Weeks back, I wrote about how Walt Disney’s 75-year-old animated feature film Bambi not only holds up, but is an animation thesis that argues why animation is an incredible medium. Some of animation’s most special qualities are rather ignored today in the world of American mainstream animation, as we are pelted year after year with many malt-o-meal movies that just feel like come-and-go reheats of what’s working.
Despite all the fancy technology and all the realism in the world, many of today’s computer animated movies just feel bland to me. Why are you trying to make live-action 2.0 with what you have? Why not exploit the technology and take animation down some crazy cool paths? Nowadays, the richly hand-drawn and hand-painted beauty of Bambi, a film that’s thankfully not so concerned about the almighty “plot,” seems risky and a tad avant-garde even.
The film I’m going to talk about is one known by many animation fans the world over, and while it isn’t celebrating any anniversary this year, it has been a wee bit over 25 years since the film was halted. Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler…
Who is Richard Williams? An animation mastermind who was determined to make, in his own words, the greatest animated movie that’s ever been made. A film combining everything he had learned about animation over the years, and everything he loved about the medium, all in one package. An epic film to be presented in widescreen, a rarity for animated features following the flopping of Walt Disney’s last roar of ambition, Sleeping Beauty. A film that wasn’t aiming to be on the level of kidvid Saturday morning cartoon rubbish or the stale, unambitious films made by the Disney studio after its founder’s passing.
The project began life at his London studio in 1964 as an adaptation of the Arabian Nights folk tale of Nasruddin. Author Idries Shah, who had collected the tales of Nasruddin and commissioned Williams to do illustrations for the volumes based on this character, backed the project. Years went by, and a falling out occurred between Williams and the Shah family. Williams lost the rights to Nasruddin, but was able to keep the characters he came up with for his story, one of which was a thief that followed the titular protagonist around. By the early 1970s, Williams had started over, with an original story that kept the Arabian Nights backdrop.
Multiple problems held back the feature, which was going to have animation from veterans such as Ken Harris, Art Babbitt, and Grim Natwick. Williams was hiring some truly top talent, and he and his younger animators learned from these masters. Since it was the mid-1970s, he was not going to be able to get any funding or backing for what he had in mind: An opulent animated epic not dissimilar to the films Walt Disney had made during the Golden Age, especially Fantasia. In the mid-1970s, most major movie companies only invested in safe-as-vanilla pictures. The success of Yellow Submarine in 1968 did not lead to a long line of psychedelic imitators, why Ralph Bakshi stayed afloat amidst several failed imitators. Something like Williams’ film wasn’t a hot commodity.
Williams and his studio did several commercials over time, he also had directed Raggedy Ann and Andy: A Musical Adventure – which was released in 1977 and bombed – and a TV special based on the comic strip Ziggy. Williams would use the revenue from commercials and other ventures to fund the big project. By 1982, he had about 20 minutes of fully-animated footage finished, a good chunk of it coming from the film’s climax set inside a complex war machine. A reel of footage caught the attention of Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg, and in turn this gave him his big break… Directing the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, to my eyes, has some of the best animation ever produced in the last five decades. Entirely hand-drawn, the film features superb lightning, movement, and staging that puts most CG-aided traditional animation to shame! All done in the mid-to-late 1980s, no less!
Williams had already used such mind-bending techniques for not only the Thief footage, but also for many of his other works. What he did with Roger Rabbit and everything else, he was going to do for The Thief and the Cobbler. Though The Walt Disney Company and Steven Spielberg intended to help Williams complete his masterpiece at long last, they went their separate ways. Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg imposed changes to Williams’ film, he refused, he walked. Disney then focused on relaunching their animation studio after being in a ditch for quite some time, Spielberg focused on starting his own studio: Amblimation. Williams was on his own, though a producer who was keen on his picture – Jake Eberts – got him some funding, and soon Williams was on a course to complete the film. Warner Bros. was set to distribute the film, part of a series of features they intended to use to launch themselves as competitors to Disney, Don Bluth, and Steven Spielberg… All in the midst of the growing 2nd Golden Age of Animation.
Two years into full production, trouble occurred once more. Richard Williams was often known for being a perfectionist when it came to animation, and often pushed his crew to be their very best, if not better. Williams had fired so many people during this time, and many couldn’t leave their offices until they were allowed to, given fierce amounts of hours. Scenes that were labored over were often redone because Williams was a sharp critic, and would be dissatisfied with the work because of a minor element. One story covered in Kevin Schreck’s making-of documentary Persistence of Vision detailed the creation of a sequence where the villainous Zigzag shuffles a whole deck of cards. Each card was meticulously animated and detailed, and the 10-second scene took months to finish… Williams had the poor animator redo the whole thing because he had a problem with the colors.
This wasn’t something new with Williams, this was the way he worked. While it did make for beautiful and jaw-dropping animation in the end, it’s something you should not do when you’re given a deadline by a major studio, and a budget that you have to stay within. The Thief and the Cobbler went over budget, and missed the deadline that Warner Bros. imposed on the studio. To make matters worse, Disney was readying their own Arabian Nights adventure, Aladdin. Aladdin shared some good-sized similarities with Williams’ film, and is often accused of intentionally stealing Williams’ thunder. (Though I honestly think that’s highly debatable.)
Warner Bros. was very afraid by early 1992, when advance footage of Aladdin began to trickle out. The Williams studio was way behind schedule and budget, as 15 more minutes of the film had to be completed, many of the scenes that needed to be done were major plot elements that couldn’t be left out. The film’s completion bond company – which, as explained many times before, is a consortium that has to step in when a movie runs into this sort of problem – came in, and fired Williams and most of his crew from the project in May of 1992 after the screening of a workprint went over horribly.
This bond company handed the project to a TV animation veteran named Fred Calvert, Warner Bros. backed out of the whole affair altogether. Calvert, assisted by the completion bond company, turned Williams’ film into a generic Disney wannabe with song sequences. Its more PG elements were cut out of the film, and significant alterations were made elsewhere. No distributor wanted to touch Calvert’s version of the movie, which was finished in September of 1993. Never getting a US release, his version – The Princess and the Cobbler – disappeared quickly in two international markets: South Africa and Australia. After much waiting, Miramax picked up the Calvert version and butchered it even further, releasing it here as Arabian Knight in the summer of 1995. Flopping hard, Arabian Knight was smeared by critics and animation fans alike. Miramax didn’t release the butchered film on home video (in pan-in-scan form on the VHS, no less!) until 1997, adding another insult to injury.
To date, no official release of the workprint has ever occurred… For years, you could watch the workprint online along with fan Garrett Gilchrist’s edit of the movie, the legendary “Recobbled Cut.” For now, the workprint is not online. The workprint is on the second disc of the independently-made Persistence of Vision DVD set, so that’s a plus. No attempt has been made to complete Williams’ film since Roy E. Disney’s attempts to do just this in the early aughts. Roy E. Disney died in 2009, apparently the will to finish this film has as well… Though it has made a major resurgence not only because of the “Recobbled Cut,” but also because of Persistence of Vision. Screenings were held, it was a big deal, Williams began talking about the film a little more – as he used to avoid discussing it… More people know about Williams’ lost animated masterpiece, while the Calvert and Miramax versions deservedly are fading away into obscurity.
The Thief and the Cobbler, to me, is the extension of the ambition that Walt Disney forcefully had to abandon once Americans went off to fight in World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Bambi was knee-deep in production by that time, and had to be finished either way, but a lot of material had hit the cutting room floor. Arguably, that was for the better, for Bambi perhaps didn’t need to be longer than 70 minutes. Premiering in August of 1942, Bambi was the third box office failure from the studio. Five features in, three of them were busts. Walt was hurt dearly, and so apparently was his drive to re-invent animation and cinema with new features…
It’s often written that shreds of that ambition did crop up in his post-war features, that all culminated with 1959’s widescreen epic, Sleeping Beauty. While this is true, Disney still knew how to tell a great story in the animation medium after the war, with or without all the fancy tricks and effects that made his early features such costly projects. Indeed, a lot of the work that followed was more conventional than something like Fantasia or Bambi. The Thief and the Cobbler feels almost like that proverbial sixth film, had the war never occurred, had Pinocchio and Fantasia never flopped. Walt getting the freedom and opportunities he never enjoyed in the 1950s or 1960s.
At the time of its development, there really was nothing like The Thief and the Cobbler. What Williams was making was not only a very big and sprawling adventure, but an avant-garde one that preferred to tell its story through visuals and animation, with a mostly silent cast. As if he was making an extended Fantasia segment, or if he took Bambi and turned it into an adventure-epic spectacle. Almost like an animated Lawrence of Arabia or Ben-Hur. Just something massive, yet it ran a little under 100 minutes.
I first caught wind of The Thief and the Cobbler when I was around, I want to say, 10. I had a Disney videos catalogue somewhere, and in the back section were all the films that weren’t mainline Disney releases. Stuff like Miramax, Buena Vista Home Video, licensed titles, this, that… One that caught my eye was this “Thief and the Cobbler” movie. Now one thing to keep in mind: When the Miramax version of the movie was released on video, the title was changed back to The Thief and the Cobbler, even though the Miramax version is far from what Williams intended and doesn’t deserve to hold that title.
Anyways, that’s how I knew of it. Then I saw a preview for it, in school of all places! A substitute teacher put on a Schoolhouse Rock VHS tape for us, and this was one of the previews! I remember being rather interested, because the visual style shown in the trailer was different from what I was used to. But then my ever-racing mind forgot all about it weeks later. Sort of.
Years later, I kept hearing of a “recobbled cut” of The Thief and the Cobbler. One day, curious me stumbled upon the Wikipedia page after recalling it. From there, I was sucked into the story of the film, the film itself, and was generally obsessed. This was over 7 years ago. I was mad about Williams’ animation and The Thief and the Cobbler, and it had a significant amount of influence on my projects and my works. To me, Williams – had he gotten his way in the mid-1970s or so – would’ve been the antidote that feature animation desperately needed…
When Williams finally got the opportunity to complete The Thief and the Cobbler and release it commercially, I feel that he made a film that was very uncommercial in many ways… And in the best possible ways, too.
Let’s just say The Thief and the Cobbler did meet the 1991 deadline, and was released into movie theaters about a full year before Aladdin or many months before it. Before the release of Aladdin, the animation golden age was on an upward climb. Beauty and the Beast – which Williams was ironically asked to direct at one point by Disney – had come out during the holiday season of 1991, and went on to collect the biggest gross for an animated feature on its initial release, on top of receiving accolades, awards, and even a Best Picture Oscar nomination. A first for any animated feature film. At last, over 50 years since the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Academy finally woke up and somewhat recognized animation as an art form!
Animation’s second golden age ultimately didn’t last much longer after that, mostly because it was only Disney who was succeeding. Don Bluth fell victim to more executive meddling, as evidenced in his early 90s pictures Rock-a-Doodle and A Troll in Central Park. Attempts to make more animated movies for older audiences ended in disaster (Cool World, Bebe’s Kids), experimental films didn’t do especially well, everyone else? They just copied Disney. Amblimation copied the Disney formula, Fox’s releases copied the Disney formula, Warner Bros. had multiple animated trip-ups outside of Thief. Who outside of the animation fandom remembers The Nutcracker Prince and Rover Dangerfield? Other studios treated animation like a genre, and that’s why most of them lost. Disney at least did it right, even if they were showing signs of losing steam themselves.
The Thief and the Cobbler would’ve been unique amongst that whole wave of animated features of the early-to-mid 90s. Not a big booming dramatic epic on the order of the Disney Renaissance films, not an innocuous kids’ musical like most of the competition, not a tryhard edgy film like Cool World or Bebe’s Kids, The Thief and the Cobbler is and was a breed of its own. Watching the workprint again a few days ago, my stance remained… The Thief and the Cobbler feels like an old-fashioned, albeit artistic movie.
Parts of the film make you feel like you’re watching something out of the mid-1960s, not something that was being produced in the late 80s going into the early 90s. I’m a reader of the blog Passport2Dreams, run by FoxxFur. In a series of posts made back in 2014, she looked at a string of films released after Walt Disney’s passing. In her review of The Jungle Book, most of which was overseen by Walt before his death, she makes an interesting comparison between Williams’ film and Disney’s animated swan song.
Have you ever seen Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler? And by that I mean the fuller, unexpurgated versions floating around online, not the dreadful dub n’ hack version released by Disney.
It’s a fascinating film, not least of which because Williams refused to storyboard the film. As a result, each shot in a sequence is as long as its’ animator wished it to be. As a result, each shot has internal rhythms but the larger sequences do not, dictated as they are by such factors as speed, fatigue, and interest. It’s an animator’s dream but an editor’s nightmare.
I think Thief and the Cobbler helps illustrate why the 60s and 70s Disney animated features are so pokily paced. Through the 50s, Walt and others insisted on keeping the pace up and the narrative tight, but as animators like Ollie Johnston and Ken Anderson were given more latitude to craft sequences, the whole pace of the enterprise slows down to a casual wobble. It’s the pace of animation allowed to exist for its own sake.
Like those slower 60s and 70s Disney animated films, The Thief and the Cobbler takes its time. It runs 90 minutes, much like Disney’s Aladdin, but this feels longer while the other one zips. The Thief and the Cobbler has a barebones story at its core: Tack the cobbler and the nameless thief aren’t these very complex characters, evil vizier Zigzag is your typical power-hungry villain who hates Tack simply because of an accident, the rest of the characters are rather stock. There’s no character arc, Tack simply falls for the Princess YumYum, she falls for him, he gets roped into this big adventure while the thief functions as a Buster Keaton-type who is in all the situations and events while being completely oblivious to almost all the action.
A similar criticism could be tossed at Bambi. Like Bambi, The Thief and the Cobbler emphasizes certain elements and has those tell the story, not traditional or conventional means. While Bambi subtly illustrates the life and times of a deer in 69 minutes through the visuals and music, The Thief and the Cobbler details a big adventure through its animation and art direction. Both movies are very light on dialogue, and are borderline silent films. I’m not quite phased that I don’t know every detail about Tack the Cobbler, or Princess YumYum, or anyone else in the film. We learn little details in dialogue-free stretches. Tack shows that he’s got brains when he escapes from prison, the thief’s determination is beautifully and hilariously shown in several eye-popping sequences, Princess YumYum demonstrates some badassness in a couple of scenes. The characters do have personalities, and they keep the picture afloat because of that. Just like how Bambi‘s personality animation, music, and impressionistic forest art do the same. Both films are delightfully unconventional works in the realm of animated feature filmmaking. Antitheses to plot-heavy, talky movies that animation is shackled to these days. A formula solidified in the early 90s.
The eccentricities of each character is a big focus, as is the visual splendor of the Golden City setting. Instead of some dialogue-heavy scenes setting up bigger parts or detailing the characters’ pasts, The Thief mostly walks through its 90-minute running time. Even the big action setpieces feel like a steady walk! For instance, a sequence where the thief is attempting to get into the palace goes on for quite a while, scenes and scenes of him climbing up sewer pipes, getting flushed, and climbing back up. These were scenes that Fred Calvert griped about when cutting Williams’ film and molding into a more commercial film.
Scenes later, the thief lands himself into a polo tournament, getting whacked by all the horse-riding players. The ball continues to somehow follow him throughout the sequence. For someone like me, the part is a delight. For someone else, it could be ongoing and boring. “Get to the point!” The Thief and the Cobbler is deliberately not that kind of movie. I can picture audiences in, say, 1992 getting bored around the point where the thief fails for the umpteenth time to get the golden balls.
The war machine sequence that climaxes the picture milks and milks every opportunity it has. Every minute or so, it’s topping itself in some gleefully over-the-top way. The film basks in its complex and meticulously-detailed animation, it does not let up! A similar climax is in Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective, a chase through Big Ben’s gears. Disney’s film used CGI to make all those moving gears, and the results are indeed impressive even if they weren’t all hand-drawn like everything is in The Thief. That being said, Mouse Detective shows restraint. The scene in the tower lasts maybe a minute or two, then Basil and Ratigan fight on the clock-hands of Big Ben. The Thief‘s War Machine climax keeps going and going and going. The Miramax cut heavily edited that whole sequence down. What would the general audience have thought of the full climax?
Similar to how Walt Disney and his crew made 69 minutes feel long enough, Richard Williams and crew created a film that felt its length. I can’t say the same about several other 90-110 minute animated movies made from the 1990s onward. Most good films in that category have pretty balanced pacing, Williams lets things go on for a little bit longer. That’s what I admire about The Thief and the Cobbler, it’s all about the animation and what you’re seeing. Visual storytelling in lengthy segments, they may not add up to a lean and rock-solid story, but they do make for a great alternative to the way adventure stories are normally told. This movie did something that would not work at all in live-action.
The first few post-Walt features from Disney function in a similar way, except The Aristocats and Robin Hood don’t have the amazing animation, technical prowess, or the scope of this film. The Thief and the Cobbler, being started in the early 1970s, oddly fits in alongside those pictures and the era itself in that way. More so than the early 1990s, that’s for sure! Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King hover around the 90-minute mark. All three of them feel quicker than The Thief and the Cobbler does. Most of the dialogue for The Thief was recorded in the 70s, so it does not have that 90s snazziness to it or the general feel of that era’s movies. The music that’s used in the workprint recalls Golden Age-era animation, not the early 90s. Now interestingly enough, the released versions use more contemporary-sounding scores. Notably the Calvert version, which isn’t too bad all things considered… Even with the newer-sounding music and the redubbed voices, there’s still something very 60s-esque about this movie. The animation style overall is decidedly very classical in a way, far removed from Disney’s CAPS look or the raw cel look of Bluth’s movies. There are strong dashes of Yellow Submarine all throughout it.
Williams’ work on Roger Rabbit, especially the opening cartoon sequence, definitely ring the 40s like they’re supposed to despite the tech and tricks that were present in the 1980s. 1971’s A Christmas Carol is a Victorian-esque etching coming to life, it does not feel 1971! Even most of Raggedy Ann and Andy feels like a lost 1940s animated movie, not a 1977 production! Williams and his crew somehow kept a very retro gloss for their works, and it endlessly fascinates me. I see The Thief and the Cobbler as a lost mid-1960s animated adventure movie in tone and spirit, and that would’ve been very peculiar amongst the early 90s animation game. “Recobbled Cut” creator Garrett Gilchrist sometimes used actual 60s compositions in making his edit, one scene used ‘From Me To You Fantasy’ from the Help! soundtrack, and it fits very, very nicely. I can see why Warner Bros. was so skittish, though it was so wrongheaded of the completion bond company to have this movie retooled into something it wasn’t. Ironically, their attempts to make it more commercial just made it seem like another Disney wannabe, and worse, an Aladdin knock-off, to the general public. Why oh why didn’t they just complete the film and release it as is? They were going to be compared to Disney’s finished-on-time picture either way, might as well have sold it as “The masterpiece 30 years in the making!”
Just more proof that most of the time, these executive-made decisions in mainstream animation often backfire. Harvey Weinstein, who was responsible for the Miramax edit of this film, continues to do this kind of thing, as evidenced in his company’s latest animation release, Leap! A French film that was already dubbed into English, redubbed for American consumption… And like many of his company’s animated releases, it looks to just come and go. American animation suffers from similar executive mentalities, this need to make everything into some homogenous product. Look at how audiences responded to the brainy Inside Out and the cross-genre animal picture Zootopia. It isn’t all about giggling tictac comedies and cutesy matinee kiddie fluff. Though, admittedly, putting a picture like The Thief and the Cobbler in front of audiences is indeed a risk.
Audiences seemed to be fine with WALL-E, which perhaps was one of the riskiest mainstream animated features made in the last decade or so. WALL-E is mostly silent like The Thief and the Cobbler is, though it isn’t necessarily a showcase for animation trickery and spectacle. Its pacing is pretty balanced, not too quick, not too slow, certainly not like The Thief‘s steady walking pace. One of the biggest criticisms often leveled at WALL-E is the fact that the film gets rather plot-heavy once everything goes up to outer space. A 2001-esque plot begins to take place, and soon the lonely robot has the key to a better life for the blobby fat hoverchair-riding humans glued to screens, something that’s a threat to a robot that’s programmed to keep everything as is on the giant intergalactic cruise ship.
That being said, WALL-E may have had many silent portions, characters that only spoke a few words, and a science fiction story (apparently a no-no in animation these days), it still was a big hit at the box office. Maybe the Pixar name helped, maybe it didn’t. Marketing enticed audiences somehow, it opened big, though its legs weren’t the best for a Pixar film. Still stronger than most films anyways, it made over $220 million domestically and over $530 million worldwide. Quite a leap, but if WALL-E didn’t have the space detour and humans and stuff, would’ve it had been a commercial success? Would it have been Pixar’s first flop?
Oddly enough, this could all relate to The Good Dinosaur in some way. Good Dinosaur isn’t paced like other modern animated movies, a good stretch of its second act is very slow and isn’t content with rushing from plot point to plot point. Most of the film is about a character who speaks, and another character who doesn’t, so it too is mostly a quiet film with very little talking. That film became Pixar’s first flop, and while it did make a decent amount of money, it wasn’t enough to cover its dinosaur-sized budget. Still, it is Pixar’s lowest-earning and least-attended film… I think that says more about the storytelling choices than the perceived quality of the movie. Raw, mostly silent stretches of atmospheric beauty? I guess it needed a snarky dinosaur sidekick or a bunch of minion-like critters running around to make audiences want to go and see it. I don’t know.
The Thief and the Cobbler also sits squarely between a modern Disney film and a PG-13 film in terms of its content. Most animated movies made nowadays easily get the PG rating for toilet humor or some innuendo kids will never pick up on or “rude humor” (whatever the hell that means), back in the 90s most animated movies settled for a G rating. Even Disney’s, and if you’ve seen Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, you’d probably wonder why those aren’t rated PG while Minions movies and sugary smurfy movies are. In the 90s, you had to EARN the PG rating. Nowadays, you just get it like it’s nothing. A little fart there or someone getting smacked in a comical manner, PG! Rude humor! Thematic elements!
The Thief and the Cobbler would’ve easily gotten a PG rating in the 1990s. It’s significantly more violent than the Disney Renaissance films, featuring a scene where a character has a flagpole sticking right through his chest along with several arrows in his back. The climax brings an insanely high body count, and the army of the One-Eyes are generally pretty frightening for small children. In a nightmare sequence, we see swords and blood spurts against darkness. The King – offscreen, but audibly – gets it on with a maiden from Mombassa in one sequence, there’s some other little things here and there. It’s much more adult-skewing, for sure. A lot of that stuff was altered or flat-out cut from the released versions, the Miramax version secured a G-rating.
Those more family-unfriendly elements are yet another reason why it’s an anomaly amongst the early 90s crop and modern animated movies in general. Of course, American executives want animation to be stuffed in the kiddie toy box, so that kind of violence and subtle sexual content is something you won’t really see. The pendulum swings one way, or the other. Animated features either have to be generally kid-friendly, or they have to be wildly inappropriate and incredibly juvenile – like Sausage Party. Some films like Rango and ParaNorman nearly inch towards the middle, which would be occupied by a PG-13 film like – say – Princess Mononoke, The Triplets of Belleville, or The Plague Dogs. Or a smart R-rated film like Akira or Perfect Blue. The Thief and the Cobbler challenged Hollywood’s narrow-minded view of animation back then, and it challenges them now.
While Bambi exists, is revered, is legendary and iconic, and is in many Americans’ homes… The Thief and the Cobbler is unfinished, its released counterparts are undesirable and obscure. Both films challenge modern animation conventions, even though they are several decades old. Imagine an alternate world where The Thief and the Cobbler was released, regardless of box office, it’s something of a well-known film amongst aficionados. There’s plenty of animated and live-action films that aren’t box office smashes like Disney, Pixar, and Illumination movies, but… They’re at least well-known and are held up in high esteem. The Thief and the Cobbler could’ve easily become one of those movies, like an Iron Giant-type (also a WB release that was botched) but even in unfinished form, it is adored by animation fans and film fans who have happened to see it. Little by little, it seems to grow and reach new audiences. One notable animation filmmaker, Tomm Moore, has cited The Thief as a big influence on his work. You can see this in his The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and his upcoming Wolfwalkers, the demo trailer released a few months back definitely is mind blowing in terms of the animation, design, and staging.
I’m certainly happy that I first saw the Recobbled Cut in March of 2010. I feel the film is a required viewing, whether you’re a fan of animation or not. I’m not sure what the hold up could be… Miramax has only released their version on video a couple of times, the Calvert cut was presumably barely released internationally. Even though Richard Williams refuses to talk about the film (understandably), there were all the screenings and Persistence of Vision. Roy E. Disney wanted to finish the film… Can’t a strong team of 2D animators finish those last 15 minutes? Williams may not want to orchestrate that and revisit the trauma, as he has other projects to deal with.
Maybe he’ll think otherwise one day. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys had avoided his intended opus SMiLE for so long, as the sessions and music ultimately traumatized him. He successfully revisited it in 2004 and finished it as a Brian Wilson project with a helping team of musicians. The original Beach Boys version is unfinished and remains that way, the 2011 SMiLE Sessions set is simply an archival release. If Williams doesn’t want to finish the film if he had the opportunity, then certainly we can have a legitimate release of all the content, no? Why is there no Criterion Collection set with the workprint, the Calvert/Princess cut, and the Miramax/Arabian Knight cut? I suppose TheThiefArchive is more than enough, but you know YouTube and their copyright bull. Enjoy it all while it lasts…
Anyways, unfinished, decades-old, and dazzling… The Thief and the Cobbler was a challenging and ambitious film in 1977, 1987, 1997, 2007, and today. It is a showcase of what animation is truly capable of and what kind of unique stories it can tell…