Movie Thoughts: The Black Cauldron (1985)

• Released: 24 July 1985
• Directed by: Ted Berman, Richard Rich
• Running time: 1 h 20 min
• Rating 1/5

Synopsis

An apprentice pig-keeper, a princess, a failure of a bard and a talking hairball look for an ancient relic known as the Black Cauldron before the evil Horned King can use it to summon his undead army and conquer the realm of Prydain.

My Thoughts

One of the most hated Disney movies. Is it worth it? Honestly, my only answer is: eh.

The main problem with this movie is that there is so little to it. It's not that it's qualitatively horrible (though still bad) or offensive. It's just that this movie is a big pile of nothing. It isn't memorable except for some mostly negative aspects; it doesn't feel epic, fun or charming; it's just mostly a slog.

The characters are very one-note. Taran has almost no personality out of wanting to be a warrior and coming to realize that friends are more important. The princess is...just a stock girl character. No personality, and honestly she might as well not be a princess because it's never relevant to the plot and she doesn't even do anything princess-y. The bard has only one single joke and it's that his harp breaks when he lies. Which is repeated a lot and never funny. And Gurgi...he was a mistake. Disney's comic relief characters generally aren't my favorite, but Gurgi's gotta be one of the worst. Even if his voice wasn't horribly annoying, he's just such an obnoxious dude. Constantly gets into people's personal space and lies/steals stuff, claims that others are his friends despite their obvious dislike of him, etc. When he leaped into the Cauldron to sacrifice himself, I wasn't sad. I was glad, glad that this annoying hairball was finally out of the movie for a bit. 

The villain had an admittedly kind of cool design and voice, but his presence was just utterly lacking. He just stood around for most of the movie giving orders and looking intimidating. That's pretty much all he does. Well, and abuse his goblin henchman, I guess.

The plot? Nothing memorable. It starts out with keeping a pig safe (which Taran fails hilariously quickly at) and then turns into stopping the Horned King from using the Cauldron. And it is boring. The journey isn't interesting and you don't even care about any of the characters, so this makes all of it such a slog. 

If there's anything I can praise about the movie, it really has to be the visuals. The animation is great, the backgrounds are lovely, the colors (though quite drab) fit the darker atmosphere and the film is mostly devoid of the dreaded sketchy style of the seventies. So it at least looks pretty good, but even in comparison to other previous Disney movies, it doesn't stand out much. Prydain pretty much comes across as any other fantasy realm with basic magical creatures like fairies/pixies/whatever they were, wyverns, goblins, witches and a dark lord. 

I've taken a look at many movies that were utter garbage before, and while those are obviously painful to sit through, I genuinely believe that being an unmemorable slog of a movie is, in a way, even worse. The Alpha and Omega sequels are crap, but they at least can be kind of funnily bad at times and gave me a lot to talk about. The Black Cauldron, meanwhile, is just a big pile of nothing. Nothing characters, nothing plot, nothing setting, etc. The only thing, again, I kind of take away from this movie is the visuals, but nothing more than that whatsoever. I'd skip this one if I were you.