Disneyology

The Black Cauldron (1985)



Out of all the Disney movies I planned to watch this year, The Black Cauldron is definitely one of the ones I’ve been most curious to see. This is in partly because it was an attempt to make a darker Disney movie that skewed older but also because, more than most of these movies, it is a total unknown quantity. The movie had very little impact on pop culture and I’d hardly even seen a clip of it much less the whole movie. If the movie is remembered for anything it’s for its incredible critical and commercial failure and, rightly or wrongly, is seen as the moment where the studio hit rock bottom. It’s a shame because the people behind the movie clearly had high hopes for the project as they dumped a lot of money into it. This was made for $44 million dollars, which is almost four times the cost of The Fox and the Hound, which was itself the most expensive animated movie ever made (without inflation adjustment). That would have been money well spent if this had indeed gotten a wider audience interested in what they were doing and given themselves a cooler image, but things didn’t really work out for them.

While I’m not going to go so far as to suggest that Disney can just spend their way into making a good movie, the extra resources certainly don’t hurt. This is easily the best looking Disney movie since Sleeping Beauty and it isn’t even close. You can tell that that 1959 film was their model as this was the first time they experimented with wide screen, 70mm, and special animation effects since that movie’s relative box office failure and it makes it so that if nothing else The Black Cauldron is a very pleasant movie to look at. The movie’s darker than usual tone is also a pretty interesting move. This was Disney’s first PG rated movie, and this is before that rating had been completely devalued. The film’s villain, while kind of generic and lacking in personality, has real menace and there’s a lot more of a sense of threat to the whole thing. It’s a pretty fascinating direction to go in from a studio that, in its last movie, was too pussy to kill off a damn dog. The problem is that while the movie seems really unique amongst Disney’s cannon it feels pretty generic by the standards of 80s fantasy movies in general.

The film’s protagonist is really boring. He’s a 14 year old kid who… has brown hair and, uh, seems fairly noble I guess. There’s also a princess here who’s more feisty than usual but otherwise doesn’t have much of an effect on the story. There’s also a furry little comic relief thing that is absurdly annoying and the film has a really weird MacGuffin in the form of some kind of magical pig. The story is also just a really basic Lord of the Rings ripoff and beyond that there really isn’t that much to say. The film starts off well enough but really loses steam fast in its second act. It picks up a little toward the end but by then it’s too little too late. It’s a frustrating movie because it feels like the ingredients are there for something cool and they just blow it at every turn and the result is a movie that never lives up to its potential. The general public rejected the movie so emphatically that the goddamn Care Bears movie ended up outgrossing it, many people at Disney were fired, and the decision was made to leave “edgy” animated movies to Ralph Bakshi going forward.

**1/2 out of Five

Like I said a couple weeks back, Disney has the rights to adapt the entire book series into a live action franchise. Though, with the way they handled Narnia, I don't know if they'll see it to completion.

Oliver & Company (1988)

By 1988 it was pretty clear to everyone that Disney was in a bad place and that they may or may not be able to dig their way out and they were becoming very open to experimentation. Oliver & Company was in many ways an experiment to see if the thing that had ailed Disney the whole time had simply been that they were behind the times and needed to start getting hip with the MTV generation and the results were… kind of hilarious in retrospect. This is actually one of the few Disney movies to be placed in a contemporary setting and one of even fewer Disney movies to fully embrace its modernity, and because of that it has become dated a lot faster than most of their output because this movie is what you’d call “totally 80s.” You can tell this right from the first moments of the movies where we immediately start seeing 80s New York as the setting and start hearing Huey Lewis and the News on the soundtrack. In fact there’s a lot of pop music in the soundtrack here and it feels less like the Broadway-ish fare that Disney usually traffics in and more like fully produced MTV ready songs by artists like of Billy Joel (who also voices a major character during a very brief moment in time where he was considered cool and youthful) and while these songs are catchy enough for what they are they feel out of place and it’s more jarring than usual when characters suddenly break out into this kind of song than normal in part because they sound like they particularly sound like studio recordings rather than an approximation of someone singing on the street.

As a story the best way I can describe this movie is… rushed. The movie is an attempt to re-tell Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” as the story of a stray kitten in New York, which I’m willing to bet seemed like a good idea at one point and they do find some semi-clever ways to adapt the story, but in the long run I’m not so sure that turning a 600 page novel set over a long period of time into a 74 minute movie set over three days was such a smart move. “Oliver Twist” is a story that’s primarily about how its young protagonist moves between class stratas and the way he falls in and out of certain social circles be it the chaotic world of Fagin’s gang or the comforting world of the Brownlows, but in this version there’s very little time for him to really integrate with any of these worlds and he seems to build these lifelong loyalties after hanging out with people for all of a single day. But let’s not ignore the obvious; even the most rock-solid of storytelling here would have almost certainly been lost amid this movie’s overwhelming “‘tude.” Hell, they might as well have renamed Dodger to Poochie, because that Simpsons episode more than exemplifies what seemed to be going on with this movie and its general datedness is probably a big part of why it was never really embraced by future generations of kids.

From an execution perspective the movie is… mostly fine. Disney had really started embracing celebrity voice actors at this point, a practice that they would sort of cool on shortly afterwards. The animation is pretty decent for the most part, you can tell their craft has kept improving and they do an admirable job of filling the New York streets with activity although their use of computer animation is a little less impactful and a bit more distracting than it was in the last movie. Critics were not fond of the movie but it did make decent money although once again the studio’s success was kind of overshadowed by Don Bluth. This movie opened the very same weekend as Bluth’s The Land Before Time and lost the weekend $7.5 million to $4 million. Oliver & Company surpass Bluth’s film and gross $53 million to LBT’s $46 million, which is pretty much a draw. Disney would have the last laugh though as this would be the last time that Bluth would be viewed as any sort of threat. The film’s bigger legacy though is probably one of failure as I kind of suspect that Disney was a little embarrassed by their sellout attempts here as evidenced by the fact that they ran as fast as possible in the other direction shortly thereafter.

** out of Five

Collecting Some Thoughts

So, I’ve waded through the Disney Dark Age and obviously the big question is “was it as bad as its reputation suggests?” Objectively, I’m inclined to say “not really but I understand why people think so.” Simply looking at my star ratings I definitely gave higher scores to the movies during this installment of the series than I did to most of the movies in my last series on the “Reitherman Years” and I think that era has been given something of an unfair pass in part because The Jungle Book came out in the middle of it and that movie is seen as a sort of classic. What I think has directed so much ire towards this era, aside from sour grapes over what was going on behind the scenes, is that this was the first time that Disney didn’t really seem like Disney. Even when they had put out bad movies in the past there had still been little doubt that they were the undisputed kings of mainstream animation and that wasn’t necessarily true of their 70s and 80s output. They had some real competition now and you could sort of see them flailing. On top of that they had abandoned a lot of what had worked for them in the past. Instead of alternating between fairy tale movies and talking animal movies they had doubled and tripled down on the talking animal movies in this era and the one fairy tale like movie they did attempt was a far cry from their earlier formula that people were so nostalgic for.

Despite Disney’s problems during this era you can definitely see them rebuilding towards something better as they went. The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound were basically extensions of the Reitherman era and had all the problems associated with it and while The Black Cauldron had plenty of problems itself I feel like it marked a point where the animators were learning and they used tricks from it to make The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company work better than they otherwise would have. Those last two movies are the real transitional efforts. You can see the techniques that would finally bring The Disney Renaissance to life but they were being used towards story ideas that weren’t worthy of them. As everyone knows, Disney was about to break out of its doldrums in a big way and that will be the subject of my next installment, but that is going to have to wait because I’m going to be putting Disneyology on hiatus for a few months and resuming it after Award season ends. Fortunately I’ll be able to hit the ground running with the movies that most exemplified what Disney was all about to my generation.

Ranking So Far
1. Fantasia
2. Lady and the Tramp
3. Bambi
4. The Jungle Book
5. Sleeping Beauty
6. Pinocchio
7. The Great Mouse Detective
8. Cinderella
9. Alice in Wonderland
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
11. The Fox and the Hound
12. Robin Hood
13. The Black Cauldron
14. Dumbo
15. One Hundred and One Dalmatians
16. The Rescuers
17. Oliver and Company
18. The Aristocats
19. Peter Pan
20. The Sword in the Stone

I will admit that when I say "Disney" in my reviews I am frequently using it as shorthand for "Disney Animation Studios" unless otherwise noted.

Lolling at "'tude".

Also, Sword In The Stone at 20 moves me to tears.

My elementary school had a copy of it. They showed it a few times. I also remember watching it on television.

I used to rent The Aristocats - could never find a copy of that fucking movie. I think Disney did eventually release it as part of their going-to-the-vault-soon collection, but I didn't give a shit by that point. 

Don't get me started on the "Disney vault," it's made this whole retrospective a lot more difficult than it needed to be.

I've been wanting to plow through the Disney catalogue for a while now but the vault bullshit has repeatedly stopped me since I wanna be able to do the movies in order rather than a random jumble.

I would have started this whole series a year ago but Netflix didn't have Snow White at the time and that kind of stopped things right away.  Since that got let out of the vault earlier this year I started things out and Netflix has had most of the movies but I've had to settle for watching a lot of them on DVD instead of Blu-Ray and I do think that has maybe disadvantaged a couple of the movies in my assessment.  The only one they straight-up didn't have was The Fox and the Hound and I had to pay to rent a stream of that one through Amazon.

And they have huge waiting lists for all of them.