The Black Cauldron

I haven’t got around to reading more of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain yet, but Disney have put their Prydain-inspired animation online and it is getting quite a bit of attention. It even found its way into the news here in Wales. I figured that I should take a look.

The film is loosely based on books 1 and 2 of the Chronicles. Well, ‘very loosely’ might be a better description. Certainly there are themes and characters from the books. Taran, Eilonwy, Ffewddur and Gurgi are pretty much as Alexander wrote them, if all rather flat. Hen Wen does not look very hen (her name means Old White). But there is no Achren, and even more surprisingly no Gwydion. Sadly they kept the ridiculous insult to the Tylwyth Teg.

It is pointless complaining about how badly the film mangles the original Welsh legends, because the books it is based on did too. The question is, have they made a decent film? Well, sort of.

The scriptwriters have clearly tried hard to construct a coherent narrative from the books that is short enough to fit into their 80 minute running time. They had some good ideas. Making the fall of the Spiral Castle the big endpiece was a good idea. But they couldn’t resist being Disney. There are some witches in a later book, so they had to go into the film. And the gave they Horned King a comedy goblin sidekick, and then let him steal much of the show.

Interestingly, both Gurgi and Creeper the Goblin are very Gollum-like. They are almost good-Gollum and bad-Gollum. The film was released in 1985 and Peter Jackson probably saw it.

Apparently The Black Cauldron flopped when it was first released. According to Wikipedia it was heavily cut before release because it was deemed too scary for children. I can see why. It does get pretty dark towards the end. But the characters are largely uninspired and the last few minutes seem tacked on because the scriptwriters couldn’t figure out a decent dramatic ending.

Creeper does rescue the film a bit, but the genius piece of casting was giving Skeletor the role of the Horned King. The credits say that it was John Hurt, but there’s no doubt from the film who that character is. It is a shame that they could not have found a role for Panthor as well. And Evil-Lyn could have played Achren. Oh well…