The Black Cauldron (film)

Walt Disney Productions optioned Lloyd Alexander's five-volume series in 1971,[7] and pre-production work began in 1973 when the film rights to Alexander's books were finally obtained. According to Ollie Johnston, it was he and Frank Thomas that convinced the studio to produce the movie, and that if it had been done properly, it might be "as good as Snow White".[9] Because of the numerous storylines, and with over thirty characters in the original series, several story artists and animators worked on the film's development throughout the 1970s.[10] When The Rescuers (1977) was completed, The Black Cauldron was tentatively scheduled to be released in 1980. Veteran artist Mel Shaw created inspirational conceptual pastel sketches, which future Disney president and CEO Ron Miller considered to be too advanced for the newly hired animators.[11]

Therefore, by August 1978, the studio had pushed its release date back to Christmas 1984 due to their inability to animate realistic human characters; its original release date was later assumed by The Fox and the Hound (1981).[12] During its development limbo, storyboard artist Vance Gerry was selected to create beat storyboards that would outline the plot, action, and locations. Having established the three principal characters, Gerry adapted the Horned King into a big-bellied Viking who had a red beard, fiery temper, and wore a steel helmet with two large horns. Meanwhile, the studio hired Rosemary Anne Sisson as they desired an experienced British screenwriter for the film.[13]

Animator John Musker was the film's initial director, having been offered the position by production head Tom Wilhite. As director, Musker was assigned to expand several sequences in the first act, but they were eventually deemed too comedic.[14] Musker explained, "...the older people I was working with didn't like any of my ideas."[15] When production on The Fox and the Hound (1981) had wrapped, several feature animation directors Art Stevens, Richard Rich, Ted Berman, and Dave Michener became involved in The Black Cauldron. When Miller decided too many people were involved, he decided Stevens was not appropriate to supervise the project so he contacted Joe Hale, who was a longtime layout artist at Disney Studios, to serve as producer.[11][14][16]

With Hale as producer, actual production on The Black Cauldron officially began in 1980.[10][17] He tossed out visual character artwork submitted by Tim Burton, and along with Rich and Berman, they desired a Sleeping Beauty (1959)–style approach. Both directors brought Milt Kahl out of retirement to create new character designs for Taran, Eilonwy, Fflewddur Fflam, and the other principal characters. Hale and the story team (including two story artists David Jonas and Al Wilson that he added) heavily revised the film, by which they capsulized the stories of the first two books. They also made some considerable changes, which led to Sisson's departure as she developed creative differences with Hale and the directors.[18]

Animators John Musker and Ron Clements, also citing creative differences, were removed from the project and began development on The Great Mouse Detective (1986).[19] Displeased with Gerry's concept for the Horned King, Hale turned the Horned King into a thin creature donning a hood and carrying a spectral presence with shadowed face and glowing red eyes. His role was then expanded into a composite villain of several characters from the books.[10] Taran and Eilonwy eventually acquired elements of the past designs and costumes of earlier Disney characters, especially the latter, who was drawn to resemble Princess Aurora.[18][20]

According to Musker, Gary Burghoff of M*A*S*H fame had auditioned as Gurgi. He tried numerous vocal iterations since Ted Berman had no idea how the character should sound like. After three hours, the directors grew frustrated and Burgoff, who had refused to leave, was thrown out of the studio.[21] By 1982, John Byner, an impressionist, had been cast in the part.[22] After Bryner was shown the character concepts for Gurgi, he felt inspired to add a "child's inflection" when creating the voice.[23]

In January 1981, Hayley Mills stated she was being considered for the voice of Eilonwy.[24] That same year, Mills hosted an episode of NBC's Disney's Wonderful World, in which she met with Hale and the directors to discuss the part.[25] The role eventually went to Susan Sheridan. According to Sheridan, she recorded the voice on three separate trips to the Disney studios.[26] In a 1983 Disney Channel special titled Backstage at Disney, Hale stated that Jonathan Winters was voicing King Eidilleg.[27] The role eventually went to Arthur Malet.

Shortly before the film's initially planned 1984 theatrical release, a test screening for the rough cut of The Black Cauldron was held at the studio's private theater in Burbank, California. After the film, particularly the climactic "cauldron-born" sequence, proved to be too intense and disturbing for the majority of the children in the audience (most of whom ran out of the theater in terror before it was even finished),[28] the newly appointed Disney studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg ordered certain scenes from The Black Cauldron be cut, as a result of the length and the fear that their nature would alienate children.[29] Since animated films were generally edited in storyboard form using Leica reels (later known as animatics: storyboards shot sequentially and set to temporary audio tracks), producer Joe Hale objected to Katzenberg's demands. Katzenberg responded by having the film brought into an edit bay and editing the film himself.[29]

Informed of what Katzenberg was doing by Hale, the newly appointed Disney CEO Michael Eisner called Katzenberg in the editing room and convinced him to stop. Though he did what Eisner insisted, Katzenberg requested that the film be modified, and delayed its scheduled Christmas 1984 release to July 1985 so that the film could be reworked.[29]

The film was ultimately cut by twelve minutes,[30] with existing scenes rewritten and reanimated for continuity.[29] Many of the deleted scenes involved extended character interactions, but other edits involved violent content, including the undead "Cauldron-Born", who are used as the Horned King's army in the film's final act. While most of the scenes were seamlessly removed from the film, the Cauldron-Born sequence contains rather recognizable lapses because the removal of the scenes of the Cauldron-Born mauling the henchmen, as well as one of them being dissolved by the mist, creates a jump in the film's soundtrack.[7]

Invented by David W. Spencer from the studio's still camera department,[31] the animation photo transfer process (APT) was first used for The Black Cauldron which would enhance the technology by which the rough animation would be processed onto celluloid. First, the rough animation would be photographed onto high-contrast lithographic film, and the resulting negative would be copied onto the plastic cel sheets that would transfer lines and the colors which eventually eliminated the hand-inking process.[32][33] However, as the APT-transferred line art would fade off of the cels over time, most of the film's animation was done using the xerographic process, which had been used by Disney since the late 1950s.[34] Spencer would win a technical Academy Award for this process, but the computer would soon render the APT process obsolete.[31]

The Black Cauldron is notable for being Disney's first animated feature film to incorporate computer-generated imagery in its animation for bubbles, a boat, a floating orb of light, and the cauldron itself.[35] Though The Black Cauldron was released a year before The Great Mouse Detective, both films were in production simultaneously for some time and the computer graphics for the latter were done first. When producer Joe Hale heard about what was being done, the possibilities made him excited and he made the crew from The Great Mouse Detective project create some computer animation for his own film. For other effects, animator Don Paul used live action footage of dry ice mists to create the steam and smoke coming out of the cauldron.[30]

The Black Cauldron was released in North America on July 24, 1985.[3] Two days later, the film was also screened at Radio City Music Hall in New York City.[43] While officially budgeted by Disney executives at $25 million,[11] the film's production manager, Don Hahn,[11] said in his documentary, Waking Sleeping Beauty, that it cost $44 million to produce the film.[5][6] The $44-million budget made it the most expensive animated film ever made at the time.[7] The film grossed $21.3 million domestically.[3] It resulted in a loss for Walt Disney Productions and put the future of the animation department in jeopardy (earning it the nickname "the film that almost killed Disney").[7] It was not distributed as a home video release for more than a decade after its theatrical run after its poor performance.[29] Adding insult to injury, the film was also outgrossed by The Care Bears Movie ($22.9 million domestically), which was released four months earlier by the much-smaller Canadian animation studio Nelvana.[44] The film was however more successful outside North America, notably in France, where it had 3,074,481 admissions and was the fifth most attended film of the year.[45]

The film was the last Disney animated film to be completed at the original Animation Building of the Walt Disney Studios (Walt Disney Productions) in Burbank, California.[46] The animation department was moved to the Air Way facility in nearby Glendale in December 1984, and, following corporate restructuring, eventually returned to the Burbank studio in the mid-1990s at a new facility.[44]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film had an approval rating of 55% based on 33 reviews, with an average score of 5.6/10. The critics' consensus reads: "Ambitious but flawed, The Black Cauldron is technically brilliant as usual, but lacks the compelling characters of other Disney animated classics."[47] On Metacritic, the film had a weighted average score of 59 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[48]

Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, praising the film as "a rip-roaring tale of swords and sorcery, evil and revenge, magic and pluck and luck... And it takes us on a journey through a kingdom of some of the more memorable characters in any recent Disney film." He noted how "involving" the story was, and felt "the key to the movie is in the richness of the characterizations, and the two best characters, I think, are the Horned King and a fuzzy little creature named Gurgi."[49]

Charles Solomon of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the "highly dimensional sound track, with its opulent Elmer Bernstein score and excellent vocal performances, is a technological work of art. But it is the animation itself with some of the best work the studio has produced since Walt Disney's death in 1966 that dazzles the viewer." He felt that if "its script and direction were equal to the animation, Cauldron would be a masterpiece to rank with Snow White and Pinocchio, instead of the frustrating, beautiful, exciting and ultimately unsatisfying film that it is."[50]

Walter Goodman, reviewing for The New York Times, praised the animation and John Hurt's performance, but believed "[p]eople old enough to recall their delight at earlier feature animations, no doubt burnished by memory, are not of course the audience at which The Black Cauldron is aimed. Nor, apparently, is it aimed at youngsters who have had a taste of more sophisticated animation of the Star Wars breed of movies."[43]

London's Time Out magazine deemed it "a major disappointment", adding that "the charm, characterization and sheer good humor" found in previous Disney efforts "are sadly absent".[51]

Charles Champlin, also from the Los Angeles Times, wrote that The Black Cauldron lacks "the simplicity and the clarity of great fairy tales, or the child-sized wonder of Margery Sharp's stories that became The Rescuers, the last really successful Disney animated feature. One wonderful chase in the old riotously inventive slapstick tradition and two minor comic figures suggest the pleasures that can result when the inventing animators have a fertile ground to start from. But a lot of the way the film seems to be dutifully following a rather cumbersome and not overly attractive story."[52]

Jeffrey Katzenberg, then-chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, was dismayed by the product and the animators believed that it lacked "the humor, pathos, and the fantasy which had been so strong in Lloyd Alexander's work. The story had been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it was heartbreaking to see such wonderful material wasted."[53]

Lloyd Alexander, the author of the books on which the film was based, had a more complex reaction to the film:[54]

First, I have to say, there is no resemblance between the movie and the book. Having said that, the movie in itself, purely as a movie, I found to be very enjoyable. I had fun watching it. What I would hope is that anyone who sees the movie would certainly enjoy it, but I'd also hope that they'd actually read the book. The book is quite different. It's a very powerful, very moving story, and I think people would find a lot more depth in the book.

The Black Cauldron was first released on VHS in the United Kingdom in 1997, and in the United States on August 4, 1998, as part of the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection,[55] in a pan-and-scan transfer, 13 years after its theatrical release.[11] The film received a DVD release with a 2.20:1 non-anamorphic widescreen transfer in 2000, as part of the Walt Disney Gold Classic Collection line, featuring an art gallery, a new game The Quest for the Black Cauldron, and the 1952 Donald Duck short Trick or Treat.[56]

In 2008, Disney announced a Special Edition DVD release of the film to be released in 2009, but was re-advertised as a "25th Anniversary Edition" and released on September 14, 2010, in the US and UK. It contained the original 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, the new Witch's Challenge game, an unfinished deleted scene, and all of the features from the 2000 DVD release.

In November 2019, the film was released in 4K for the launch of Disney+.[57] On May 4, 2021, the film was finally released on Blu-ray exclusively through Disney Movie Club.[58]

Costumed versions of the characters from the film have made occasional appearances at the Disney Parks and Resorts mostly in Fantasyland.

In 1986, the eatery Lancer's Inn at Walt Disney World, was renamed Gurgi's Munchies and Crunchies. Eventually, in 1993 it was closed and then remodeled into Lumiere's Kitchen, The Village Fry Shoppe, and currently The Friar's Nook.[59][60]

On July 11, 1986, Tokyo Disneyland opened Cinderella Castle Mystery Tour, a walk-through attraction in which the Horned King makes an appearance. The attraction was in operation until 2006.[61][62][63] To tie in with the attraction's opening, a 14-day special event and castle show The Mystery of Cinderella Castle was featured on the Cinderella Castle Forecourt Stage, featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, with Princess Aurora, Prince Phillip, and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty. During the battle against Maleficent's forces by Goofy, Donald, Phillip, and Aurora, a cameo appearance is made by Creeper with other Disney villains.[64]

The video game The Black Cauldron was designed by Al Lowe of Sierra On-Line and released in 1986. It was made shortly after the first King's Quest game, so it resembles that adventure in many ways. Along with The Dark Crystal it remains one of only a few adventure games by Sierra to be based on films.[65]