The Black Cauldron

The Black Cauldron is a 1985 American animated adventure fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation in association with Silver Screen Partners II and released by Walt Disney Pictures. The 25th Disney animated feature film, it is loosely based on the first two books in The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, a series of five novels that are, in turn, based on Welsh mythology.

Summary
A young boy and a bunch of misfit friends embark on a quest to find a dark magic item of ultimate power before a diabolical tyrant can.

Good Qualities

 * 1) Much like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas, it shows that Disney is more than capable of making films that aren't entirely light-hearted, innocent, and happy-go-lucky and have a more serious tone while still being aimed at kids.
 * 2) Wonderful animation with nicely done backgrounds and setting.
 * 3) Nicely done grasp to its source material, The Chronicles of Prydain.
 * 4) Brilliant voice acting, mainly from Grant Bardsley as Taran and Susan Sheridan as Princess Eilonwy.
 * 5) Well-done character and story development.
 * 6) The Horned King and his undead army are nightmarish, spine-chilling antagonists to watch.
 * 7) Memorable, interesting characters, such as the main protagonist, Taran.
 * 8) The plot for the movie is very original and well thought out.
 * 9) Though the film has its funny and heartwarming moments, it can also get very serious and suspenseful at times which is something very new and original for Disney.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) It can get extremely dark for Disney’s younger target audience, which spawned some controversy (See BQ#5).
 * 2) The characters come across as underdeveloped at times, as does the plot. (It's a condensation of the first two Prydain books.)
 * 3) Gurgi can get rather annoying at times.
 * 4) Expanding on that topic, it flopped so hard that The Care Bears Movie was more commercially successful.
 * 5) Very troubled production history: Original producer Art Stevens was kicked off the project early on (and subsequently left Disney) after his planned version was deemed too light-hearted. In turn, original directors Dave Michener and John Musker left to work on The Great Mouse Detective, and were replaced by The Fox and the Hound directors Ted Berman and Richard Rich. Production was divided into units that had little contact with one another, resulting in a lack of direction for the animators, a miserable working environment, and a revolving door of personnel. The task of animating the film was also arduous, thanks to the brand-new APT (animated photo transfer) process used in its production, its use of computer animation (the first animated feature to do so), and being shot in Cinerama; as a result, its budget ballooned to $44 million, the most expensive animated feature ever produced at the time. Meanwhile, in 1984, Walt Disney Productions President and CEO Ron W. Miller was ousted by the Disney board of directors (partly due to the constant budget overruns on The Black Cauldron), and replaced in the latter capacity by Michael Eisner, who brought in Jeff Katzenberg to head the animation department. After a test screening of the film's rough cut proved far too frightening for the children in the audience, Katzenberg ordered heavy cuts on the film; when producer Joe Hale objected to the demands, Katzenberg responded by editing the film himself. When informed by Hale of what Katzenberg was doing, Eisner told him to stop, and while he obeyed, he requested that the film be delayed from its intended Christmas 1984 release date to July 1985, so that it could be reworked. In the end, the film's inflated budget and an unusually dark nature that made it difficult to market caused The Black Cauldron to become one of the biggest box-office bombs in Disney history, not only making back less than half its budget, but nearly killing Disney itself. Hale was subsequently fired from the company, with Berman only avoiding the same fate because he left voluntarily around the time the film was released, and neither they nor Miller would ever work in animation again; Rich lasted a little bit longer and was put to work on Oliver & Company, only to be fired himself after falling out with the new studio management. In 2016 the company announced they were looking into doing a more faithful adaptation of the source material The Chronicles of Prydain in live action, but little has been heard of it since as the film's reputation continues to make people wary of having anything to do with it.

Reception
The film holds an approval rating of 53% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 32 reviews, with an average score of 5.54/10. The critics' consensus stated "Ambitious but flawed, The Black Cauldron is technically brilliant as usual but lacks the compelling characters of other Disney animated classics.

Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times gave the film ​3 1⁄2 stars out of four 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."

Trivia
The first Disney-canon film to receive a PG rating.

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