- For this presentation, I was really keen to link my research back to Wales. I knew this would be a challenge because Wales isn’t exactly known for its animation industry. When I was pondering my topic I was surprised to find that there is actually an ode to Wales in one film from our beloved Disney.
2. Released in 1985, the Black Cauldron is Disney’s 25th animated feature film.
The film is set in the mythical land of Prydain during the Middle Ages and is about an evil king who wants to steal a magic cauldron that will allow him to conquer the world, and a young farmer boy who tries to stop him.
The film has a lot of classic Disney tropes like an Aurora-inspired princess and a couple of animal sidekicks.
3. The film is based on a series of books written by American author Lloyd Alexander called The Chronicles of Prydain.
The author went to Wales for army combat training. After becoming familiar with Welsh culture, particularly the castles and folklore, he was inspired to write a fantasy series.
Mainly influenced by the stories of the Welsh Mabinogion.
The Mabinogion are the earliest prose stories in British literature, basically a collection of short stories made up of drama, philosophy, romance, tragedy, fantasy and humour.
The setting of the book is loosely based on Anglesey and all of the characters have Welsh names. These are all used in the film so we have Taran, Eilonwy, Gurgi, Fflewddur Fflam and Hen Wen the pig. However there isn’t any other kind of recognition for Wales other than this.
4. Most people are not familiar with this particular Disney production as it is widely disregarded for reasons which I’ll go into later. However the film has a pretty important place in Disney’s history.
5. TBC was actually the first ever Disney feature released that utilised computer animation (White, 2020).
CGI was only used for minor objects (bubbles, lighting, the cauldron) but it still advanced Disney animation, moving it away from the old methods used before.
6. At the time of the production of this film there was a lot of sci-fi dominating cinema and Disney was losing their audience to it. The Black Cauldron was Disney’s attempt at a fantasy adventure. (Price, 2019, p.1)
It was thought that this film would be the Snow White of a new generation of animators. We saw a very different approach to Disney’s usual style of filmmaking. It’s dark themes and scary villain earned it Disney animation’s first ever PG rating (Kois, 2010).
Now, Disney have made their fair share of unsettling sequences but this film is another level. Aside from the Horned King villain who is basically the devil, there’s a traumatising pig chase sequence and one of the main characters sacrifices himself in an act of suicide. Let’s have a look at one of the main sequences.
8. From that clip, it’s clear to see that this wasn’t made for Disney’s usual audience. But it also didn’t appeal to a more mature audience.
The Black Cauldron was the most expensive animated film ever made at the time, with a huge cost of $44 million, almost 4x that of its predecessor The Fox and the Hound (Box Office Mojo). This was not planned but the studio ended up going way over budget after spending more time than expected in production.
Unfortunately the film was a complete fail and didn’t even make half of its money back in the box office. It was beated by The Care Bears movie, a defeat which has been described as Disney’s rock bottom (waking sleeping beauty). It actually put the future of Disney animation in jeopardy. There are a lot of elements involved in the films failure, let start with the plot.
9. So what caused the failure of this film? Well it was produced during a pretty chaotic period in Disney history.
There were lots of staffing changes going on in the company, Jefferey Katzenberg became chairman and Micheal Eisner was the CEO. TBC ended up being passed around amongst different directors and there was a conflict between them and the artists. The concepts and ideas for the film were often revised and many people left the project due to creative differences.
Jeffery Katzenberg was shocked when he saw the film and felt it was too dark and intense for children. He insisted that the film be re-edited, ignoring the producers who told him that this wasn’t possible in an animated film.
The film was reworked again. Some scenes were reanimated but others were not so seamlessly cut. In the clip I just showed you, you might have noticed this.
All of these changes resulted in a disjointed plotline, jarring editing and weakly developed characters. The audience found it confusing. I personally think the main problem is that they didn’t want to put out another typical Disney fairytale but also didn’t fully commit to the dark fantasy idea, so they ended up pleasing no one.
10. TBC was produced in the period of Disney that is known as The Dark Age, or the Bronze Age. These films demonstrate the struggle that the studio went through after Walt Disney’s death in 1966. Without him to hold the reins, Disney entered this period of transition and turmoil until the late 1980s.
This was generally a commercially unsuccessful era for Disney but TBC was their absolute rock bottom (Waking Sleeping Beauty). However, it has been said that TBC made pretty great achievements in animation and inspired the company to continue with their digital work. (Price, 2019)
Looking back now I think we can say that this was not a dark age of Disney animation but more a time of experimentation and transition. After all it ultimately set the foundation for the pinnacle of the studio. Does anyone know what happened next?
11. After gaining some stability Disney were able to bounce back with the Little Mermaid and after that the Disney Renaissance. I’m not going to go into this too much but basically they took the all of the successful technical and artistic elements of the Dark Age and went back to producing well-known fairytale musicals (Price, 2019, p.3-4). Combine this with cheaper production techniques and Disney entered one of their greatest eras of all time.
12. So in conclusion, even though TBC wasn’t commercially good it led to many great things and shows that we all learn from our mistakes. I’m glad I got given the opportunity to tell you about this film if you didn’t already know about it because I don’t think it deserves to be forgotten about.