D52 Week 25: The Black Cauldron!

In 1959, Disney released their noble experiment, Sleeping Beauty, their first film produced using the Technirama process, allowing for a wider picture and more detailed art, especially the backgrounds, which artist Eyvind Earle poured a theretofore unprecedented amount of time into, to get them juuuuuust right. The film was also an exercise in crafting a darker, more realistic narrative than was standard for the studio at the time. (It immediately followed a particularly fluffy movie about doggies in lurve, after all.) And Sleeping Beauty was such a smashing critical and commercial success that, twenty-six years later, they decided to recreate that magic with The Black Cauldron, another unusually dark Disney fantasy filmed in glorious Technirama!

By which I mean, nobody really liked Sleeping Beauty, and it lost Disney a lot of money, so I don't know why the fuck they thought it would go any better this time. Actually, it managed to go even worse. Idiots.

I have no idea what I'm supposed to latch onto in this film. Okay, so there's this kid named Taran, and he's an "assistant (to the) pig-keeper". But, he wants to be a great and powerful hero! He likes to practice for this by tormenting farm animals with a stick. He regards this as heroism, though in the real world that's more of a signifier of budding sociopathy. (Before you know it, he'll be popping pills in Dallben's basement and stabbing people.) Basically, Taran is an a douche. Even though he's just your standard typical farm boy, he's remarkably numb to all the very magical things that start happening around him. I mean, in something like Alice in Wonderland, you can explain away her detachment with the old "It was all a dream!" excuse, and her general predisposition for surrealism anyway. But in a movie like this, it's sort of offputting. Oh, look, undead soldiers. Yawn.

Or maybe I'm supposed to latch onto Eilonwy, because she's a princess, and princesses are charming, or something. She basically just exists to explain magical concepts, I guess. It's not like she actually does stuff or anything. Oh, wait, that's a lie. She kisses Taran at the end of the movie, doesn't she? Because that's all princesses are good for, right? To be used as mild-mannered romance objects with no free will of their own? If only there was some sort of film that one could go see right now, perhaps in some sort of large building specifically designed for the viewing of films, that disproved that notion. But, alas..................

It probably says a lot that she's a character in a Disney film, who is a princess, but is not at all a part of the Disney Princess Mafia. They're letting people like Mulan in, people who aren't even princesses at all, but Eilonwy is STILL left out, because she is terrible.

No, but CLEARLY the star is Gurgi, right? He's cute and adorable and marketable, right? No. No no no no no. Gurgi is terrible! He has an annoying voice and he doesn't do much besides trying to strangle old men for "munchings and crunchings"! And, god, that's a catchphrase that gets old really fast, and it comprises about 50% of his fucking dialogue, by my hyperbolic estimation! And he has sleeves, even though he's a naked furry animal??? He spends the entire film being a useless coward, and then suddenly he changes his mind, for no conceivable reason, to sacrifice himself to stop the titular Black Cauldron - oh, by the way, that's a general plot point that makes no sense - and then....and then Taran has him revived, because he's a "true friend"? Dude, nobody liked Gurgi. The world would probably be FAR better off if we still had a magical sword to ward off evil here in the mortal realm. But, whatever. Fine. Have it your way. Revive him. Render the one supposedly meaningful sacrifice ANYONE makes in this fucking film pointless. Stories with consequences are for the weak, right?

But what about our villain, the Horny Horned King? He's scary, in the sense that he is a dead person, and that is supposed to be inherently scary, but in this case, it isn't, because he is a moron, perhaps on account of his brain having rotted away like every other bit of flesh on a skeleton would have! Why does he talk about how the Black Cauldron's "evil power will course through [his] veins"? What veins??? You're a goddamned skeleton, you dick! And then you see Hen Wen's prophecy, and you act surprised that the Black Cauldron is actually a real thing? "So it DOES exist!" So you've been going through all this trouble on the random hunch that it might exist, but honestly, who has any fucking idea? I like to think that there are at least fifty untold stories of other powerful evil artifacts that he went to great lengths to find early in his gross bony life, only to discover that, no, they don't exist at all, because he doesn't do his evil king research. This Black Cauldron thing was just one lucky fluke in a looooooong string of hilarious horny failures, wasn't it?

Nothing in this movie makes fucking sense, is what I'm saying! Everything has a crazy fantasy-style nonsense name, except for Dallben's cat, who is apparently just named Cat! Why? Why doesn't he get a special name, with an improbable double consonant somewhere and maybe a Y where one might expect an I? If there's this super-powerful magical sword that exists, then why has it just been left undisturbed in this old king's tomb for now? Why didn't, say, whichever king came next decide to keep it, on the off chance that a powerful magical weapon might come in handy? Everyone involved in this story's universe just makes THE WORST decisions in regards to magical swords!!! And PLEASE, can we be done with jokes about how fat chicks are universally libidinous slobs compelled to hit on everyone they see, to those individuals' allegedly comical discomfort, because of course the very idea of even thinking about being within somewhat close physical proximity to a robust woman is literally the worst thing in the world? Not only is it insensitive and cruel, but I'd rather do the heavy-set witch than the gross bony anorexic one, honestly, and CERTAINLY more than the one who looks like Zombie Madame Medusa! I'm just tired of this joke, Disney! Fuck this joke!

I'm sorry, everybody, that this week's piece was such an unfocused rant. But what can you really write about The Black Cauldron? The backgrounds are rather beautifully drawn and there's some pretty good animation and the Technirama process certainly works to its visual benefit, but that doesn't matter one iota, because the places and things that are being drawn so well are boring, and also, every character has the personality of wet cardboard. Well, except for Gurgi, who is slightly more interesting, by which I mean he has the personality of cardboard that is wet in a somewhat more unconventional way, let's say because it's been soaked in cat urine or something. The Black Cauldron is terminally dull, is what I'm saying. And Taran doesn't even say, "Well, EXCUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME, PRINCESS!" So, in short, this movie can go fuck itself, no matter how much its comical girth might make that prospect seem comically unpalatable to itself.

NOT NOT TERRIBLE AND NON-UN-UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-DVD AND BLU-RAY DISNEY SEQUEL OF THE WEEK: The Black Cauldron II: The Legend of the Black Soup takes place several generations after the original. Taran's great great grandson, Naradam, is a respected judge, pressuring his son, Ffnarminn, to follow in his footsteps. But Ffnarminn wants to be a great hero, just like his great great great grandpop, and also, to impress his girlfriend, Llaurinia! One day at Cargraghppph Middle School, nefarious lunchlady Ethyll discovers an artifact from the days of yore of yesteryear: The Black Cauldron! She's not sure what, exactly, it does, so she just uses it to whip up a batch of soup for that day's school lunch. She's elated to discover that all the kids who eat the malevolently evil soup are instantly transformed into an evil army of the undead, ripe for her commanding! She immediately commands her army to march on the Superintendent of Schools, Ralph Dmnbasketnask, to demand a minimal raise after her many hard years of lunchladying, and when all looks lost for the carefully balanced school budget, Naradam realises that he must finally acknowledge his family's heroic heritage, by conquering Ethyll and her army with his magical gavel! As the undead soldiers turn back into pimple-faced adolescents, Naradam and Ffnarminn embrace, the father finally understanding his son's dreams, or something, but Naradam realises that he, too, is not a hero. He'd rather just settle down and marry Llaurinia and have a bunch of children and live in a picturesque house with a white picket grtichsktndket.