The Return of Torgo and Wooley's September Excite-o-rama!

I wish I'd kept this.

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Wild, bro. I had it.

A friend of mine is a huge Tolkien-head. He's been collecting the calendars for about 40+ years. I'm sure he has this one.

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The Black Cauldron -

Disney's attempt at jumping on the fantasy bandwagon of the early '80s was dangerously unsuccessful - dangerous because it risked the future of the animation department - and as a result, it didn't make it to video until many years later. Whether via reappreciation or good luck, the company saw fit to add it to Disney+, which is good news to this big fan. The hero is Taran, an assistant pig farmer who dreams of becoming a warrior and taking on the Horned King, our scary and scary-looking villain who seeks the titular cauldron that has been lost for ages. It has the power to reanimate armies of dead soldiers, which he can bend to his will so he can rule the world. Taran gets his chance when Hen Wen, his favorite pig whose gift of clairvoyance lets him locate the cauldron, is captured by the Horned King's servants.

Disney must have put their best animators on this project because it's one of their best-looking animated movies. The backgrounds are so full of detail and atmosphere that I'd pore through an "art of" book of this movie if one existed, the highlight being the Horned King's dank and labyrinthine castle. The character work is on par with it, and not to keep bringing him up - the fuzzy old man look of the roguish Gurgi and hapless bard Fflewddur are highlights - but with his shroud and well...lack of skin, the Horned King is the stuff of nightmares. Speaking of, besides the look and feel, my favorite thing about the movie is its willingness to frighten. It gives the movie stakes and lets the exciting moments and ones with impending doom deliver welcome doses of adrenalin. While this could explain why the movie underperformed, i.e., parents thinking it's too frightening for their kids, it's a vibe that's a far cry from the weightlessness and lack of stakes found in the studio's recent output.

This movie ends up being a very enjoyable fantasy adventure that may not doing anything novel with its hero's journey tropes, but it makes up for it with its frights, artwork and simply how much fun it is. I also admire its message that's valuable to child and adult alike that sometimes, the best thing to do is make a sacrifice, even if it's something for which you've hoped and dreamed. Having a cool flaming sword that cuts through metal is nice and all, but it's not much use if you have no friends or family to defend. If I have any gripes with the movie, it's that it's always on the go. Disney likely made it this way to accommodate children’s' attention spans, but I wish our heroes could have stopped and smelled the roses more often, especially in the more atmospheric locations. I still think it's a movie Disney should hold its head up about and that they'll hopefully never sweep under the rug.

My rating: 4 purloined apples out of 5

My guy (or gal): Gurgi, a companion who's worth keeping around even if he might steal your stuff or eat your food every now and then.

I think The Black Cauldron was the first movie I was allowed to see by myself in the theater. Maybe 7 at the time? And my only real memory of it was shrinking down in my seat, trying to hide from something on screen. I think an army of the dead. I maybe have even snuck off to the bathroom, unable to cope with it.


So, good stuff.

I can relate. Nightmare fuel and the child me didn't mix. The scene in The Wizard of Oz where the witch's legs curl under the house and the "death for the dead" scene in Beetlejuice really got to me. The scene I really shouldn't have seen as a kid was the one in Blade Runner where which frightened me so much I threw up. It could explain why I didn't give horror a chance until well into adulthood.

My understanding is the book was very anti-war, so the main message of the movie at the end is basically one of the remnants of the book that subverts the standard hero-journey's adventure. It's not much, but hey, it's something I'd show kids - or suggest to others who have kids to show them.


These days, it's funny, I hear about the "Disney death", an over-used trope to have characters reveal how they feel about other characters because they think they're dead, only to have the dead character reveal they're still alive. And I just think, "that's not how I remember it going exactly in The Black Cauldron." Seemed a bit more earned in that movie.

Agreed.

No such book exists from what I can tell.
However, I found this blog and this one, which both have decent collections of concept art.



Wow, this is the first movie Tim Burton worked on? I did not know that.

HUGE fan of the Prydain stories when I was 8-10 or so.


As if I wasn't gonna read the hell out of this.


My third grade friend and I used to "play" it at recess. I think he was always Taran.
Unfortunately by the time the film came out I was 14-15 and had sort of moved on. Pretty sure I saw it in the theater but it wasn't a big event in my life at the time. But, like the Hobbit, returning to it as an adult made me appreciate it more, mostly because of the eye candy that Torgo mentioned. They didn't quite capture the feel of the books, imo, and I'd like to see someone take another stab (heh) at the series but yeah, I'm a fan now.

oooh some good stuff there. Some of it by Mike Ploog, Marvel's monster guy! (Ghost Rider/Man-Thing/Werewolf by Night/etc)

This seems like a fact that I'd known and subsequently forgotten. Obviously Disney wasn't going to use such idiosyncratic designs as his, but I wish they hadn't gone with such a tried-and-true look for Taran and Eilonwy. Something in between would've been nice.

Same.

Well.
That was some crazy-ass shit.
One thing I've learned watching all these turn-of-the-century short films from the early days of the medium is that if they were going to go through all the trouble to make one of these things, they were gonna make it pretty fantastical. It's a real education to learn how much of early filmmaking was Fantasy, Science-fiction, and Horror, and just how fantastical and phantasmagoric these films are.
In this case, we have Georges Melies and co., portraying a group of scientists who wear wizard hats and gowns, deciding that they can actually go to the moon by being shot out of a very large cannon. There is much fanfare and they are fired off on their celestial path. Upon landing, they note the sometimes-hostile, sometimes-psychedelic environment...


... before being accosted by a Moon-person, hopping around and scooching on its ass toward them. Their response to this, like all Colonizers, is to perceive this as a threat and kill him instantly. With an umbrella.
More Moon-people attack and they are taken captive and brought to the Moon King. I won't spoil the ending but they're White European Colonizers so you can pretty much rest assured that genocide ensues. Per sources I've read, this was intentional social commentary by Melies. But I'd also believe that that was just the normal world-view at that time.
Honestly, this is such a bizarre film, so far beyond what I expected (though it was tempered a bit by having watched several of Melies' short-films over the last few years), and when I made my captive audience watch it the other night, even they commented how much further "out there" this was than anything they expected to see from that era. They actually enjoyed it quite a bit.
It is worth mentioning that the version on HBOMax, the one I watched, is both the color-tinted version and the version with a crazy-ass soundtrack including glockenspiels and sythesizers and it really adds to how nuts the proceedings seem. Given that the film has no original score or sound of any kind and it was up to the exhibitor to provide what they could or would, I think that all soundtracks are valid and therefore this one totally is.
I highly recommend this at 12 minutes.

If you want to just watch it on YouTube, this is probably the best version but it lacks a crazy-ass glockenspiel and synthesizer soundtrack:

This is the copy I had and you can imagine how into THAT shit I was. Look at that guy.

I fully support listening to contemporary soundtracks for silent films (I've had this experience with Buster Keaton shorts and a couple of Lon Chaney Sr silent movies).


I... actually don't know if I've seen A Trip to the Moon. Maybe I haven't, given how I don't know the plot and only seem to call to mind the iconic image.


As for color tinting, IDK about that one in particular, but color tinting was a process in the silent era. It'd just be the entire frame and it'd be one color, but they'd change colors between scenes for mood. The Phantom Carriage is a known example of that. I believe they mixed the color tint in with the film material itself, but I'm much less sure on that part these days.

A Trip to the Moon is great and you should check out as many of Melies' shorts as you can, Wooley. I haven't seen anything which tops this one, but it's always fun seeing the creativity and artistry on display in them.

Also, is this the first time you've seen it?

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If I recall, they had to cut some even more disturbing shit out of that film after test audiences had kids running out the theater crying. Something along the lines of flesh melting off of bones...

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In the case of this film each frame was hand-colored and they used a LOT of colors in each frame.
"...these prints were hand-colored by Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris. The Thuilliers led a studio of two hundred women, painting directly on film stock with brushes in carefully chosen colors. Each worker was assigned a specific color to apply to a frame of film in assembly line style, with more than twenty colors sometimes used for a single film.".

Looks like this was my sixth or seventh of Melies' films at this point.
It is the first (and second) time I've seen it. Like many people, I was aware of it, knew the iconic image, and had even seen clips from it before but just decided to finally watch the whole thing. Especially since I have enjoyed all his other short-films that HBOMax has (most recently I watched The Four Troublesome Heads).

They should have kept it in.


The reason Cauldron (as well as Neverending Story and Dark Crystal) were such revelations at the time was they didnt pull their punches simply because their target audience was children. Of course some children can't take these sorts of things, and their is nothing wrong for parents to know before hand what they are getting into, but as a child who wanted my limits tested, it was nice that a couple of early 80s films provided the goods.


In fact, I found moments in those kids films more distressing than most of the horror films I watched at the time. And I was already watching all of them by the time I was 7. Even the ones I (maybe) shouldn't have been