Film Review: The Black Cauldron (1985)

*All reviews contain spoilers*

Disclaimer: This blog is purely recreational and not for profit. Any material, including images and/or video footage, is property of their respective companies, unless stated otherwise. The author claims no ownership of this material. The opinions expressed therein reflect those of the author and are not to be viewed as factual documentation. All screencaps are from Disneyscreencaps.com.

Cast –

Wayne Allwine – Henchman

James Almanzar – Henchman

Grant Bardsley – Taran

John Byner – Gurgi and Doli

Brandon Call – Fair Folk

Candy Candido – Horned King’s guards

Phil Fondacaro – Creeper and Henchman

Steve Hale – Henchman

Brian Harvey – Fair Folk

Nigel Hawthorne – Fflewddur Fflam

Billie Hayes – Orgoch

John Hurt – The Horned King

John Huston – Prologue Narrator

Freddie Jones – Dallben

Jack Laing – Henchman

Gregory Levinson – Fair Folk

Arthur Malet – King Eidilleg (of the Fair Folk)

Adele Malis-Morey – Orwen

Eda Reiss Merin – Orddu

Phil Nibbelink – Henchman

Peter Renaday – Henchman

Lindsay Rich – Fair Folk

Susan Sheridan – Eilonwy

Sources of Inspiration – The Chronicles of Prydain, a series of American novels by Lloyd Alexander, 1964-1968

Release Dates –

July 24^th, 1985 in the USA (premiere)

July 26^th, 1985 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, USA

Run-time – 80 minutes

Directors – Ted Berman and Richard Rich

Composers – Elmer Bernstein

Worldwide Gross – $21 million (a huge bomb as it cost more than twice that to make)

Accolades – One of the few Disney films with no wins or nominations. Yikes…

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1985 in History

The World population at this time is estimated to have been just under five billion people

The Domain Name System, an essential component of the functionality on the Internet, is created

Vodafone launches one of the UK’s first cellular mobile phone networks; Cellnet then launches the second days later

The border between Gibraltar and Spain reopens for the first time since 1969

Nelson Mandela rejects an offer of freedom from South Africa (on condition that he renounces violence), 22 years into his 27-year imprisonment

The first episode of British soap opera EastEnders debuts on BBC One, and Australia’s Neighbours debuts on Seven Network

The Provisional Irish Republican Army carries out a mortar attack on the Royal Ulster Constabulary police station at Newry, Northern Ireland, killing nine officers

The US Food and Drug Administration approves a blood test for AIDS, used since then to screen all blood donations in the US

A Beirut car bomb, planted in an attempt to assassinate Islamic cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, kills more than 80 people

WrestleMania debuts at Madison Square Garden

Madonna launches her Virgin Tour, her first concert tour, in New York City

South Africa ends its ban on interracial marriages

Coca-Cola tries and fails to replace its original drink formula; the “New Coke” is widely hated and the “classic” kind is quickly reinstated

The Bradford City stadium fire kills 56 people

Kuwait grants women the right to vote (the decision is reversed in 1999, but then reinstated in 2005)

Scientists of the British Antarctic Survey announce discovery of the ozone hole

The Schengen Agreement is signed, creating a bloc of countries with no internal border controls, making international travel easier

Studio Ghibli is founded in Tokyo

Space Shuttle Discovery completes its mission, with Sultan bin Salman Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a Payload Specialist

On July 3rd Back to the Future opens in American theatres and ends up as the highest-grossing film of 1985 in the US (later the same month, The Black Cauldron came out…)

The Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior is bombed and sunk in Auckland Harbour by French DGSE agents

Live Aid pop concerts in London and Philadelphia raise over £50 million for famine relief in Ethiopia

Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan’s first astronauts

Samantha Smith, a 13-year-old “Goodwill Ambassador” between the US and the Soviet Union, is killed with her father in a plane crash

The wreck of the Titanic is discovered in the North Atlantic by Dr. Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel using side-scan sonar

Super Mario Bros. is released for the Nintendo Entertainment System, which had just been released in the US two years after its debut in Japan

The Nevado del Ruiz volcano erupts and causes the Armero Tragedy, killing an estimated 23,000 people

Elmo is first introduced by name on the children’s TV show Sesame Street

Microsoft releases the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0

The Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable are released for sale to the public

Births of Lewis Hamilton, Cristiano Ronaldo, Leona Lewis, Rooney Mara, Lily Allen, Derek Hough, Alex Hirsch, Lana Del Ray, Bruno Mars, Wayne Rooney, Amanda Seyfried, Frankie Muniz and Raven-Symoné

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Well, well, well. You all knew this was coming – ladies and gentlemen, we have finally reached that milestone of infamy, The Black Cauldron (and just in time for Halloween!). If you’re remotely interested in animation, you’re bound to have heard of this film at some point; how it struggled along in development hell for over a decade, before enduring a torturous production period and then, upon its debut, bombing so disastrously that it almost sank the entire studio. So how did this troubled project come about?

Disney first optioned the rights to the original Lloyd Alexander stories back in 1971 and then obtained them fully in 1973, which was when pre-production work first started. However, the actual animating didn’t begin until May of 1981, just before the debut of The Fox and the Hound. Once they’d begun, the creation of the film ended up taking four long years, although as it turned out this would be the last time that such a long gap between films would occur. With this film, Disney were planning to tap into the popular trends in Hollywood at the time by creating something for a more “mature” audience of young adults, since by then the Disney brand had become too closely associated with children’s entertainment for their liking.

Supposedly, the idea to make this film in the first place came from none other than Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two of Disney’s Nine Old Men. They were convinced that, were it done properly, it could be “as good as Snow White” and honestly I think they were right – it was loaded with potential. Of course, because of the complexity of the five-book series some changes would have to be made, so a team of story artists worked throughout the 1970s to streamline it with an intended release date of 1980. Concept art was created by Mel Shaw of Rescuers fame, but then-CEO Ron Miller was concerned that they would be too difficult for the new animators to work with. Some of the newbies were also struggling to animate realistic human characters, so the release date was eventually pushed back to Christmas of 1984, with the earlier date (tweaked slightly) going to The Fox and the Hound. During this time of limbo, a veteran storyboard artist called Vance Gerry was assigned to create fresh storyboards for the film, as well as to continue working on the characters. With the main ones established, Gerry adapted the Horned King into a big-bellied Viking who had a red beard, a fiery temper and a horned helmet (thank goodness this goofy design was eventually modified). British screenwriter Rosemary Anne Sisson was also brought in around this time to work on the script.

At first, the film was set to be directed by John Musker in what would have been his directorial debut. Musker was assigned to expand several sequences in the first act, but these were deemed too comedic. Eventually, with production on the previous film wrapped up a host of other directors began to get involved with the messy project, including Art Stevens, Richard Rich, Ted Berman and Dave Michener. Ron Miller felt that too many people were working on it, so he removed Stevens as a director and brought in Joe Hale as the film’s producer. Hale got the sluggish production moving and began to toss out some of the concept art which had been created by Tim Burton, Rich and Berman, aiming instead for a more Sleeping Beauty-style approach.

Surprisingly, they managed to bring the great Milt Kahl back out of retirement briefly to help create character designs for Taran, Eilonwy, Fflewddur and a few other principles (I suspect he was responsible for improving the Horned King’s design, which is one of the film’s highlights). Kahl and the story team (including two men chosen by Hale: David Jonas and Al Wilson) began to revise the film, focusing mainly on the story from the first two books and making so many changes that Rosemary Sisson ended up leaving due to “creative differences.” These “differences” also led to the departure of Musker and his partner Ron Clements, who turned instead to another in-development project called Basil of Baker Street (which would become The Great Mouse Detective).

On and on it went; it was one of the worst production periods Disney had endured for decades. The team were split into several different units, some of which did not communicate with one another. Although it had been intended as a challenge for the young animators, one of them, John Musker, later said that things grew “too stodgy” and confidence in the film began to waver, a situation not helped by the lack of firm direction and uncertainty from management about the future.

This reached a peak in 1984 when the corporate structure of the company was given a big shake-up, with almost all of the top jobs being taken on by newcomers. Ron Miller had been getting a lot of criticism from shareholders about his perceived mismanagement of Disney, especially in the wake of a failed hostile takeover attempt that year from businessman Saul P. Steinberg. Although this was unsuccessful (largely thanks to the efforts of Walt’s nephew, Roy E. Disney), the fact that the once-mighty Disney Company had been allowed to get into this state prompted action. Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took over as CEO and president of the company, respectively, with Eisner also bringing in Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount to be chairman. Roy E. Disney, meanwhile, wanting to keep a closer eye on the way his uncle’s company was being handled, became vice-chairman and also chairman of the animation department (since according to him, he was the only one among them who understood the way animation departments ran).

As if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the animation department was moved out of the hallowed Animation Building at the main studio in Burbank to the Air Way facility in nearby Glendale in December of 1984, as production finally neared completion. As you might remember from my Pinocchio review, the Animation Building had by this time been in use for over forty years, so many of the animators felt understandably crushed at being suddenly cut off from the old traditions and atmosphere of the place. Their already low morale dropped even further, with many of them genuinely scared that the animation department could be axed altogether. Still, some have suggested that this move acted as an effective “wake-up call” for the animators, which forced them to work as hard as they could to convince the new management that animation wasn’t just an expensive luxury but a necessity for the studio. This it may have been, but of course by late 1984 it was sadly too late for The Black Cauldron – the film was going to have to be released as it was, for better or worse.

Before we get into this, it’s worth noting that the film does in fact have a cult following to this day; perhaps the effects of nostalgia have begun to soften opinions towards it, or perhaps people are just willing to be kinder to it with the benefit of hindsight, as we now know how unfortunate this film was to be made in such a tumultuous time. Whatever your opinion of it, it’s certainly an important film in Disney history, so let’s give it our attention and try to understand why it became one of Disney’s most notorious failures of all time.

 

Characters and Vocal Performances

Our hero here is a young chap called Taran…

No, no, not him unfortunately. I’m talking about this useless plonker:

Right off the bat, we have here one of the film’s biggest problems: the incredibly useless protagonist. My first thought is that he’s something like a cross between Peter Pan and Arthur, with all of those characters’ worst traits bundled together into one. He and Eilonwy both suffer from having rather bland and genericized designs which incorporate lots of elements from other Disney films, even wearing costumes that are basically rip-offs of earlier ones in different colours. This blandness extends to Taran’s actual character – there’s no nice way to say it, he’s simply an appalling lead.

He’s a whiny, arrogant, incompetent little brat who’s full of talk about how great he thinks he could be (if only he was given a chance), yet whenever he is given a chance to prove himself he always screws it up. Like many real adolescents, Taran has a habit of slipping off into delusions of grandeur at the worst possible moment, causing him to lose Hen-Wen – his only responsibility at this point – mere minutes into the film. A bit later on, once he’s met Eilonwy, even she begins to call him out on his defects, noting wryly that he only becomes more useful once he’s got his hands on the magic sword (called Dyrnwyn in the books, apparently). She’s quite right; the way he minces about doing pirouettes with it just underlines how immature he really is, but he has such an ego that he can’t accept that the sword is doing all the work and ends up snapping at her for being a “girl” who just doesn’t understand manly weapons. Never mind the fact that she’s clearly far more perceptive about magic than he is! She also looks suitably disgusted when she realises he’s stolen the sword from a grave… our hero.

The frustrating thing about Taran is that while he’s longing for a chance to prove his bravery, what he really needed was a chance to develop. Throughout the course of the film, he remains as clumsy and incapable as he is at the start, right up until the end when he finally gets the opportunity to redeem himself via sacrifice in order to save his friends. Then, at this crucial moment where he’s about to get the chance to demonstrate how much he’s grown during the experience, what does the film do? It tosses the moment to Gurgi! Gurgi! Why in the world did they decide that he was important enough to warrant stealing this moment from Taran? In a way, it’s typical of the character, who has been thieving from his friends throughout the film. Even so, it’s incredibly annoying and robs Taran of his last chance at completing whatever arc he was on.

As a final note, I also found Taran’s voice actor, Grant Bardsley, extremely underwhelming in his line readings. It’s almost as bad as Arthur with his three different voice actors – totally flat and emotionless most of the time. I don’t know if a more talented voice actor could have done a better job with such poor material (seriously, the script for this is so clunky at times), but it would certainly have helped a little.

At least Eilonwy (Eye-lon-wee) is better in this regard. Initially she was going to be voiced by Hayley Mills, but she dropped out for unknown reasons and was thus replaced with Susan Sheridan, who was thirty-four when she voiced the character (and thirty-eight by the time the film actually came out). Eilonwy has gained something of a cult fan base in recent years thanks to the success of the Disney Princess franchise; since Eilonwy is an actual princess, many Disney fans feel she’s gotten a bit of a raw deal by being excluded (and she’s not the only one either; think of Kida). Unfortunately, this isn’t so much down to anything Eilonwy’s done – she’s simply a victim of circumstance, appearing as she does in such an unpopular film. As the film’s heroine and our first human female lead since Aurora (who she bears a passing resemblance to), she is certainly more spirited and enjoyable than Taran, although she still has her flaws, too.

My favourite thing about her is that she’s given a strange sense of self-awareness in the way Sheridan performs her lines, almost as though she knows that she’s too good for the film she’s in. It’s interesting how little chemistry she has with Taran; right from the start, she’s disappointed and frustrated with him, although at first she’s just being a bit snobby about his lowly occupation. These feelings soon grow into outright anger when he begins lashing out at her for trying to puncture his massive ego with common sense. Eilonwy feels more “British” than Taran, somehow – she’s given a sort of stiff-upper-lip, no-nonsense attitude and it’s impressive to see how cool and collected she is when Taran first meets her in the depths of the Horned King’s castle. Still, despite this promising start, she isn’t really given much to do in the end and just ends up tagging along after Taran as a part of his entourage, with no particularly memorable scenes or subplots.

Her design and personality harken back to earlier young-girl leads like Alice and Wendy, which made me wonder if the film might have been stronger had they made Eilonwy the lead. I suppose this couldn’t be done as it would be too big of a change from the original books, but then it’s not like Disney has been averse to drastic alterations for the sake of a better narrative before. Eilonwy’s reason for being in the plot at all, her magical bauble, is never properly explained in the film, with Eilonwy herself simply stating that the Horned King thought he might be able to use it to find the Black Cauldron. (In the books, she’s a kind of apprentice magician with actual powers, but here, the bauble quickly becomes irrelevant after her introduction and gradually disappears from the film). Overall, Eilonwy just feels like a waste of a potentially great character and I only wish she could have been featured more prominently.

(Still, at least she escaped a forced romantic subplot – in spite of Gurgi’s best efforts)

Brrr… now this is where the character design gets to shine a bit. This gruesome entity is known as the Horned King and serves as the film’s main antagonist. He’s actually one of the darkest and most ambitious of all the villains in the canon, with plans for world domination using an army of zombie warriors – pretty badass! He’s voiced by the late, great John Hurt, who by this time had already appeared in a number of other animated works such as Watership Down (1978), The Lord of the Rings (1978) and The Plague Dogs (1982), but I would argue that this was his greatest triumph in animation. He lends the Horned King a terrific sense of presence, enough so that the character has become a bit of a break-out star in Disney fandoms in recent years, with many considering him to be the most effectively designed and performed villain in the canon (even if he’s not written all that well). Like many other great villains, a lot of his screen presence comes from the reactions other characters have to him – everyone in the film is clearly petrified of him – and also from the consistent way he’s portrayed, always serious and never lighthearted.

After Joe Hale’s decision to expand the King’s role in the story, he became a thin, spectral creature in a hood (and a rather fetching fur stole) with a shadowed face and glowing red eyes, serving as a composite of several book characters. His design actually bears some resemblance to that of Darth Vader, but of course this was unintentional: The Black Cauldron predates The Phantom Menace by a good fourteen years. Sadly, much like Eilonwy, the Horned King also ends up feeling a bit wasted here, as his nefarious plans are undone almost instantly by Gurgi’s sacrifice. The Horned King’s demise, wonderfully horrible as it is, also seems surprisingly easy for Taran to bring about, with only a minor struggle between them: it makes him look almost weak, even though we’ve seen him crush a goblet with one hand earlier on. In typical Black Cauldron style, Taran is not allowed the honour of finishing the King off himself (because he clearly wouldn’t be able to): the task is given to the cauldron itself, instead. Looking back at the film now, it’s easy to see why the Horned King isn’t particularly memorable; he might make for some great visuals, but when you think about it, he never really… does anything. This lack of impact is largely due to some serious cuts made to the film’s climactic scenes to make them less scary, but at least his utterly terrifying death managed to remain.

Now then – Gurgi. This little fur-ball of indeterminate species has quickly become The Black Cauldron’s equivalent of Jar-Jar Binks, driving almost everyone up the wall with his traitorous, cowardly personality and supremely annoying voice… but am I completely alone in having a bit of a soft spot for him? Most people seem to consider him the pinnacle of irritation, but if I’m totally honest, I actually quite like him; the scene where he first meets Fflewdduh is practically the only one in the whole film that made me laugh. Admittedly, he is a bit of a poor man’s Gollum, with none of that character’s depth or intrigue, but there are other characters in this film which I find myself despising far more than Gurgi. The only thing that I really hate about him is that he’s given one of the film’s most important emotional moments near the end, when it really belongs to Taran – Gurgi’s sacrifice also leads to one of the sappiest and most contrived happy endings in the Disney canon, when the witches are forced to bring him back to life (somehow). The writing for this film is already one of its weakest aspects, but these parts with Gurgi are particularly grating and probably contribute a lot towards the hate he gets from most viewers. I suppose if Disney were too frightened even to kill off Chief in The Fox and the Hound, there was no way they were going to kill their main character here (even if he was going to be resurrected afterwards). Still, at least it does provide a means of redemption for Gurgi, who up to this point has been entirely selfish and greedy (more reasons for hating him; I know I should, but I can’t!).

We all do this behind our boss’s back, right?

For me, Creeper is the unbearable one – my God, I can’t stand this character. I’m not at all surprised to learn that he was solely a Disney creation; they always seem to do that, don’t they? Jamming in an extra character just “because,” as though they’re trying to leave their own distinct Disney mark on the film. Creeper’s role here is the stereotypical one of being a meek and cringing servant to the villain, someone for the Horned King to vent his temper on when things don’t go to plan. Given the circumstances, we should probably feel sorry for him, but personally I think he deserves everything he gets because he’s just horrendous to watch. If you think Hunchback’s gargoyles were bad, just wait till you see Creeper… he has like, no redeeming qualities at all. A villain as sinister as the Horned King didn’t need this joker around, as it just lessens his evil presence to know that he could ever have hired him – Maleficent suffered from a similar problem, albeit to a lesser extent. Creeper’s defining characteristic (aside from cowardice) seems to be his two-facedness, as evidenced by the dramatic switch in personality he undergoes whenever the King isn’t around. He appears to be second-in-command, judging from the way he orders everybody about in the King’s absence, and he takes a twisted pleasure in tormenting poor Hen-Wen at one point as he tries to extract the Black Cauldron’s whereabouts from her on behalf of his master. The only moment of Creeper’s that I liked was his reaction to his master’s death; he starts out horrified, but then, as the implications of what’s just happened sink in, he begins to celebrate gleefully at finally being free of the wretch. I can’t blame him for that given how much the King kicked him about, but I can blame him for being a terrible and unnecessary character. Which he is. So much.

The fourth member of the little good-guy’s gang is Ffllell…. Falafel…. Fliffle-fluff… hang on. Fflewdduh Fflam! There we go! (Floo-duh flam). Honestly, I pity any dyslexic Disney fans out there if they ever review this film, because that has to be the most complicated name in the whole canon. Fflewdduh is quite an enjoyable member of the cast, a run-down minstrel whose magic harp breaks a string whenever he tells a fib, much like Pinocchio. He gets a few funny lines, but the best thing about him is his voice, provided by Nigel Hawthorne at his most deliciously pompous. Fflewdduh does get a few standout moments in his dealings with the witches of Morva and in his introductory scene where he’s trying to reason with his doltish captor, but overall he feels somewhat forgettable because he doesn’t have any solid reason to be in the story at all (at least not here in the film; in the books, he’s apparently a king!). He just kind of appears from nowhere and begins to tag along with Taran and Eilonwy because… why not? In this character more than any of the others, you can really feel the struggle the writers had to condense the plot of the novels without omitting anything too important – Fflewdduh is presumably included simply because he’s important to the story in the books, but he’s not really given anything to do here and, just like Eilonwy and the Horned King, ends up feeling wasted.

On that note, we also have Dallben, who is Taran’s… I don’t know, foster-father? Mentor? Their relationship is never properly explained, but Taran lives with Dallben and is being trained by him for some future purpose. Dallben is only featured briefly in a few scenes at the beginning and end of the film, but he’s actually one of the film’s more engaging characters and I would have really liked to see a bit more of him. He is presented as a sort of sage, full of knowledge and good advice, which might have made him a worthy addition to the main group had he been included on their journey as a Gandalf-like figure. As it is, his lack of screen time prevents him from ever getting any real development, but for what he is, he’s a welcome addition to the film’s otherwise muddled and underused cast.

There’s not much you can say about Hen-Wen, the little pig who feels more like a plot device than a character. Although she’s a likeable little MacGuffin, she and her powers are never given any kind of explanation (even Taran knows next to nothing about them) and after her initial introduction, the writers seem to have been trying to get rid of her as quickly as possible. After losing her, Taran finds her inside the Horned King’s castle and rescues her from death at the expense of his own freedom, as he’s promptly captured by Creeper. After this, we don’t see her again until we get to the part with the Fair Folk, where she is… left behind, to be returned to Dallben off screen while the adventure continues without her. We then see her one last time at the end, safe at home with Dallben, and that’s that. Once again, the writers don’t seem to have known what to do with her.

Why’s Eidilleg dressed like Santa Claus?

Of course, the most pointless creatures in the whole film are the so-called Fair Folk, a group of saccharine fairies whose appearance is so out of the blue that it feels like a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment (except Doli does briefly accompany the gang on the last part of their journey, thus providing a tenuous link between the fairies and the rest of the plot). I don’t know what these characters are here for, which isn’t a good sign – apparently, Doli had a much larger role in the books, but once again, due to some brutal cutting, many scenes with the Fair Folk (and thus most of their context) were dropped.  As it is, the gang just sort of stumbles into their world through a random whirlpool and find that they have Hen-Wen; the king, Eidilleg, finds out what they’re doing there and then sends Hen-Wen on her way before assigning Doli to accompany the others to Morva in search of the Black Cauldron. Doli feels like a bad rip-off of Grumpy from Snow White; I assume they were going for that jerk-with-a-heart-of-gold type of character, but Doli’s not given much chance to show his sensitive side and so just comes off as a plain old jerk.

At this point, it really starts to feel like there are far too many characters being thrown into the film for its own good – but when you stop and think about it, there actually aren’t that many of them. In fact, there are less characters in this film than in earlier ones like The Rescuers, but because the ones in this film are never given enough development, it ends up feeling bloated because we just keep being introduced to more and more of them without ever really knowing why they’re there. As someone who hasn’t read the books (like me), it just gets even more confusing; a good film adaption should be able to stand on its own, with or without prior knowledge of the literary world it’s set in, but if you watch this one without that knowledge you’ll be at a loss as to why characters like the Fair Folk are included.

L-r: Orwen, Orgoch and Orddu

The last ones to be brought in are the three witches of Morva, named Orwen, Orgoch and Orddu. If you’ve seen the film before and actually remembered their names, I’m very impressed. If you can remember which one is which, I’m even more impressed as we’re not given much to help us distinguish them. The witches do at least serve some purpose; they are the current keepers of the Black Cauldron, so it is with them that the heroes must bargain to get access to it.

Orddu, the tallest, is the leader and is given the most distinctive personality, with all the sleazy charm and faux affability of a used-car salesman, but her sisters have no such luck when it comes to characterization. Orwen is little more than a sexist stereotype, an overweight woman who believes she’s far more ravishing than she is (I love her confidence though – you go Orwen!) and is essentially gag-fodder, with her biggest scene being an extended joke involving Fflewdduh (who has been randomly turned into a frog) getting trapped in her voluptuous cleavage. My, how far Disney had fallen… even the antics of Madam Mim didn’t feel this cheap. With all of the cuts made to the film, why did they feel like they had to keep this awful scene in? Oh, and let’s not forget Orgoch, the third witch. She… exists.

The witches are set up as though they’re going to be much more important than they are, despite being introduced so late in the film. After some clowning, Orddu notices Taran’s amazing sword and decides that they will trade the Black Cauldron for it, but only because without the sword they won’t be able to destroy it and will therefore end up giving it back. This logic almost works, but after the Horned King’s castle has been destroyed and they come to take it back, Fflewdduh basically blackmails them into trading it for Gurgi’s life by accusing them of having “no real power.” The fact that they’re able to do this at all feels so contrived; wouldn’t it have been more powerful to leave Gurgi dead, thus holding up his sacrifice and helping the characters to grow? That would be expecting too much from The Black Cauldron, though.

The bulk of the minor characters are a selection of generic, brutish henchmen working for the Horned King – one of them, a redhead who shakes Creeper and yells “More women!” at one point was apparently a self-caricature of animator Phil Nibbelink, who also voiced him. As with all characters of this sort, you just end up wondering vaguely why such a powerful menace as the Horned King would ever need to hire these goons. To be fair, they do manage to capture the heroes a few times, but then the heroes in this film are especially incompetent so you know, it ain’t hard. They also peace out immediately when the King’s ghostly army rises – not very good at our job, are we lads?

The cauldron-born, the Horned King’s zombies, are the stuff of nightmares, with most of them consisting of little more than a rotten skeleton imbued with the cauldron’s mystical evil. It’s truly scary to see them suddenly leaping out at the henchmen and lurching out of the castle to infect the surrounding lands… but their terror is cut short, because they’re in The Black Cauldron. Nobody is allowed to be too competent here! I can handle losing the Fair Folk scenes, but cutting out the parts with these guys was just a plain bad decision – the quality of the film goes up dramatically during their brief appearance, with some of the best cinematography in the whole thing. What a waste, having them defeated so quickly.

As with Maleficent, the Horned King’s most effective sidekicks are animals, in this case freaky-looking dragon creatures which are apparently called gwythaints. They are responsible for another of the film’s standout scenes where they capture Hen-Wen after Taran lets her wander off – the design of these things is actually reminiscent of Maleficent herself in her dragon form and they’re almost as scary as she is. Yet, once again, I can’t help feeling like they’re underused. If they’d cut out Creeper and most of the Henchman to focus more on the gwythaints and cauldron-born, the film’s dark atmosphere could have worked a lot better.

 

Animation

The animation for the film was ambitious and expensive, marking the first foray into computer animation by Disney (save for a few minor scenes in The Fox and the Hound). David W. Spencer from the studio’s still camera department created a breakthrough technique called the animation photo transfer process (APT), which was first used here and enhanced the technology by which rough animation was processed onto celluloid. According to Wikipedia, “The rough animation would first be photographed onto high-contrast litho film, and the resulting negative would be copied onto the plastic cel sheets that would transfer lines and the colours which eventually eliminated the hand-inking process.” The technique couldn’t be used for the whole film as the APT-transferred line art faded from the cels over time so most of it was done in the usual xerographic process, but Spencer’s work was still significant enough to win him a technical Academy Award. (As it turned out, the computer technology introduced here would eventually be the death of the short-lived APT process, but it was still a major step forward for traditional animators).

From this film onwards, I’ll start to discuss the ways in which computer animation was used to enhance the Disney films it was a part of. In these early days, it could only be used in a handful of scenes and only for certain types of objects – for The Black Cauldron, most of it was used to animate the cauldron itself, as well as Eilonwy’s bauble and a few other parts like the boat that the gang escape in near the end. The Great Mouse Detective, which was in production around the same time as this film, also featured some computer animation; in fact, the effects for that film were completed first. When Joe Hale saw the work the team for that film had done, he was so excited about the possibilities it created that he had them create some computer animation for The Black Cauldron, too. I do think that using it mainly for the cauldron was a wise decision, as it doesn’t look as badly dated as some other computer effects from the 1980s; hard, inflexible objects like cauldrons lent themselves well to the limited abilities of the technology at the time. For some of the film’s other effects, animator Don Paul incorporated some live-action footage that was then animated over in the style of certain parts of Fantasia; for instance, he used footage of mist created by dry ice to create the steam and smoke coming out of the cauldron.

Aside from the innovative use of computer effects, though, the rest of the film’s animation sadly isn’t anything special. You can really feel the loss of the Nine Old Men at times here, with some downright shoddy moments that made me cringe with embarrassment for Disney. One scene that always stands out to me as one of the ugliest is just after Hen-Wen has been captured by the gwythaints. Taran runs up to a rocky ledge and sees her being borne away by them to the Horned King’s castle while a computer-generated sky swirls ominously in the background, but the hand-drawn characters of Taran and Gurgi do not mesh well with this background at all. Every now and then, their outlines take on a fuzzy graininess which really takes you out of the film, as you can literally see the seams of the thing – and there are other moments like this elsewhere, too.

Even as late as 1985, Disney were also still recycling material from earlier films – this was the Dark Age, after all. In the early scene when Dallben is using Hen-Wen’s magic to find the Horned King (which is otherwise one of the more visually striking scenes), the first image to appear in the water is a recycled piece from the Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia.

I will say that some of the special effects do hold up well, though, especially in the climactic scenes at the castle when the Horned King is raising his army of the dead. It’s just a shame that so much ended up being cut; it’s interesting that the cauldron-born parts were considered inappropriate, yet there’s an extended and pointless gag with Fflewdduh trapped in Orwen’s cleavage as a frog.

Despite these deficiencies, to close this section I have to give a shout-out to the death of the Horned King for being the most gruesome moment in the entire Disney canon. Seriously, if the whole film could have been animated to this standard, we’d have a masterpiece on our hands – it’s fantastic. Even if you don’t end up watching this film, I’d recommend any animation fan checks out this scene.

 

Plot

Disney had originally secured the rights to the entire Chronicles of Prydain series with the intent of turning it into a franchise, but after the film flopped so badly all future plans of a series were killed off (at least until the recent announcement that a remake was in the works). This film was based in particular on parts of the first two books in the series – The Book of Three and, of course, The Black Cauldron. The books themselves are based on Welsh mythology, which has led to a popular assumption that the film is set in a sort of alternate, medieval Wales.

Apparently, Ralph Bakshi was approached to be the film’s director early in the production process around 1979, after the success of his own fantasy films Wizards (1977) and The Lord of the Rings (1978), but he turned the offer down as he believed his style was too mature for a Disney film. Perhaps this would be true ordinarily, but I think The Black Cauldron could have been a perfect Disney film for him to work on; the dark subject matter would have suited him well, and he’d have gotten the chance to work with John Hurt again!

So – what’s the deal with these infamous cuts? In 1984, with the film more or less complete, Disney began to hold test screenings at their studio theatre to see if things were as bad as they thought they were. Apparently, children in the audience were so terrified during the original version of the “cauldron-born” sequence that they fled the theatre en masse, screaming. (Sounds awesome!) Newly-appointed Jeffrey Katzenberg was deeply concerned at the extremely macabre tone the film had taken, so he requested that the filmmakers cut out ten minutes of the film. The animators objected and Joe Hale pointed out that animated films aren’t typically edited in post-production in the way that live-action films are, but Katzenberg was adamant, so they cut out about six minutes and screened it for him again. Unfortunately, Katzenberg was too sharp for them and realised that they hadn’t cut as much as he’d asked: when he said ten minutes, he meant ten minutes.  This time, he took the film into an editing bay and, to the animator’s horror, began editing it himself. This was sacrilege as far as they were concerned – how dare this guy swan in and start chopping up their four-year passion project? Company chief Michael Eisner was forced to step in and get him to stop, but Katzenberg was still able to remove around twelve minutes of footage from the final film, mainly scenes of the cauldron-born and the Fair Folk.

A cut scene – sorry it’s so small!

Although leaving these scenes in place might have helped the film’s climax, I doubt they would have been enough to save the picture. The whole plot feels episodic, disjointed and poorly paced, which really robs the climax of any impact anyway – after a relatively strong start, the film soon begins to meander and gets bogged down in masses of useless characters, before suddenly wrapping everything up far too simply without resolving all of its plot threads. There are some glaring plot holes here and there; why is Fflewdduh allowed to escape the castle, for instance? He simply yells at the guards to stand aside – and they do! All resistance is abandoned, ostensibly because of their fear of the magic sword, and the gang just runs out like they own the place. What? Then there are the many lazy clichés that the film falls into (at one point, Dallben actually sends Taran to “the hidden cottage at the edge of the Forbidden Forest”), although perhaps some of them were less clichéd at the time, back before Harry Potter appeared and Lord of the Rings blew up. Much like with The Sword in the Stone, the prologue sets the story up to be far grander and more intriguing than it ends up being – the Black Cauldron itself is actually the manifest spirit of an evil king, apparently. Little details like that really drew me in at first and I enjoyed the narration, but the film doesn’t maintain that momentum for long.

 

Cinematography

This film was the first in the canon to feature that beloved Walt Disney Pictures logo that all eighties and nineties kids remember: the simple white castle and text over a sky blue background, with a star flying over the castle to the bars from When You Wish Upon a Star. This was used for the next twenty-odd years until the modern CGI logo was introduced in 2006, at the start of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. It was also the first to put its production credits at the end of the film rather than the beginning – from here on out, all Disney films close with end credits set to music. The ones in this film are lovely, with some great artwork of the characters in a sort of tapestry style paired with Bernstein’s woodwind instrumental, another of the rare plusses for The Black Cauldron.

The “firsts” continue. This was the first Disney film to be presented in six-track Dolby Stereo surround sound, and it was also the first to be presented in the old Super Technirama 70mm format since Sleeping Beauty. For the first time since The Jungle Book, the old multiplane cameras were also briefly brought back out of retirement and improved upon – the last film to use multiplanes would be The Little Mermaid in 1989 (although by this point they were being outsourced, as Disney’s cameras were no longer operational), after which they were officially replaced with the new CAPS computer system.

Like the rest of the film, the cinematography is somewhat… uneven. In its best moments it’s sensational, some of the most unusual and mesmerising work we’ve yet seen, but at other times it looks cheap and nasty. The scenery is amazingly grim for a Disney film and remains some of their darkest work to date (along with Hunchback), with the backgrounds of the Horned King’s castle a particular highlight. It is perhaps ironic that the film really shines in its darkest moments, especially during the haunting climax where the cauldron-born are brought to sinister life (although Katzenberg’s cuts rob the scenes of the payoff they needed). The camerawork is some of the best we’ve seen in the Dark Age so far, with lots of creative use of perspective and long shots – they’ve even begun to incorporate jump scares! (Seriously, watch out any time Taran looks around a corner).

During the production process, Tim Burton drew some concept art for the film and apparently enjoyed the experience immensely, as he was given complete freedom to create exactly what he wanted. Of course, none of this work ended up being used, something which Burton himself commented on in hindsight, saying that he had the feeling that while the executives liked his work they didn’t want to show it to anybody. Supposedly he was planning to incorporate Alien-style face-huggers as the Horned King’s minions, so I can kind of understand why such adult work had to be dropped!

The high point for the cinematography begins around the point where the Horned King awakens the cauldron-born, continues through his nightmarish demise and culminates in the collapse of his castle. Apart from some rather dated CG shots of the castle exploding, the sequence is one of the most gripping in the whole film and it’s worth watching all the dreck beforehand to get to it.

 

Soundtrack

In yet another first, this was the first Disney film to contain no songs of any kind – the music here consists solely of the instrumental score, composed by Elmer Bernstein of Trading Places (1983) and Ghostbusters (1984) fame. As in that latter film, here Bernstein used a ghostly ondes Martenot (an early electric instrument from the 1920s) to build up the eerie mood in Prydain – you can hear it prominently in a lot of the long shots of the Horned King’s castle. The score is at its best whenever that character is on the screen; his theme is dramatic and chilling, perfect for the tone they were trying to strike with him. The overall score is distinctive and appropriate to the tone, and was one of the few aspects of the film to be praised by critics.

Unfortunately, due to the extensive last minute revisions, much of Bernstein’s score was cut and left unused. In its minority, the score was re-recorded for the original album release by Varèse Sarabande in 1985 with Bernstein conducting the Utah Symphony Orchestra. However, the album soon fell out of print and many of the film’s tracks didn’t resurface until 1986, when a bootleg copy entitled simply “Taran” was supplied to speciality soundtrack outlets. The soundtrack received a new release in 2012, as part of an Intrada Records partnership with Walt Disney Records which included several other Disney film soundtracks.

There are some creative touches in the sound effects at times, such as when the Horned King activates the cauldron’s power, for which the sound of a space shuttle launch was used. However, the writing is pretty dreadful throughout the film and most of the voice acting does little to improve it – Grant Bardsley in particular is very flat and wooden, and even Eilonwy can feel a bit “false” at times, as though Susan Sheridan was just going through the motions. Naturally, John Hurt is the highlight here, but credit goes to Nigel Hawthorne too for injecting a little oomph into Fflewdduh (I love that little line in the dungeon where he’s urging the others to run and then goes: “Make haste? I must save myself!”). It is a bit odd that a minstrel character gets no songs though, save for one short snippet just after their escape from the castle. My single favourite line is probably this delightful piece of innuendo from Orwen to Fflewdduh: “You don’t mind if I… pluck your harp?” I might not care for that part of the film, but I do get a good chuckle out of that line!

 

Final Verdict –

As if the film didn’t have enough “firsts” to its credit, it was also the first Disney film to get a “PG” rating (even coming close to getting a PG-13 before the infamous cuts were made). Interestingly, despite this, it retained the usual “U” rating in the UK (the equivalent of “G” in America). According to critic John Grant, expectations for the film were high after years of hype, especially with the release of other animated fantasy features like The Dark Crystal (1982).

It’s painful to linger on this too long; we all know how things turned out. The film was a complete and utter disgrace, bombing so badly that it failed to earn back its own budget and was beaten at the box office by… The Care Bears Movie. Good grief. It didn’t help that The Black Cauldron was the most expensive animated film ever produced at the time, making its failure that much more catastrophic for the studio. However, outside of the USA it actually didn’t fare quite so badly – it did surprisingly well in France (of all places), where it ended up the fifth-most-attended film of the year, and it’s rumoured to have done well in Japan too (possibly even inspiring the aesthetic of The Legend of Zelda video game series).

Co-director Ted Berman retired in shame, while Richard Rich and producer Joe Hale were both fired. Shockingly, Lloyd Alexander (the author of the books) actually liked it, but he did stress that this was because he didn’t see the film as an adaptation of his books and was merely watching it on its own terms as a fun fantasy romp. Roger Ebert also gave it a fairly positive review, so it definitely didn’t have as overwhelmingly negative a response as people think.

That said, it was unquestionably a failure for Disney. Christopher Finch has suggested that the problem was over-ambitiousness, with the project simply growing too large and unwieldy for the relatively inexperienced animators – the problem lay not in the idea, but in the execution of it. Still, despite the obvious plot problems (he says that the film was “weighed down by an excess of quasi-mythological claptrap”), he does admit that the special effects are dazzling at times. John Grant believed that the main reason it did so poorly was because it couldn’t live up to the excessive promotion Disney used on it; a lot of the ideas that had been promoted, such as 3D holographic projections “leaping” out of the screen, ended up being scrapped. Grant also highlights the writing once again as a major flaw, saying that the film’s happy ending is “hopelessly contrived” and a “rather clumsy deus ex machina.”

One wonders why Disney didn’t consider re-releasing the film to try and recoup some of the costs, but with such poor critical reception the idea probably seemed too risky, as it might just end up losing them more money. There was a tie-in video game sharing the film’s title which was released by Sierra On-Line in 1986, but there was no home media release of The Black Cauldron for years. Eventually, following many requests from the film’s fans, Disney finally released it on VHS in the UK in 1997 and in the US in 1998, as part of the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection in a pan-and-scan transfer, a full thirteen years after its original theatrical run. The film then received a DVD release in 2000 as part of the Walt Disney Gold Classic Collection which featured a browsable art gallery, a game and the 1952 Donald Duck short Trick or Treat.

In 2008, Disney then announced a Special Edition DVD release for the film, but this failed to materialise until 2010, when it was re-advertised as the 25^th Anniversary Edition (this is the copy I have). It contains another game and some deleted scenes, along with all of the features from the earlier DVD release.

Following this whole mess, Disney decided it was time to buck up their act – enough was enough. From then on, they planned to make sure they had multiple projects in production alongside one another so that they wouldn’t be relying so heavily on single films (a problem Walt had experienced decades earlier after WWII). Since the mid-1950s as Disneyland was opening, there had increasingly been gaps of two, three or even four years between Disney film releases, but this was never to happen again; since The Black Cauldron’s release in 1985, there have been only five individual “gap years” in 1987, 1993, 2006, 2015 and 2017.

It might come as a surprise to hear that Disney are apparently intending to return to the world of Prydain in live-action sometime soon, as they re-purchased the rights to the books in 2016. When you think about it, this is actually quite a smart move; unlike the many other cash-grab remakes, this one makes sense. The original film now has a considerable cult fan base, so what better way to gain some credibility than to remake this flawed film in a way that does justice to the source material? A well-written remake of The Black Cauldron that improves the character development and doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of the story could do wonders for Disney’s reputation.

For now, though, all we have is this film. Summarising what I think of it personally is tough; for all its issues (and there are many), I can still feel the passion behind it shining through at times. It’s like there’s an exceptionally strong film somewhere inside it that’s straining to break out, but you only ever get glimpses of the greatness that it could have attained, had it been handled better. I didn’t hate watching it as much as I expected, even watching it twice to try and better understand the tangled plot. The main strength of the film lies in its visuals and especially in its climax, but I’m afraid these aren’t enough to save it from the often mind-numbing script, the sometimes deadpan voice acting and the occasionally awful animation (at least by Disney standards). If you want to get a full picture of Disney history then you can’t miss this one, but for the more casual viewer this is one which you might want to seriously consider skipping, at least if you’re pressed for time.

THIS IS THE SCARIEST SHOT IN THE FILM! CALM DOWN ORGOCH!

My Rating – 2/5

 

References

I consulted my own books to research for this review, as well as some standard web sources:

The Art of Walt Disney (2011 ed.) by Christopher Finch

Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters (1998 ed.) by John Grant

Disney’s Art of Animation: From Mickey Mouse to Hercules (1997 ed.) by Bob Thomas

By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3591120 – credit for the poster

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm5473782/mediaindex?ref_=nm_phs_md_sm – credit for Taron Egerton image

https://magicalmoviereviews.wordpress.com/tag/cauldron-born/ – credit for cut scene still

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2CLTQraB0c – credit for End Credits still

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Trivia/TheBlackCauldron – TV Tropes trivia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cauldron_(film) – Wiki page

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088814/ – IMDB profile