that’s mostly about Fox & Hound, but does touch on Cauldron.
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue3.8/3.8pages/3.8sitofox.html
The key quote:
The Black Cauldron is one of my guilty pleasures; I loved it as a kid for those scary, darker moments, and I still enjoy it, knowing how terrible it is.
I would say Kida is far more forgotten in the Princess lineup than Queen Elsa and Anna, who’s official induction is just a matter of time.
oh this movie. I was a big fan of the books and I was so excited to see a movie version. So my friends and I went to opening weekend (we were tweens, so basically right in the demo it was aimed at).
I have never left a movie as absolutely furious as I did Black Cauldron. My friends and I hated it completely- it ruined the books, the characters, the story — I can’t remember liking a single thing about it. In hindsight it was probably the foundation for how I treat adaptations as very much separate things from the original, but boy, was that a hard-earned lesson. I can’t say if I’d have that same reaction today (I’ve not seen the movie again, nor read the books in a long time) but I have no desire to try again, either.
I second hoopmanjh’s question @6: does Disney still have the Prydain rights? I also would love to see a well-done animated adaptation of the Prydain books. As a streamed/televised miniseries, if not as a movie. But maybe the failure of TBC will forever make all animators who hear “Prydain” see thirteen black cats walking under a ladder, placing their paws carefully to avoid the shards of a broken mirror.
I’ve never watched (or read) this story, but the title strikes me as very not intriguingly unusual. Aren’t cauldrons black by default, unless specified otherwise? It’s like saying “The Steel Sword” or “The Green Forest,” at least in this kind of setting.
“Disney’s films had often triumphed or fell thanks to the villains” — true that, and I’m a lifelong villain-lover. (And now reading Isle of the Lost. What took you so long, Disney?!)
I loved the books as a kid and remember being bummed out by the trailer for this film. It was clear even then that Disney ruined their chance at adapting a truly wonderful book. Truly hope the Prydain Chronicles can get their chance to shine in an animated or live action film one day. They deserve it far more than some other adapted series.
Everybody – Disney apparently still owns the film/television adaptation rights to the Prydain series, but I would be shocked if Disney agreed to another adaptation any time soon; this seems to be a film that sure, they’ve released to the public, but they are really, really hoping people will forget. I’ve been checking Disney Pin Stations since starting this Read-watch, and this is one of only a very, very few films where I couldn’t find a single associated pin. It wasn’t released on Netflix, although the films that flank it (The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound, and The Great Mouse Detective) were. Apparently no one bothered to upload the cleaned up version (on the DVD) to Amazon/iTunes, so the digital transfers there are shockingly bad. (And it’s just this film – the other digital transfers are fine.) And even the cleaned up version wasn’t cleaned up all that much, although I guess that’s good since you can see why Katzenberg flipped out.
Granted, Disney did bring back Ron Clements and John Musker after they headed the only Disney animated film that did worse than The Black Cauldron – but Clements and Musker also brought us The Little Mermaid, so they sort of had a bit of a cushion. Disney hasn’t had any success with a Lloyd Alexander adaptation.
Also, I’d agree that Elsa and Anna will eventually join the Disney Princess franchise, possibly after their next movie, but they still aren’t “official” Disney Princesses.
And you are right – as I blogged this, I did forget Kida, who is a princess in a Disney film, but not an official Disney Princess. Like Disney, I tend to forget that Atlantis: The Lost Empire, even exists (although you can find pins for it!) I don’t think she’s going to be joining the Disney Princess lineup any time soon.
All I know is that this was the first (and for a long time, until I had kids) only theatrical release of a Disney animation I was. And 10 year-old me LOVED it. I could never figure out why others didn’t like it, or why I couldn’t find it on VHS. Still haven’t seen it a second time, and I’m willing to let my imperfect memory of the movie stand,
Years ago, a number of friends kept telling me that I had to see this movie, that it was a hidden gem — secretly one of Disney’s best. It was dark, they said. The animation was amazing, they exclaimed.
I watched it with much the same feelings that I imagine Roy Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg felt the first time they saw it.
What struck me was that the aspects of the movie that my friends praised were exactly the areas where I felt the movie fell flat. The animation was… not good. There was darkness in it, but also one of Disney’s worst “cutesy” characters ever, and that darkness was bland, and the characters were whiny and bratty… and why the heck should I care about them anyway?
This movie came out in a very dark (as in bad) stretch of Disney films, but even a lot of those not-great Disney films had things you could like about them. Black Cauldron? Not so much.
@10
Actually depending on the intended purpose, many cauldrons would have been copper coloured or greenish – portable ones were often made of copper or bronze as it is substantially lighter than iron. A large cast-iron cauldron as described would indeed be black, but you wouldn’t expect to be able to move it much – it would weigh half a ton.
The cauldron in question is based on Pair Dadeni, the Cauldron of Rebirth of welsh mythology. The Black in the title is more because it raises the soulless dead in service of evil, whereas the Cauldron of Rebirth raises the Irish dead again and the Irish aren’t evil per se.
This was the first film I ever saw at a cinema, but as I was about four years old I can barely remember it, and I’ve never seen it since.
Interestingly, it was a U rather than PG certificate in the UK, and while I have some vague memories of finding some bits scary, bit didn’t give me nightmares (that I recall).
Maybe I should watch it again some time, just to see how it holds up.
I tried to post something on this last night and apparently failed. My experience was the same as @8. I loved the books and was excited about Disney’s touting of the next generation animation techniques that were going to revolutionize cinema…and the movie was horrible. Awful adaptation. I was cursing the screen walking out of the theater. I haven’t watched it since.
I was wondering why they chose Black Cauldron from the start – it is truly a dark story of a group of mismatched folk, including our beloved Assistant Pig Keeper, who are trying to stop bad guys from using a magical cauldron that turns dead people into mindcontrolled warriors who can’t be killed. The task is arduous and a lot of good people die in the attempt. Taran is forced to make substantial progress towards growing up, at a cost of a good chunk of his innocence. Wonderful book but is it more like a Holocaust survival story than a Disney film. Note that Disney did get it right, as a matter of technique and story, in the next film – The Little Mermaid – that began the modern Disney revival.
On the bright side, Alexander must have got a nice payout from Disney, and that the film has sunk with a trace means that the original Prydain books can be judged on their own merits and aren’t defined as versions of a Disney story, as happens to so many other stories. Like the recent film “Pan” which is being criticised for whitewashing a Native American character, though the character Tiger Lily was Native American only in the Disney cartoon, not the “Peter Pan” book by JM Barry. Who reads the book? It’s a Disney story. Or that so many fairy tales are now defined by their Disney version, forgetting their darker roots.
Gweilo – I’ve paid no attention to the new film Pan, so I can’t speak to any whitewashing there, but Tiger Lily is Native American in the original Barrie play and book as well. Barrie specifically uses the word “redskins” (multiple times) and namedrops a few Native American tribes. That the Disney film managed to make the stereotypes Barrie uses in the play and book even worse is another problem, but they didn’t make Tiger Lily Native American.
I am reading all these crypto-Welsh names, wondering how the characters in the movie pronounce them, and cringing.
I know I saw this in the theater when it was released, but I have very little memory of it other than disappointment. I was a huge fan of the books and was very excited about getting a movie, and then was utterly crushed by how wrong the movie seemed to me.
I recall that one thing that bothered me was putting that story to the cartoony animation style. It seemed like a clash. And then they got the characters all wrong.
I’d love to see this series given the kind of filming of something like LOTR, now that they have the technology to do this sort of thing in live action. Just don’t bloat it like they did The Hobbit.
I remember going to see this movie when it was first released and absolutely loving it! To be fair, I was 5 at the time. My imaginary friend was even named Taran because of this movie. I remember a lot of make-believe games with my great aunt being based on this movie. The nostalgia I have for this film doesn’t hold up when watching it as an adult. When it was released on DVD, I watched it again for the first time in many, many years and the plot holes were suddenly glaringly obvious. I talked to my great aunt after watching it and told her that I it seemed like something was missing from the story. The whole movie was some how different then I remembered. She told me that we had added so much to the story in our games and her retelling it to me (over and over ad nauseum) that she wasn’t sure anymore what was actually in the movie and what just in our imagination.
Despite all the flaws this movie had, it will always have a special place in my movie collection because of all the memories I got from playing make-believe with my aunt. It was also my first exposure to true high fantasy, so without it, I doubt I would be here posting on a blog hosted by publisher of fantasy and science fiction. So I guess it all came full circle.
@8 – hah, for me, I had that experience with The Two Towers. It still gets my heart racing when I think about it!
But speaking of LotR, that also had some questionable animated versions (gee, one kind of wonders what would have happened had Disney gotten a hold of it…I highly doubt the Tolkien Estate would have gone for that though) but ultimately did get remade into what was MOSTLY a very good version (I very much enjoy Fellowship and RotK. TTT can be skipped though. The first Hobbit movie was quite good, and the second two were meh (but still not as bad as TTT, in my opinion)).
Speaking of Disney Princesses, let’s remember that while Kida and Anna and Elsa are excluded, Mulan has been included.
I remember seeing this in the theater — I thought it was for my 10th birthday, but maybe not since it came out in July and my birthday is in September. I don’t remember much about the movie, but remember liking it a lot, and was inspired to read the books, which became my favorite fantasy series as a kid. I was bored by Narnia and didn’t read The Hobbit until I was an adult for reasons having to do with childhood trauma, Gollum, and the Rankin/Bass cartoon version from the 70s, so this was “my” series. I watched Black Cauldron again in recent years, and my reaction was “what was 10 year old me thinking?!”
For an interesting inside look at the making of THE BLACK CAULDRON, see the book MOUSE IN TRANSITION by Steve Hulett. Hulett was a storyman at Disney from 1976 through the early 1980s and devotes a chapter to the THE BLACK CAULDRON. It’s a good case-study in the “groupthink phenomenon,” that is, how a good idea gets implemented badly because nobody wants to be the one to say that things are on the wrong track.
It was also a good exemplar of the lack of focus and inspiration at Disney at that stage of the post-Walt era: Everybody was obsessed with “what would Walt do?”, forgetting that Walt was constantly innovating and trying to make each movie different and to advance the animated film–instead, the studio seemed intent on enshrining Disney’s “vision” was it was in 1966, and no-one was apparently brave enough to challenge that and come up with a way to move on artistically or creatively.
@12 Interesting that his death didn’t result in someone in the estate trying to get them back (or maybe they tried and couldn’t, I don’t know). Though I can see how Disney might want to hold onto them, especially since they’re in a mode of making live-action of all their animated films right now. This one might be in the queue somewhere (2030? After the live action “Home on the Range”) At least it can really go nowhere but up, if they do it.
Oh yeah, this. I was 15 when this came out, and had read the books in 5th grade. They were my introduction to fantasy and I loved them. I took one look at the preview for this and knew they had botched it. The fact that the title is actually the title of the second book and the Horned King is not even in it was the first red flag. The Disneyfying that was obvious in the trailer was the second. My friends and I gave it a pass.
Cythraul – I don’t speak Welsh, so I can’t speak to the pronunciation.
Aeryl – We’ll be going into the Disney Princess issue a lot more when we reach Mulan and The Princess and the Frog, but for right now I’ll just note that both of those films did decently at the box office, unlike The Black Cauldron. Eilonwy and Kida were in much less financially successful films.
I’ve never seen this movie, but one thing that leaps out at me is that Taran and Elionwy are dead ringers for Kevin and Princess Calla from Gummi Bears – now that’s an underappreciated gem.
I was in HS when this movie came out, and was extremely upset at the way the movie was overwriting my own images of the characters. (I didn’t even see the film; but the drumbeat of publicityclips “ruined” it for me.)
So, when I heard that Hollywood was adapting another of my favorite books, I resolved to steer clear of it.
And thus, I avoided seeing the Princess Bride until years after it left the theaters. :/
@29, The point I’m making is that Mulan isn’t a princess.
@32 Didn’t Mulan become a princess? She married the prince, right? Same for Tiana. Mulan and Tiana are equally princesses or not, I think. Born to lower-class backgrounds and married princes.
Anyway, I never saw the Black Cauldron, but it sounds like a rather dreadful version of Alexander’s wonderful take on Welsh mythology. I think I’ll pass.
Aeryl – True, and it does rather say something that Pocahontas (the only Native American in that group) and Mulan (the only Asian) also just happen to be the only two that are not princesses either by birth or marriage, right? Which is to say, I think Disney included them in the lineup for other reasons besides “Hey, not every Disney Princess needs to be an actual princess!”
Though I still think that was only part of it: while yes, Mulan is in many ways the antithesis of what the Disney Princess franchise primarily focuses on (sparkly dresses!) and while Pocahontas is in many ways a very problematic film, and the ways Disney continues to market Pocahontas and its characters is not necessarily all that much better, both films did considerably better at the box office than The Black Cauldron did, and continue to sell merchandise, the main focus of Disney Princesses.
Reiko – No, Mulan didn’t become a princess – her love interest isn’t a prince. He’s a captain in the army and the son of a general, with a rather nasty implication that he only got his position through nepotism, but he’s not royal.
Tiana did become a princess – that’s even part of the plot. And then went straight into business for herself. You go, Tiana. YOU GO.
@34: Well, Pocahontas is the Chieftain’s daughter. They probably consider that close enough to being royalty.
I have to disagree about the first appearance of computer animation in a Disney film. The Fox and the Hound relied heavily on computer animation for the cars. This was easier to see “back in the day,” when the fluidity and accuracy of three-dimensional drawing wasn’t so good. It might be harder to spot today, however.
In the link below, pay attention to things like the accurate cha nge of scale, the rotation of the vehicles, and small details like the milk cans in the back of the widow’s car. http://youtu.be/se7Rn8lSq6g
It’s obvious that these images were rendered in line drawings on another source and rotoscoped into the film as drawings. If your qualification is “direct from computer to film,” then The Black Cauldron is the first.
Is this movie no different than not-for-kids animated fantasy films like Heavy Metal, Wizards, Fire and Ice, Ninja Scroll etc.? afterall fantasy was huge in the 80s.
Nah, this movie is one of Disney’s forgotten masterpieces.
The books were actual horsecrap. The movie was better than any of them.
You are wrong. Roger Ebert is right, and I agree with him.
@@.-@, I agree wholeheartedly. Maybe somebody who never heard of the books can enjoy this movie but no Prydain fan can. I hope Lloyd Alexander got a good price from Disney.
Thanks Eisner! Not disregarding those commenters who loved it at the ages of 4 and 5, but when I saw this in the theater shortly before turning 7 one part I can’t recall scared me enough that I went to the lobby to play video games and don’t believe I went back.
I can’t remember whether I read the books before or after, but greatly enjoyed them.
Return to Oz was awesome on TV a few years later.
A very, very late coda — The Black Cauldron is now available on Disney+ and not only that, but it’s inexplicably in 4K HDR, so at least it looks really, really nice.
It’d definitely enhanced on Disney+, but you can more clearly see the seams between the computer-generated animation and the traditional animation, especially in the scene before Taran goes to the tower for the first time, where the sky is full of billowing red clouds that look like they were lifted from Wrath of Khan.
For myself, I was a tween when this came out, and I remember seeing it in the theater with a friend, the friend’s mother, and his younger sisters, the younger of whom was terrified, so we left halfway through. I remembered absolutely nothing about the film until I rewatched it, just the fact that we left in the middle.
Very interesting write-up, some interesting bits not mentioned here- Disney actually wanted to use holographic 3-D technology to make projections of the army of the dead appear right there in the theater at screenings of the film, neat idea but once it was discovered how expensive outfitting theaters with that technology would be the idea was abandoned(it was another case of trying to follow in Walt’s footsteps as it’s reminiscent of the Cinemascope technology used for screenings of Fantasia).
The reason Katzenberg started cutting the film was actually in response to poor test screenings where kids were coming out traumatized and lots of angry parents were making noise(and after Return to Oz they didn’t want to risk a letter-writing campaign encouraging people not to see their film) so Katzenberg was trying to appease them.
Also the reason this film finally came out of development hell was in response to the critical acclaim of Bluth’s own “Secret of NIHM” which garnered a lot of praise from critics who argued it was better and more mature then anything Disney had put out in years, so naturally Disney wanted some of that same acclaim.
Plus getting beaten out by a re-release of E.T. wasn’t the most humiliating defeat for this film-that was getting beaten out by the Care Bears movie of all things and in it’s fourth week of release no less. Getting beaten out by a film that existed just to sell merchandise to kids had to have been utterly demoralizing(and no doubt influenced Disney to merchandise their characters to hell and back in the following decades as a result)