Film Discussion of the Week: The Black Cauldron

In the same boat. I know I’ve seen this but probably not in like 25 years.

I always loved Disney movies, and I can't believe I didn't know about this one. I added it to my must watch list now.

Balder Looks good to me.

(My long overdue thoughts on The Black Cauldron):

I love The Black Cauldron. It's the only Disney film I still fully enjoy as an adult and one of the very few american animated films I truly respect. It was certainly ambitious for a Disney film at its time, but more so today.

What I love about the film:

-The fantasy setting
-The horror-atmosphere/dark-fantasy atmosphere
-The ambitious animation (it was the most expensive animated film ever made at the time of its release)
-No musical numbers!
-No comedy or comedic reliefs
-No anthropomorphic animals or talking animals- probably a first for Disney
-Character designs are unusually refined for a Disney film yet retain the best aspects of classic Disney animation

In other words, The Black Cauldron can safely be described as an ambitious film. Unlike other ambitious Disney films like Fantasia, Sleeping Beauty, and The Rescuer's Down Under, I really feel like The Black Cauldron knocked the ball out of the park in just about every aspect of the storytelling; unlike those films, The Black Cauldron had none of the things that people expect to see in Dinsey animation. Perhaps that's why the film flopped so hard, but to me its what I always wanted to see in a Disney animated film.

I think the films production alone is fascinating. I can't think of another Disney animated film that had a more troubled production than this one. For starters, Black Cauldron was in production for almost a decade, far longer than any other animated film of theirs. Disney intended The Black Cauldron to be their monte opus and a film that would break new ground for the then-struggling studio and the animation industry as a whole. I just can't help but respect that level of effort, especially when the finished product really was a respectable work.

Then, the minute the film officially went into production during the early eighties, a number of major roadblocks occurred. First a large-scale animator's strike happened at the studio, then just after the film was completed there was a corporate takeover and CEO Ron Miller was replaced by Jeffery Katzenburg. Long story short, Katzenburg was appalled by the amount of gore and horror imagery in the original cut and ordered the studio to completely revise the film, which resulted in over 10 minutes of footage being cut out and in some cases replaced with inferior animation, a move which in producer Joe Hale's own words "really hurt the picture". I couldn't agree more. To this day I am still waiting patiently and out of morbid curiosity for that long-lost footage to resurface on the web. A complete restoration of the original cut would be a dream come true for fans of the film, but it would never happen.

Despite its troubled development and unfortunate censorship, I still award The Black Cauldron 5/5 for being the most ambitious Disney film of all time. Fuck the haters. It's a great film!

And whether or not you love the Black Cauldron or hate it, you can't deny that it's impact on the animation industry; immediately after its release Disney shut down their longtime studio in California and moved to a new one in Florida where their film making process was completely reformed. Starting with the Great Mouse Detective their films now employed cost-cutting measures to every aspect of their films' visuals, such as cheaper-quality paints, less refined character designs, shorter production periods, etc. and eventually resulted in a long string of "classics" such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and other "classics" that made up the Disney Renaissance. Personally I would've preferred they went out on The Black Cauldron.

I haven't looked into it myself so I don't know much about movies being specifically censored for a swedish audience, but all those scenes in Black Cauldron have definitely been present every time I've watched it, multiple times on TV (swedish dub only) and DVD (both english and swedish dubs).