Movie: 'The Black Cauldron' (1985)

Writer's block and a horrific spate of mathematical work has conspired to destroy my ability to string words together. My incoherence has increased a hundredfold but I shall attempt to do this movie justice anyway.

As mentioned yesterday, Disney had quite the panic in the early to mid 1980s. Losing focus and key personnel they produced movies that did not make much money and weren't exactly Disney-like. 'The Black Cauldron' and 'The Black Hole' are probably the worst examples by far of what was a dangerous drift, of which I know very little. The fact that this movie was followed by 'Basil The Great Mouse Detective' the following year was a miracle in many ways.

'The Black Cauldron' is based on the first two of a sequence of books called 'The Chronicles of Prydain' by Lloyd Alexander, making this the first Disney movie to be strongly influenced by Welsh mythology. In outline it seems that the story is ideal, involving as it does a bevy of funny witches, a magic sword and magic cauldron, a bard, a princess, a prophetic pig, and a loveable anthropomorphic animal called Gurgi. Where does it fall apart? Maybe in that it's just a bit bland and dark? And that it's thankfully missing the ten minutes of undead soldiers killing people? Again... maybe... but it's really not that bad. It's like an arrow that has been shot into the bullseye of the wrong target. You see, it's just a bit off, and the arrow hit the generic animation company tone instead of Disney tone. For Disney tone there should be a song, a dance, and the villain should be less threatening.

In 'The Black Cauldron', a young pig keeper called Taran loses his prophetic magic pig Hen Wen to the forces of the evil and menacing Horned King, failing in his very specific duty, and somehow has to rescue the brave porker or destroy the Horned King's ultimate objective: The Black Cauldron. This Cauldron would allow the King to bring his dead army back to undead status and secure him dominion over the world and that can not be allowed to occur, but there is only one way to destroy the power of the Cauldron... the voluntary self-sacrifice of a person's life.

Now, in essence that could easily be the description of a Disney movie but somehow it didn't work out well. The pacing is odd, very little really seems to happen, and the oh so important villain was menacing and evil without being watchable or fun in any way. Indeed the King's cartoony toadlike henchman stuck out like a sore thumb when not being throttled by that bony undead hand. Perhaps that last sentence really underlines the problem with the movie: A cartoony henchmen being throttled by a skeletal undead hand. It's all just a bit too dark and none of the good bits seem to be savoured at all. It's as if the script supervisors took holidays through the whole of the production.

I'm not going to say any more about 'The Black Cauldron' except this: Try again, Disney, for there's a good movie here if you can just pull it off. Go, go, go and redeem this failure and the problems with the similarly Celtic 'Brave' by doing it well the second time.

O.