Of all Disney's failures, none are quite so infamous as The Black Cauldron. Based off material that was in the talks for decades, it was a property that was whispered about around the Disney studios for quite a few years before its conception (Ollie Johnston was an especially great fan of The Chonicles of Prydain). When Disney finally put the rights to use, they pumped oodles of cash into what they hoped would be the harbinger of a new age of Disney animation, one of darker, more mature storytelling. Not a single Nine Old Men put an ounce of work into this (okay...so Milt Kahl did some preliminary character designs...) and it seemed to be the consumation of the arrival of the new guard of Disney animators.
What went wrong? Well the studio made the disastrous choice of handing off sections of the film to individual teams without giving them any interaction between each other, leading to some odd continuity and a total lack of a compelling throughline. Secondly, ambitions for a darker film were rather bipolar, leading to some odd inclusions like graphic gore and partial nudity and unfortunate omissions like a number of fascinating Tim Burton designs which were jettisoned for being too twisted. It doesn't help that the animation looks floaty and bland, some of the weakest in any Disney film up to then, and that heavy cuts under Michael Eisner removed said gore and nudity, only adding to the disconnected nature of this film. They made a few interesting choices, like reviving multi-planing (a very good idea) and using widescreen for the first time since Sleeping Beauty, but these don't make up for all the other blunders made by this film.
The story is quite typical of Tolkien-inspired fantasy. An evil Sauron figure has returned to seek a magical item that will restore his power and send his armies across the land to conquer everything in existence. That item is a pig. I know, John Huston says he's seeking a cauldron, but he's actually trying to steal a magic pig from this film's Frodo Baggins, Taran, in order to find it. The one pig to rule them all. I'm not sure if that was in the book, and it's probably handled better in the book, but that's just a goofy sounding concept. Of course, our hero Taran, who's such a wimp that he's easily dispatched by the local goat (I know, that's what character development's for, right? right) loses the pig and has to go rescue him from the Horned King (who looks suspiciously like a demon from Night on Bald Mountain). Taran rescues the pig, but gets himself captured. With the help of a few fellow prisoners and a magic sword, he escapes, and it then becomes a quest to seek the Cauldron before the Horned King finds it.
As animation, this is even more of a dark pit than The Fox and the Hound, which had a few real standout moments. There are no moments of excellence here, just floaty, weightless motion and an over-reliance on reaction shots that just looks awkward. Characters are thrown off-model in strange ways, and very little of the performances ring true. The backgrounds do have a nice atmosphere to them, but are also pretty smudgy. Design wise, very little stands out here, and I can't help but wish they'd incorporated things like Tim Burton's idea for flying hand monsters (not ripping off J.R. Tolkien enough?). The color design looks hollow and lacks any sort of warmth or emotion, as if drab colors were what was hip in the eighties (not that I blame them for thinking such). Lamentably, the best animation is Hendel Butoy and Andreas Deja's for Gurgie, a hapless character that they nevertheless lend some much needed life to. Otherwise, I can only point to The Secret of NIMH, made for less than half the money, and sigh at how the biggest animation studio in the world could have made a film that looked one-tenth as good. Not that Bluth hasn't made the mistake of failing to smell a bad concept, but even he must have gotten bad vibes from what Disney was about to do.
One has to wonder how a studio with so much riding on this film could have gotten it so wrong. The failure very nearly drove Disney into folding its animation company, and so many potentially lucrative animators were driven into better careers elsewhere. It's a shame, but, thankfully, Disney did hold on to make a few more films. What's more, their very next project would be honest-to-god decent. It's a shame we didn't see a solid genre picture from this studio, though. We can only look at the disastrous final product and wonder what could have been.
What went wrong? Well the studio made the disastrous choice of handing off sections of the film to individual teams without giving them any interaction between each other, leading to some odd continuity and a total lack of a compelling throughline. Secondly, ambitions for a darker film were rather bipolar, leading to some odd inclusions like graphic gore and partial nudity and unfortunate omissions like a number of fascinating Tim Burton designs which were jettisoned for being too twisted. It doesn't help that the animation looks floaty and bland, some of the weakest in any Disney film up to then, and that heavy cuts under Michael Eisner removed said gore and nudity, only adding to the disconnected nature of this film. They made a few interesting choices, like reviving multi-planing (a very good idea) and using widescreen for the first time since Sleeping Beauty, but these don't make up for all the other blunders made by this film.
The story is quite typical of Tolkien-inspired fantasy. An evil Sauron figure has returned to seek a magical item that will restore his power and send his armies across the land to conquer everything in existence. That item is a pig. I know, John Huston says he's seeking a cauldron, but he's actually trying to steal a magic pig from this film's Frodo Baggins, Taran, in order to find it. The one pig to rule them all. I'm not sure if that was in the book, and it's probably handled better in the book, but that's just a goofy sounding concept. Of course, our hero Taran, who's such a wimp that he's easily dispatched by the local goat (I know, that's what character development's for, right? right) loses the pig and has to go rescue him from the Horned King (who looks suspiciously like a demon from Night on Bald Mountain). Taran rescues the pig, but gets himself captured. With the help of a few fellow prisoners and a magic sword, he escapes, and it then becomes a quest to seek the Cauldron before the Horned King finds it.
As animation, this is even more of a dark pit than The Fox and the Hound, which had a few real standout moments. There are no moments of excellence here, just floaty, weightless motion and an over-reliance on reaction shots that just looks awkward. Characters are thrown off-model in strange ways, and very little of the performances ring true. The backgrounds do have a nice atmosphere to them, but are also pretty smudgy. Design wise, very little stands out here, and I can't help but wish they'd incorporated things like Tim Burton's idea for flying hand monsters (not ripping off J.R. Tolkien enough?). The color design looks hollow and lacks any sort of warmth or emotion, as if drab colors were what was hip in the eighties (not that I blame them for thinking such). Lamentably, the best animation is Hendel Butoy and Andreas Deja's for Gurgie, a hapless character that they nevertheless lend some much needed life to. Otherwise, I can only point to The Secret of NIMH, made for less than half the money, and sigh at how the biggest animation studio in the world could have made a film that looked one-tenth as good. Not that Bluth hasn't made the mistake of failing to smell a bad concept, but even he must have gotten bad vibes from what Disney was about to do.
One has to wonder how a studio with so much riding on this film could have gotten it so wrong. The failure very nearly drove Disney into folding its animation company, and so many potentially lucrative animators were driven into better careers elsewhere. It's a shame, but, thankfully, Disney did hold on to make a few more films. What's more, their very next project would be honest-to-god decent. It's a shame we didn't see a solid genre picture from this studio, though. We can only look at the disastrous final product and wonder what could have been.