Disney Daze: The Black Cauldron

The Black Cauldron (1985)

Disney Animated Classic Number 25
Starring: Grant Bardsley, Susan Sheridan, Freddie Jones, Nigel Hawthorne & John Hurt

Directed by: Ted Berman & Richard Rich

Rating: ★½

One of the few loyal readers of this blog asked me to watch this film, because they said that it had to be seen to be believed (and not in a good way). I didn’t really think that such a recent Disney film could be this bad, but it really, really was. The Black Cauldron is a very dark Disney movie which was a box office flop- and it’s easy to see why. 

The first 2 minutes of the film give the audience some exposition about the cauldron itself, and that alone is enough to send children running out of the cinema. We are told that the Black Cauldron itself is demonically possessed, and that its power is that it can bring skeletons back to life so that they can be commanded to kill every living thing on the planet. And then we see the cauldron bleed. I’m not kidding. And that’s only the beginning... The villain is a giant green ghoul with burning red eyes and a skeleton’s head, and is called the Horned King. He is the one who wants to use the cauldron to kill every living being in the world, and his preparations for this include digging up and collecting corpses so that he can throw them in the cauldron at the end and bring them back to life as his unholy army of the night. And, oh yeah, he has an orc underling that he regularly abuses by strangling it. 

This is the film's villian. Cruella De Vil doesn't look so bad now, does she?

During the course of the movie there are also three creepy witches who turn people into frogs, one of whom is incredibly horny and turns one of the main characters into a frog and them pushes him between her breasts. At another point, near the end, the villain manages to get the cauldron, throws the corpses in, has them come back to life and begin killing everyone, and this still isn’t the darkest part of the film. That bit comes when the main characters realise that they cannot ever destroy the cauldron, they can only stop its dark magic by someone willingly committing suicide by throwing themself into it, which does actually happen, and to one of the characters that I liked the most! To say that I was shocked and disturbed is an understatement...

This is the point when the dead rise out of the Cauldron and kill everyone. Just a tad dark for a Disney film?

But to be honest, I like a dark film, and the reasons discussed above weren’t why I disliked it. I mainly disliked it because the plot was so odd and generally seemed like a jumble of random storylines mashed together. It's clearly based on ancient British mythology, but not any that the audience would be too familiar with. The fact that the driving force of the story is that the main character, Taran, is chasing after a prophetic pig which is kidnapped, quite frankly sums up how strange the whole thing is. It’s not too bad to begin with (once you get over, ignore and deal with the pig), but as soon as they fall into a whirlpool which magically and randomly appears in the middle of a frog pond and sucks them into a neon fairy world, the movie literally loses the plot. 

Taran is a fairly decent protagonist, and is similar to Wart in The Sword in the Stone, but he doesn’t really do much, and doesn’t even save the day at the end. The necessary princess/love interest starts out strong by saving Taran, then stands around doing nothing but being pretty and simple. My favourite character was the small furry monster called Gurgi that reminded me of Gollum, and I’m surprised that there haven’t been more toys made of him, because he is quite ‘cute’. There is absolutely no need for the fairies, and they seem to only be there to pad the weak plot out and to add something fairly light, in order to contrast against the horror that the children are witnessing.

Disney characters that you probably don't know. You definitely won't see Princess Eilonwy in the Disney parade.

Overall, The Black Cauldron is like The Sword and the Stone on crack and with added dragons and evil villains. The ending is weird and abrupt and the animation is cheap looking- it looks even worse than Robin Hood, but at least Robin Hood had an interesting and enthralling story. This is definitely a ‘boy’ Disney movie, but I can only see it appealing to very young children who love very dark things.

It could have been really good- it has some interesting and unique ideas, but unfortunately these are not orchestrated coherently. If they released it now, having had changed some of the weaker plot elements, I think that it would do quite well, because it does start off fairly well and has some original elements. The Black Cauldron would definitely make an amazing haunted house ride at Disneyland- but it would probably be so successful and effective at being scary that children would be traumatised for life. 

It's odd to think that this film was released only 4 years before The Little Mermaid, because it makes me question how Disney could make such a disaster just a few years before making one of their very best. And it's a good thing too that they manged to sort themselves out in those crucial years- if they had kept churning out films like this then, just like The Black Cauldron itself, Disney would have been quickly forgotten.