How dark and daring gamble The Black Cauldron became a notorious Disney flop

What’s certain is that the Black Cauldron was aiming to become a different kind of Disney movie. “Ron Miller, the company’s former CEO and son-in-law of Walt Disney, wanted to leave the film,” Neil O’Brien, author of After Disney: Tow, Trouble and Media Company of The Transflation of America, tells the BBC. “He wanted it to appeal to a teenage audience, and deliberately did not have a song in the film that could turn off the teenage audience.”

Black Coldron also received Disney’s first PG rating. “It’s the norm now, but it was very progressive in that respect. It pushes the boundaries to where the animation is,” Mindy Johnson, author of Ink & Paint, the woman in Walt Disney’s Animation tells the BBC. “It feels surprisingly dark. The cauldron-born scene is probably more creepy than what they did in the past,” Dr. Sam Summers, an animation instructor at Middlesex University, tells the BBC.

Clashing in the studio

But things were also getting dark behind the scenes. A new generation of Colourt alumni, like the California Institute of Arts, or Bradbird and John Lasseter (who later became the driving force behind Pixar, each directing an incredible storyline), wanted to bring a fresh aesthetic to the studio. However, this led to a clash with old security guards who were keen to maintain the status quo. “When the cauldron was on the way, there were a lot of competing factions,” O’Brien says. The mood in the studio shifted from very optimistic to relevant.

Aramie

Adapting the Black Cauldron was a towering feat based on the Priden Chronicle by Lloyd Alexander, a five-volume series from the 1960s. “It’s an epic story, and there were challenges I’ve been afraid of in years of development,” says Johnson. It was also the first film to implement computer animations, such as the Cauldron Effect and Magic Orb. And it was the first Disney film for Sleeping Beauty in 1959 to be 70mm. This meant that the animators had bigger and more expensive canvases. They have made toys, complex and expensive technologies like the hologram system for films, bringing people born out of the cauldron to life.