I watched Disney's The Black Cauldron last night with the Missus. Its a flick that's always intrigued me as it was one of Disney's biggest cinema flops ever losing gazillions of Disney dollars.
Much too late for me to have seen as a kid, Cauldron hit the big screen in 1985, by which point I was already a young dad! I wonder just how many kids saw it back then. Much fewer than expected.
The film itself is not like the classic animations of my own childhood, Aristocats, 101 Dalmations and so on. Cauldron is much darker with scant chance for laughter. The characters themselves are memorable but not unforgettable in the way say Mowgli and Baloo are. The voices seem weaker, perhaps even un-Disney. I know the boy hero is called Taran but I've already forgotten the name of his mentor the Wizard. Doldan? The names are often mumbled.
The princess herself - yes, a Disney Princess [someone on the staff must have read the Disney guide book] - also seems uncharacteristically un-Disney. She's wearing a Belle dress but her face is somehow harsher than normal. Whatever the reasoning, The Cauldron Princess is not one of the standard panoply of Disney royals you can buy for your kids almost everywhere. She could only dream of the goddess-like world-spanning fame lauded on the most famous of them all, Frozen's Elsa.
I've read that Cauldron was the first time that Disney used CGI. I couldn't tell where but that's no bad thing. I also read that Andy Serkis based his famous Gollum on one of the two small creatures who star in the film, namely the floppy-haired dog-like thingy called Gulpy?..... dunno! [there's that name problem again]. This character leaps and twirls and gabbles and talks in riddles, a lot like Gollum. Andy Serkis clearly liked the Black Cauldron.
The mention of Gollum hints at a wider resemblance to Lord of the Rings overall, in particular the animated Bakshi film of the Seventies. The scenes of the Horned King - perhaps the best characterisation in the Cauldron as a whole, with the noticeable voice talent of John Hurt - are dark and scary. They remind me of Sauron. Maybe that was the idea. Cauldron itself is, from what I've read, a Disneyfication of high fantasy novels by Pennsylvanian Lloyd Alexander, a world-famous childrens author, who has completely, me personally, passed by. Based on, but not entirely, Welsh mythology like the Mabinogion, Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain are a vast literary undertaking across five novels, published in the 1960's. I don't know why I've never heard of them until now. I always loved Lord of the Rings.
My favourite character in The Black Cauldron is Creeper. At first I thought he was Trobbit from the Blackstar set of toys, but Creeper is his own man. Well, half-man really, maybe less. Unusually for the film Creeper is actually humorous and his jumping, shuffling and down-trodden antics are genuinely endearing. Like many other imps of misfortune - Berk a la Trap Door comes to mind - Creeper is always in deep bother with his impatient master, the Horned King, who likes to strangle the irksome thing whenever he can.
Strangling is just one of the actions in the film, which make it less-suitable for tiny kids. The Horned King is another. Imagine Skeletor in a hoody. Yet the big no-no was to come and a scene I didn't see because the missus and me ..... fell asleep! Well, it was past 11 and we are in our Sixties!
The scene is known as the 'Cauldron-born' and we need not have worried. It was more or less deleted as soon as the film was made back in 1984. Too scary by half, Disney chopped and changed 12 minutes of the Horned King bringing his undead army back to life, as you do when you're a mad castled megalomaniac. Shame.
The Black Cauldron is on Disney+, so we can re-visit it at some point, preferably before our eyes shut.
In the meantime I can try to find my one and only Black Cauldron collectable, a small plastic figure of the magic pig Henwen, a cereal give-away at the time of the film. And there's me thinking it was just a generic plastic porker.
Have you seen The Black Cauldron readers?
