Random Movie Review - The Black Cauldron

As I may have said before, since Walt Disney's passing, there was a decline in the quality of the films that came after his passing. This of course led to The Fox and the Hound which I reviewed earlier this month to not be a huge hit seeing as at the time Disney were competing against Don Bluth who left the company to form his own studio and taking eleven Disney animators with him. What came after that film is considered to be that one film that Disney wants you to forget. Of course this would be easier if The Black Cauldron wasn't one of their numbered animated classics. But yeah for a number of reasons, this film was a critical and commercial failure which led to Disney delaying its home media release to 1997 which seems like a long time, but it just shows how many lengths a studio can do to make everyone forget it ever existed. But it seemingly has a fan base surprisingly and yet hasn't been released on Blu-Ray (at least in the UK anyway) so perhaps there is some good about it. Let's find out:

Loosely based on the first two books in the Chronicles of Prydain series, we come to the land of Prydain where we meet an assistant pig keeper called Taran (voiced by Grant Bardsley) who works on a farm run by Dallben the Enchanter (voiced by Freddie Jones, no relation). Dallben learns of the titular black cauldron which a being known as The Horned King (voiced by the late but great John Hurt) is searching for in the hopes of creating an invincible undead army known as the Cauldron-Born. Fearing for the life of his oracular powered pig Hen Wen, Dallben instructs Taran to take the pig to safety, though the leads to Taran's daydreaming to get the better of him and loses the pig to the Horned King's forces. And so an adventure begins that sees Taran go about trying to stop the Horned King from basically trying to conquer the universe as most villains tend to do.

With a very familiar plot and some but not many forgetful characters, I can see why this Disney film didn't do well. The animation seems to be OK for the time it came out and there are some technical advances in that. But it lacks a lot of the things that most Disney films are known for having such as a sense of humour and lightheartedness in its characters and story and some charm too. I'm glad that the author of the books got a kick out of it, but for most of us its probably a case of the books being better than the film. But maybe one day the series will get a better film adaptation made. One can hope. 7/10