Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The Black Cauldron has had a bad reputation from pretty much minute one, the instant it opened in theaters to lukewarm reviews and half-empty theaters. But truthfully, to say The Black Cauldron spent the last 35 years living with a bad reputation undermines the truth that it actually has next to no reputation. Like nearly all of the animated Disney feature films released between Robin Hood in 1973 and The Little Mermaid in 1989, The Black Cauldron practically doesn’t exist. Princess Eilonwy doesn’t stand side by side with Cinderella and Belle on lunchboxes, you can’t get your picture taken with Gurgi at a Disney park, and good luck finding Taran and Horned King action figures (actually I just did a search and, yep, of course there are Funko Pops of these two).
Even among it’s deep cut ’70s and ’80s peers, we don’t talk about The Black Cauldron as much as, say, 1977’s underrated romp The Rescuers, or 1988’s ultimate bop Oliver & Company. Do we need to talk about the film’s pretty standard peasant-turned-hero and damsel-in-distress team up with cute animal sidekick to fight evil wizard villain storyline? Not really! You know the gist, and you can stream it for yourself on Disney+ if you’ve got 80 minutes to kill! But today, on the film’s 35th anniversary, we can unanimously celebrate one important aspect of this perfectly meh film: it was the first Disney feature to utilize computer generated animation.
You could say that this film—a film that bombed so hard in 1985 that Disney buried it deep within its vault for 13 years—kickstarted the entire computer-animated phenomenon that’s now so commonplace, we just call it animation. But even this, The Black Cauldron’s most notable achievement, isn’t remembered! That’s partly because Disney touted 1986’s The Great Mouse Detective as the first film to use computer animation. Those mice stole all of Cauldron’s thunder.
The truth is, Disney had animation crews working on The Black Cauldron and The Great Mouse Detective simultaneously. The animators on Mouse Detective broke new ground when they fired up the computers and put them to work on an elaborate chase sequence within Big Ben. When Joe Hale, producer on Black Cauldron, heard about what his fellow animators were cooking up across the metaphorical hall, he wanted in. He had the Great Mouse Detective team work on some minor objects for his movie—some bubbles, a levitating ball of light—and the one headlining object: the cauldron itself.
No, The Black Cauldron isn’t serving you proto-Toy Story realness with these scenes. These are baby steps! But these baby steps hit theaters before The Great Mouse Detective, giving audiences a very tiny taste of what was to come next year.
Disney did have every right to brag and boast about The Great Mouse Detective’s accomplishments. That film’s Big Ben sequence is a massive leap forward for computer animation, and it actually still looks impressive (if a bit out of place when paired with the comfortably sketchy line-work of traditional ’80s Disney animation). And the breakthroughs from Mouse Detective continued into The Little Mermaid and The Rescuers Down Under, films pioneered and perfected (respectively) the CAPS digital animation process—a process developed by a little software company called Pixar.
So, happy 35th birthday to The Black Cauldron. The characters aren’t memorable, the plot isn’t notable, the box office was abysmal, but The Black Cauldron changed how we view animation forever… at least just a tiny bit.
