There were a lot of pop culture touchstones I missed as a kid growing up in a rural part of the country to parents unable to spend money on a lot on entertainment. We rarely went to see movies in theaters, we never had cable TV, and I probably spend more time outdoors than I did watching cartoons or PBS edutainment programming. While we did get a VCR in about 1992, I watched less than my siblings did, and I do not recall ever seeing this on tape.
What am I talking about, though? Notorious Disney animated box office flop The Black Cauldron. It was released on VHS in 1997, 12 years after its initial theatrical release in 1985. This film was apparently based on The Chronicles of Prydain, and while I haven't read that series, I did recognize elements of Welsh mythology from The Mabinogion.
Image via IMDB, cropped and resized for this post.
However, the writing throughout this film was inconsistent in tone. Is it trying to be a serious epic fantasy? A slapstick comedy? A heartwarming tale of overcoming adversity and making friends along the way? It tries to be all at once and fails at each in turn. There is also a disjointedness to the plot structure and pacing. Scenes don't flow well from one to the next. Character motivations and relationships are poorly developed. The weight of the villain's threat is not foreshadowed worth a darn. Things just happen in sequence sometimes without any real storyline linking it all together.
The animation itself is mostly good. The backgrounds are spectacular. The character movement is generally fluid with good line art and coloring. However, the foreground is often stylistically at odds with the background, and something just seems off about the facial animation in particular.
Voice acting was variable, but mostly just mediocre. Disney can , and has, done better. There was a lack of punch to the delivery, an absence of weight. The villain almost sounded phoned in. The music was... there? I'm not saying it was bad, just that it sounded lackluster. Background sound effects weren't bad, but it gave me the overall sense of direct-to-VHS quality in a lot of places where Disney just didn't normally stoop to that level at the time. This was before their 90s and early aughts sequel craze, after all.
I think there are hints at what could have been a great film here. Make this the next Disney live-action adaptation, maybe even as a mini-series for Disney+! I even have a pitch: cast Andy Sirkis as both Gurgi and Creeper. If you've seen this, you know exactly what I mean. Who else would you want to see bring the rest of these characters to life? Could a film or series based on this old series of novels supplant Harry Potter and other fantasy films for the tween audience?
