Login
As someone who was born in the 80s, I can’t help but wonder – what was up with all the dark fantasy films made during the decade? None of them hit at the box office, but various studios kept churning them out. The quality varied, and many of them gained cult audiences, of which I belong to, if not all of them, a vast majority. Films like Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice, Frank Oz and Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, Ridley Scott’s Legend, and Ron Howard’s Willow all spring to mind.
It seemed only natural that Disney would eventually tackle the genre. And so they did with 1985’s The Black Cauldron, a very loose adaptation of the novel of the same name. It’s not entirely successful by any means, and phrases like overly ambitious and sloppy best describe it. Yet I find myself enjoying it, not enough to claim it as an unheralded classic, a hidden gem, or even a personal favorite, but it doesn’t completely deserve the shabby treatment Disney has given it.
The strange thing about watching all of the Bronze Era films is how you can see the changing of the guard, and the numerous points of turmoil playing out in the films. Disney’s death hovered over The Aristocats, which felt like a bland bit of desperation to keep the brand afloat, or in the previous The Fox and the Hound, which had two generations struggling for control and a coherent voice. The Black Cauldron is not coherent, but I love that it takes a hard right against so much of the saccharine nature of many Disney films. This one goes dark and creepy, and it works the best when it embraces those moments.
While much of the film is a shocking success in crafting a believably dirty, dark, and horrific fantasy world, it suffers from the hands of a meddling studio. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the newly appointed studio chairman, balked at the off-brand atmosphere and downright disturbing scenes of the Horned King’s climatic raising of the dead. With the film practically complete, Katzenberg took it upon himself to remove twelve minutes of footage. In live action, this would be easily repairable, but in animation, you don’t edit like you would any other type of film. While trying desperately to make the film less scary and adult, and more family-friendly Disney brand, Katzenberg unequivocally turned it into a muddled mess. Disney was once known for gambling on artistic innovation and pushing the boundaries of animation, and he should have left the film intact. And does no one remember the darkness haunting the edges of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Pinocchio? It was only in the Post-War years the studio tamed the more horrific elements of its adaptations, transforming them into safer entertainments.
Not to say this would have prevented it from being a box office bomb, which felt like an inevitability either way, but it could have possibly regained some critical or artistic love that was lost along the way. It's exciting to think of so adult and mature a film coming from a studio that can, at times, be aggressive in its stunted adolescence and purity. Think of Cinderella's ugly politics of feminine suppression or Lady and the Tramp's sentimentality, which practically drips off the screen. The Black Cauldron is something not entirely successful, but the ambition on display is enough for me to recommend it. Any any movie that features an opening narration from John Huston and a villain played by John Hurt is incapable of being all bad.
