The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut - Animation Dissection
I actually managed to see the "Recobbled Cut" of the Thief and the Cobbler some time back, and have been meaning to make a post on it for a while now, but just hadn't found the time. The whole mystique surrounding the film is a fascinating story of what could have been, and what could have been was an animated film long before Pixar's time that was intended as a piece of art rather than merely entertainment.
The first time I saw anything related to the Thief and the Cobbler was when I saw it for sale in my local grocery story and I turned my nose up at it, assuming that it was just another one of GoodTimes Entertainment's cheap knockoffs of Disney filmsm, in this case Aladdin. Turns out I was right in a way...
The Thief and the Cobbler was actually begun in 1964, long before the Disney Rennaissance was even a thought. It was the pet project of master animator Richard Williams (Most people now would know him best for his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit). This film was his pride and joy, intended to be his greatest masterpiece. It was created slowly in bits and pieces as funding became available. It was truly a labor of love.
The film became a point of interest for many in the animation industry, to the point that Disney animators working on Aladdin were instructed to watch a workprint of Thief for inspiration, leading to some similarities between the two films.
In the late 80's, the movie was picked up in full by Warner Brothers, likely in the hopes they could use it to compete with the upcoming Aladdin. Unfortunately, Williams missed deadlines and Warner Brothers was unsatisfied with the results he had produced. In 1991, with only about 10 - 15 minutes of the film left to finish, Warner Brothers backed out of their contract leaving the film in the hands of a Completion Bond company. This new company promptly booted Williams off of his own project and replaced him with Fred Calvert for the film's completion.
Calvert was forced to work under extreme pressures to finish the film quickly and cheaply. As a result, the final film is a horrendously edited mishmash of styles and quality and some terribly bad ideas.
As if changing the story, characters and tacking on unecessary songs weren't bad enough, this new version of the film's most egregious error was in its treatment of the title characters, the thief and the cobbler. In Williams' original movie, the two characters were mute, almost completely silent. This new version not only gave these two characters voices (animating scenes of them talking into the film) but gave them inner monologues as well. They took two characters who were never meant to speak and changed it so they never shut the hell up!
It's difficult to imagine what thought process would lead to a decision like this at first. It certainly didn't seem to do the film any favors, this watered-down Disneyfied version performed poorly and largly was seen as forgetable, but it does make some sense when the film itself is really looked at.
This foul-up wasn't to be the end of the road for this troubled production, though. In 2000, Roy Disney, a big fan of the movie, began making attempts to restore the film to Williams' original vision. Unfortunately, his leaving of the Disney company effectively left that project dead in the water. Then in 2006, an intrepid fan set out to recreate the original film as best he could, gathering together bits and pieces that have survived and creating the appropriately titled "recobbled cut".
The result here is also a huge mishmash, but unlike the "final" version of the film, this one becomes interesting as opposed to infuriating. It's essentially a look behind the scenes to the making of an animated film as it's cut together from Calvert's finished product (unfortunately still including some of his changes), low quality work prints, rough animation and even storyboards for the few remaining unfinished sections. It's a rare opportunity to peel back the layers and get a look at the process of it all. But in watching this version, you get a better look at William's original vision...and you can see why it is that Calvert had such a hard time finishing it and felt he had to resort to a lot of telling.
You see, this was most definitely a film made by an animator. Now for anyone who plans to snarkily comment with "but aren't all animated films?" I'd like to answer "No, not really." This movie is about animation, that's the whole point. Overall, I'd say Aladdin is a much better movie (not that the two are really all that comparable - aside from some superficial similarities, the movies aren't really that much alike. I'm only mentioning it to illustrate my point), casual viewers may not think much of Thief's highly stylized focus-on-the-animation drive. Envision a chef who loooooves radishes, so he makes a dish with the express purpose of making the greatest radishes in the world, but even though the radishes are the best you've ever tasted the rest of the meal suffers for it. Aladdin, on the other hand, is a simple, straightforward meal, where there's nothing really radical and every portion of it was well made. The first dish may do great things for radishes, but given the choice, most people would prefer the latter dish.
...and now I'm hungry...
The Thief and the Cobbler has lackluster characters and a fairly generic story, but it's not about that. It's about the animation. This is a film you really have to watch, you're not going to get much of anything from it without paying attention because it's all in the little details. Watching this film reminds me a great deal of older animation. I know it was begun in the 60's and bears the marks of that, but it puts me more in mind of the cartoons of the 30's, 40's and 50's, the Fleischer cartoons and the early Disney and Warner Brothers shorts, when everything was animated by hand and no shortcuts were taken. And the two title characters feel like they're meant to showcase the animation the most.
In the case of the thief, he isn't given much in the way of characterization and feels disconnected from the plot even though he's important to it. Most of his scenes are wild, chaotic and highly detailed, with the story often grinding to a halt in order to linger on his slapstick antics. For example, towards the end of the film, a good ten to fifteen minutes are spent following the thief as he attempts to escape some crumbling machinery, following his every miraculous escape as the scenery around him collapses and tears apart. The point here seems to be to show these complex and detailed scenes, which again are entirely hand drawn and focus on them entirely. The character of the thief is merely a prop to bring us from one set of such scenes to the next. Normally such a scene would bog down a film, but here, scenes like this seem to be the point. You're not watching to see what happens next as much as your watching to see some incrdibly complex animation unfold all around the screen.
For the cobbler, named Tack, the focus seems very different. His scenes are mostly small and quiet, very contained. For him, the point is to present to us with not only a complete and likable character, but also a dynamic character who grows and evolves as the movie progresses, all without relying on a single line of dialogue. The latter effect was unfortunately marred by a coloring error, but I still think it's a fascinating idea to have the character physically change, the way he moves, looks, how he holds himself to represent his growth. It's the ultimate example of showing over telling, and provides a very different challenge from that of the complex animation surrounding the thief.
The result of this is a film that's fairly slow and tends to meander around quite a bit. I can't say I'd recommend it to most people, as a general source of entertainment it's passable, but there are certainly better things to watch for a little fun. If it sounds like I'm putting the movie down, though, I'm really not, because again, that wasn't the point. The animation is the point. Average viewers will take animation for granted, they're used to it, have seen it time and time again, so they don't focus on it. This isn't a bad view, it's just what happens. They'll look at something like this movie and instead of being in awe of the level of skill and care that went into it, they look instead to what it's saying, which admittedly isn't much. One view isn't better than the other, they're just different, but we rarely have films that cater to the former, so it's a shame this was never fully completed. Much like the abstract paintings, this is art for art's sake. It's highly stylized and very visually complex. If that's something that would interest you, I'd definitely give it a look. I know I'm wishing I could get it on DVD to add to my collection.
You can find it easily by just googling "Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut" it's available in a variety of different places online. I would very emphatically not recommend seeking out the edited down version. If you want to compare them, the Nostalgia Critic did a review. It's not one of my favorites of his - I think the released version was an insult to everyone too, but even I think he went a bit far in some places - but you can see how terrible some of the things they did to the film were.
But in some ways, I feel almost like the worst thing that happened is that Richard Williams has pretty much entirely written off this film. He won't discuss it with anyone, he refused to give input to the fan for the recobbled cut, he even released a book about animation and doesn't once mention the film he spent 30 years of his life working on! (There's a single screenshot from the movie in the book, but the movie it's from is not credited.) I can't imagine how bad that felt, to have something you worked so long on taken from you. I imagine I'd do the same thing. To me, that's the saddest thing...I can put myself in his shoes, and I've never created anything so great...and at the end of the day, I feel like that's the real story. Perhaps someday someone will finish it properly for him, but it's such a strange, quirky film, that I'm not sure it'd happen. Oh well, at least we got some nice animation and more Vincent Price villainy out of the deal.
The first time I saw anything related to the Thief and the Cobbler was when I saw it for sale in my local grocery story and I turned my nose up at it, assuming that it was just another one of GoodTimes Entertainment's cheap knockoffs of Disney filmsm, in this case Aladdin. Turns out I was right in a way...
The Thief and the Cobbler was actually begun in 1964, long before the Disney Rennaissance was even a thought. It was the pet project of master animator Richard Williams (Most people now would know him best for his work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit). This film was his pride and joy, intended to be his greatest masterpiece. It was created slowly in bits and pieces as funding became available. It was truly a labor of love.
The film became a point of interest for many in the animation industry, to the point that Disney animators working on Aladdin were instructed to watch a workprint of Thief for inspiration, leading to some similarities between the two films.
In the late 80's, the movie was picked up in full by Warner Brothers, likely in the hopes they could use it to compete with the upcoming Aladdin. Unfortunately, Williams missed deadlines and Warner Brothers was unsatisfied with the results he had produced. In 1991, with only about 10 - 15 minutes of the film left to finish, Warner Brothers backed out of their contract leaving the film in the hands of a Completion Bond company. This new company promptly booted Williams off of his own project and replaced him with Fred Calvert for the film's completion.
Calvert was forced to work under extreme pressures to finish the film quickly and cheaply. As a result, the final film is a horrendously edited mishmash of styles and quality and some terribly bad ideas.
As if changing the story, characters and tacking on unecessary songs weren't bad enough, this new version of the film's most egregious error was in its treatment of the title characters, the thief and the cobbler. In Williams' original movie, the two characters were mute, almost completely silent. This new version not only gave these two characters voices (animating scenes of them talking into the film) but gave them inner monologues as well. They took two characters who were never meant to speak and changed it so they never shut the hell up!
It's difficult to imagine what thought process would lead to a decision like this at first. It certainly didn't seem to do the film any favors, this watered-down Disneyfied version performed poorly and largly was seen as forgetable, but it does make some sense when the film itself is really looked at.
This foul-up wasn't to be the end of the road for this troubled production, though. In 2000, Roy Disney, a big fan of the movie, began making attempts to restore the film to Williams' original vision. Unfortunately, his leaving of the Disney company effectively left that project dead in the water. Then in 2006, an intrepid fan set out to recreate the original film as best he could, gathering together bits and pieces that have survived and creating the appropriately titled "recobbled cut".
The result here is also a huge mishmash, but unlike the "final" version of the film, this one becomes interesting as opposed to infuriating. It's essentially a look behind the scenes to the making of an animated film as it's cut together from Calvert's finished product (unfortunately still including some of his changes), low quality work prints, rough animation and even storyboards for the few remaining unfinished sections. It's a rare opportunity to peel back the layers and get a look at the process of it all. But in watching this version, you get a better look at William's original vision...and you can see why it is that Calvert had such a hard time finishing it and felt he had to resort to a lot of telling.
You see, this was most definitely a film made by an animator. Now for anyone who plans to snarkily comment with "but aren't all animated films?" I'd like to answer "No, not really." This movie is about animation, that's the whole point. Overall, I'd say Aladdin is a much better movie (not that the two are really all that comparable - aside from some superficial similarities, the movies aren't really that much alike. I'm only mentioning it to illustrate my point), casual viewers may not think much of Thief's highly stylized focus-on-the-animation drive. Envision a chef who loooooves radishes, so he makes a dish with the express purpose of making the greatest radishes in the world, but even though the radishes are the best you've ever tasted the rest of the meal suffers for it. Aladdin, on the other hand, is a simple, straightforward meal, where there's nothing really radical and every portion of it was well made. The first dish may do great things for radishes, but given the choice, most people would prefer the latter dish.
...and now I'm hungry...
The Thief and the Cobbler has lackluster characters and a fairly generic story, but it's not about that. It's about the animation. This is a film you really have to watch, you're not going to get much of anything from it without paying attention because it's all in the little details. Watching this film reminds me a great deal of older animation. I know it was begun in the 60's and bears the marks of that, but it puts me more in mind of the cartoons of the 30's, 40's and 50's, the Fleischer cartoons and the early Disney and Warner Brothers shorts, when everything was animated by hand and no shortcuts were taken. And the two title characters feel like they're meant to showcase the animation the most.
In the case of the thief, he isn't given much in the way of characterization and feels disconnected from the plot even though he's important to it. Most of his scenes are wild, chaotic and highly detailed, with the story often grinding to a halt in order to linger on his slapstick antics. For example, towards the end of the film, a good ten to fifteen minutes are spent following the thief as he attempts to escape some crumbling machinery, following his every miraculous escape as the scenery around him collapses and tears apart. The point here seems to be to show these complex and detailed scenes, which again are entirely hand drawn and focus on them entirely. The character of the thief is merely a prop to bring us from one set of such scenes to the next. Normally such a scene would bog down a film, but here, scenes like this seem to be the point. You're not watching to see what happens next as much as your watching to see some incrdibly complex animation unfold all around the screen.
For the cobbler, named Tack, the focus seems very different. His scenes are mostly small and quiet, very contained. For him, the point is to present to us with not only a complete and likable character, but also a dynamic character who grows and evolves as the movie progresses, all without relying on a single line of dialogue. The latter effect was unfortunately marred by a coloring error, but I still think it's a fascinating idea to have the character physically change, the way he moves, looks, how he holds himself to represent his growth. It's the ultimate example of showing over telling, and provides a very different challenge from that of the complex animation surrounding the thief.
The result of this is a film that's fairly slow and tends to meander around quite a bit. I can't say I'd recommend it to most people, as a general source of entertainment it's passable, but there are certainly better things to watch for a little fun. If it sounds like I'm putting the movie down, though, I'm really not, because again, that wasn't the point. The animation is the point. Average viewers will take animation for granted, they're used to it, have seen it time and time again, so they don't focus on it. This isn't a bad view, it's just what happens. They'll look at something like this movie and instead of being in awe of the level of skill and care that went into it, they look instead to what it's saying, which admittedly isn't much. One view isn't better than the other, they're just different, but we rarely have films that cater to the former, so it's a shame this was never fully completed. Much like the abstract paintings, this is art for art's sake. It's highly stylized and very visually complex. If that's something that would interest you, I'd definitely give it a look. I know I'm wishing I could get it on DVD to add to my collection.
You can find it easily by just googling "Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut" it's available in a variety of different places online. I would very emphatically not recommend seeking out the edited down version. If you want to compare them, the Nostalgia Critic did a review. It's not one of my favorites of his - I think the released version was an insult to everyone too, but even I think he went a bit far in some places - but you can see how terrible some of the things they did to the film were.
But in some ways, I feel almost like the worst thing that happened is that Richard Williams has pretty much entirely written off this film. He won't discuss it with anyone, he refused to give input to the fan for the recobbled cut, he even released a book about animation and doesn't once mention the film he spent 30 years of his life working on! (There's a single screenshot from the movie in the book, but the movie it's from is not credited.) I can't imagine how bad that felt, to have something you worked so long on taken from you. I imagine I'd do the same thing. To me, that's the saddest thing...I can put myself in his shoes, and I've never created anything so great...and at the end of the day, I feel like that's the real story. Perhaps someday someone will finish it properly for him, but it's such a strange, quirky film, that I'm not sure it'd happen. Oh well, at least we got some nice animation and more Vincent Price villainy out of the deal.