Literary adaptations are usually a dubious prospect. Yet we readers stay hopeful. Maybe this time, we pray, in the face of fresh announcements. Maybe this time, Hollywood will remember to include that non-essential minor character I loved so on the page. Or capture the themes/foes/feelings that the book did. It almost never happens. But we keep the faith.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the sketchiest film adaptations to ever do it, in this reporter’s opinion. That same property also happens to be one of Disney Animation’s biggest flops: The Black Cauldron, adapted from Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain series.
For its birthday, I propose a return to that doomed fantasy-world. Why was Prydain, such a terrific series on paper, so hard to celebrate onscreen? And what can future book-to-film adaptors learn from its catastrophic example?
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As Barry Levitt reported this month in the BBC, at the time of its 1985 release, The Black Cauldron “was the most expensive animated film ever made.” It was also an instant disaster, netting only half of its budget over a whole theatrical run. Conor Holt at Remind magazine notes that The Black Cauldron was “the biggest monetary misfire in Disney history until 2004’s Treasure Planet.”
So, what happened?
First, there was the audience trouble. Neil O’Brien, author of After Disney: Toil, Trouble, and the Transformation of America’s Favorite Media Company, speculated that attempts to position The Black Cauldron as “teen-friendly” may have sealed its fate. The film was song-less, and PG—Disney’s first. And though the animation spiritually echoes docket sisters like The Fox and the Hound, the big kid rating was well-earned. Consider this objectively horrifying sequence.
Then there were the brewing conditions. The film was assembled in a cauldron of bad timing. Its final frames were drawn during major regime change at Paramount/Disney. And the new guys to assume the corporate reins, Michael Eisner and and Jeffrey Katzenberg, were not fans of the inherited project.
After “disastrous test screenings that reportedly had children running out of the theatre crying,” Katzenberg instructed creatives to cut fifteen minutes from the feature. And when this didn’t satisfy, he took over editing himself.
To begin with the demographic trouble, we should consider Alexander’s intended audience.
On paper, the Prydain series centers around a scrappy Assistant Pig-Keeper, Taran, who—much like Bilbo Baggins—is sucked into a world-historical adventure at the bequest of an ancient wizard mentor.
Like others before him, Taran has greatness thrust upon him. Over the five book series, he wanders, he grows, he learns to fight. He befriends a bard and a princess. This is, firstly, a lot of ground to cover in a project that was ultimately forced to be 82 minutes. Then there’s the fact of T’s enemies.
Queen Achren, Taran’s first foe, is no joke. Neither is her dethroner, the Prince Arawn, who takes the Iron Crown and rules over the Land of the Dead. And that reanimated corpse army—a cousin militia to Tolkien’s Dead Men of Dunharrow—is freaky as hell. When I first met them in family read-aloud hour, the cauldron-born gave me nightmares—even without the aid of illustrations. So one can see how Disney had a hard time interpreting and marketing this material. The story is capacious, and genuinely scary at times.
There’s also the sophisticated source material. Like Tolkien, Alexander served in a World War, and mapped what he saw of combat onto some fairly dense Welsh mythology. This accounts for Prydain’s unique appeal as much as its hard-to-translate-ness. Between the pig pal and the dead army, it’s a bridge series. Sitting, in my personal mythology, precisely between Narnia and Middle Earth.
It’s easy to imagine, in hindsight, how a complex story struggled to find a foothold—artistically and economically—between Disney’s pre-established Great Mouse Detective fans, and the teens it was then hoping to seduce. Which gets us back to making a case for keeping the series on paper. Maybe some properties just can’t make it on the big screen.
Then again. Dan Kois at Slate pointed out in 2010 that some of the age panic around Cauldron may have been overstated. After all, animators at United Artists brought us The Secret of NIMH in 1982, and that’s another property–book and film—that I associate with both nightmares and excellence.
Unlike Cauldron, NIMH was a critical and cult darling on its release. In 1982 it lost the Saturn Award to Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal, which, if you want to talk about terrifying child fare, don’t get me started.
Here, finally, it’s useful to recall something we may have forgotten in the last twenty years of animation, thanks to the rise of psychological, parent-geared programming at Pixar. That being the fact that most fairy tales are dark.
Disney’s biggest 90s successes, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, may have inaugurated a golden age at the studio, and saved the animation department from trouble Cauldron wrought. But these films did not honor their source material. In Hans Christian Anderson’s OG version, Ariel and Eric don’t get together at the end. She jumps into the sea in an act of suicidal sacrifice.
Since we started telling them, children’s stories have been riddled with cautions. The best of them name the fact that the world is scary; it is. Especially for kids. But the greatest also show that given grit and teamwork, sometimes we can triumph over the biggest armies. (Or it’s a good story, anyway.)
In a world where dark mage Guillermo Del Toro is remixing Pinocchio for all ages/nightmares, maybe we’re finally ready for another filmic crack at Prydain. As of 2016, Disney had re-acquired the rights to the series. Variety reports a fresh adaptation is in development.
But like a ghost army, I’ll believe it when I see it.
