Two Cents: Disney Deep-Cuts Begins with a Dive Into THE BLACK CAULDRON

Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.

The Pick

There have been great Disney animated films, and there have been terrible Disney animated films, and there have been many Disney animated films that fall somewhere between those two poles. But there is only one film that flopped so spectacularly that it threatened to kill Disney animation completely.

That would be 1985’s The Black Cauldron.

To be fair to The Black Cauldron, disaster had been brewing for a while. Following Walt’s death in 1966, Disney as a whole, and its animation division especially, struggled to regain the vigor and invention that had powered so many animated classics. And as culture in the ’70s pivoted to darker, more cynical trends, more and more the Disney brand seemed out of step, cloying, and irrelevant.

Development of The Black Cauldron, an (extremely loose) adaptation of the first two books in Lloyd Alexander’s five-book series, The Chronicles of Prydain, began in 1971, before entering actual production in 1980. The film’s production was long, expensive, and filled with creative turnover, including junking all of the work provided by a young animator by the name of Tim Burton.

When new studio boss Jeffery Katzenberg took over the company, he was already eyeing the animation department as an expensive liability no longer worth the hassle. His opinion was compounded when he sat down to watch The Black Cauldron and was mortified by the grim tone, dour color palette, and nightmarish imagery. Hoping to placate Katzenberg, a test-screening was held to let actual families and children, the eventual paying audience, see the film.

Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. The screening climaxed with waves of parents storming angrily from the theater, often carrying screaming, terrified children in their arms. Katzenberg ordered 12 minutes, containing the most viscerally disturbing imagery, be chopped from the film.

In its truncated form, The Black Cauldron was released in 1985 and promptly flopped. Katzenberg gave serious thought to closing Disney’s animation division for good, but the studio’s next film, 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective, proved a modest enough hit that Katzenberg relented. Two of that film’s directors, Ron Clements and John Musker, next directed The Little Mermaid. That film’s blockbuster success created an entire new generation of Disney-lovers and kicked off a new golden age for the studio’s animation, the after-effects of which we are still experiencing.

As for The Black Cauldron, it was largely buried. Over time, the film developed a strong cult following, whose demand for the movie eventually led to Disney finally releasing it on VHS in 1997. The deleted sequences, including the gruesome ‘cauldron born’ scene, achieved their own brand of notoriety for years.

But now, The Black Cauldron is available for anyone to watch via the Disney+ streaming service, like a stealth bomb of terror planted between The Aristocats and Wreck-It Ralph.

All these years later, how does The Black Cauldron stack up as a film, regardless of its troubled reputation? — Brendan

Next Week’s Pick:

A young pre-007 Sean Connery stars with Albert Sharpe and Janet Munro in a charming foray into Irish fantasy, mixing it up with wily leprechauns and a screaming banshee! Darby O’Gill and the Little People is a film I saw once as a kid (and just the second half at that), but absolutely loved. I’m excited to revisit it properly, and hopefully the cultural depictions, which were made in earnest and inspired by Walt Disney meeting with the Irish Folklore Commission, will hold up. — Austin

Would you like to be a guest in the next’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!

Our Guests

Austin Wilden:

The Black Cauldron is a part of the Disney Animated Canon I’d never seen before. I remember seeing ads for it in front of other Disney features on VHS growing up and have since become familiar with its infamous place in Disney history as a movie that almost sunk the studio. It’s not hard to see why just looking at the finished project, even without the knowledge of its troubled production.

As ‘80s animated features based on classic fantasy novels go, it’s nowhere near the quality of Rankin Bass’ The Last Unicorn or even Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. The latter sharing some stylistic touches with the animation on display here, which is as close as this movie got to keeping me interested. Then there are some points where style shift in the animation feel more like the product of a rush to finish the project during the final days of reworking it to tone down the darkness. This leads to noticeable flubs in the background art, linework on characters switching between clean and sketchy within a single scene, and some off-model moments, like the Horned King suddenly having pupils in his last scene.

With the contents of the story, it’s apparent how hacked to the bone this was in order to tone down the dark elements that apparently frightened children out of test screenings. Namely the fact it feels like the movie introduces a new comic relief character every other scene. I didn’t even find that pattern annoying as much as tiring, though some of the schtick would get an occasional mild chuckle out of me.

The Black Cauldron is a mess, but it’s not an interesting one unless you know about the troubled history behind it. Even with some of the unique elements on display, I mainly found myself bored with it. I wish I could find some hidden value or theme to latch onto, but I can’t work up much passion to even dislike this movie.(@WC_Wit)

Brendan Agnew (The Norman Nerd):

It’s easy to see why Disney thought at one time that they had something here. The Black Cauldron boasts quality fantasy source material pedigree, some gorgeous design, and a script that hit the requisite Hero’s Journey Bullet Points (albeit by butchering said source material, BUT WE’LL GET TO THAT LATER) that could have guided a rollicking fantasy yarn. And heck, when John Huston is delivering that opening prologue alongside those sumptuous visuals, it works.

Then you start meeting the characters.

I mean, Taran just sucks. They all kinda suck (which is super annoying, given that Alexander’s writing of them was charming as all get out), but Taran absolutely sucks the most, and what makes it worse is that they manage to get Eilonwy just right enough that she’s super active by ’80s Disney heroine standards, but then she’s still shackled to Taran.

Who sucks.

And he didn’t have to, none of them had to, it didn’t have to be this much of a disaster. When Disney scooped the guts out of the first two novels of the Prydain Chronicles to cobble together the skeleton of a basic fantasy adventure, they forgot that skeletons aren’t alive and their story was fucking dead even as they dumped insane amounts of money to try and cobble something together. They definitely had the pieces at their disposal, but the resulting film plays out like someone dumped the pieces on the floor and took a hammer to them until they formed a rough approximation of a picture.

Every now and then a narrative beat will land effectively or the truly astounding imagery will elevate a sequence, but mostly this movie just staggers through the motions. I know we all love a good diamond in the rough story, but there’s a reason this film got buried. (@BLCAgnew)

Husain Sumra:

There are few things more interesting in cinema than seeing Disney take a swing at something new and miss so profoundly. The Black Cauldron, neatly known as the movie that almost killed the company, is one of those things.

The movie is a clear attempt to draw in all those Star Wars fans of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Those damned teenagers and their darker sensibilities. You can see that in Taran, who is essentially Luke Skywalker in the first 5 minutes of A New Hope but for the entire damned movie (and boy, is it grating).

Similarly, nearly every character is right up there as some of the least charming Disney characters ever. The one bright spot here are small sequences of pure animated terror, which were actually more terrifying until Jeffrey Katzenberg took an axe to them.

The Black Cauldron isn’t a good movie by any definition. It’s a slog, it’s got bad characters and it’s the cinematic equivalent of Disney going into Hot Topic and coming out with the most obnoxious things on the shelf. At the very least, it’s a fascinating mess of a movie. (@hsumra)

The Team

Brendan Foley:

The problem with The Black Cauldron is not that it’s scary, or bloody, or gross, or any of the other very valid things that people point to when trying to express what’s so wrong with this movie.

No, the problem is that everything in between the various grotesques is just deathly dull and unengaging. The Black Cauldron is less a story than a linear series of interactions, with characters dropping in and out of the movie seemingly at random with no sense of overarching flow and no narrative momentum. And it doesn’t help that this might be the single most unpleasant ensemble Disney ever assembled. Other people have already kicked Taran enough (he does suck, though) but, really, the entire central group are varying shades of either useless or obnoxious, as are the usually-reliable stable of colorful supporting characters. Everyone is mad and hostile all the time, and this, coupled with a color scheme that’s like moss growing on poop, makes for a monotonous experience. But, really, if you’re doing a big fantasy quest movie and you’re core fellowship never generate any sincere bond, never cohere into a family that we love and we fear for, then you’re trying to start a car with no engine.

The Black Cauldron is interesting inasmuch as it fits into the canon of fantasy films, feeling very much of a piece with the kind of dour, grimy flavor that was so frequently used in the ’80s for films like Dragonslayer or Ladyhawke. But it is only of interest as an artifact, never as a film in its own right. (@TheTrueBrendanF)

Austin Vashaw:

It’s been a good while since I’d watched this, and I didn’t recall much. Turns out there’s a reason for that — there’s not much meat on these bones.

That said, I may be the only one among our team who finds this kind of charming. it’s got a lot of problems, but they’re the same problems that plague a lot of the 80s and 90s animation set from both pre-renaissance Disney and their alternatives like Hanna Barbera, Don Bluth, Filmation, and even some Warner Bros and early Dreamworks. Annoying one-note characters, meandering narratives, and scattershot tone issues that often feel too gnarly for younger kids and too dopey for the older set. I’m of the age where I watched a lot of those growing up.

Forgetting the Disney classics for a moment and just comparing The Black Cauldron to its contemporaries, it’s still mid-to-upper tier. The animation is mostly great, and I really dig the creepier aspects which give it some teeth. The villains don’t have much depth, but they certainly look cool. And I do like that the furry sidekick character Gurgi even gets some surprisingly meaningful character beats.