In many respects, The Black Cauldron is Disney’s “forgotten” animated feature. Its fans, and like all Disney films, it has plenty of them, adore it but it’s not the first film that springs to mind when talk turns to the company’s feature-length animations. There will be many more casual fans who may not be aware of it all and after its disastrous performance at the box office, Disney themselves seemed almost happy for it to fade into complete obscurity. Over a decade in the making, it was one of Disney’s most ambitious films of the 80s, distilling the five books of Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain series (The Book of Three (1964), The Black Cauldron (1965), The Castle of Llyr (1966), Taran Wanderer (1967) and The High King (1968) – there were several short stories too) with its sprawling cast of characters into a mere 80 minutes. The company spent an extraordinary amount of money on the film – reportedly as much as $44 million, making it the most expensive animated film to date – and were “rewarded” with a box office disaster, the film not even taking half of that on its initial release.

The story is set in the mythical land of Prydain where teenager Taran (voiced by Grant Bardsley) is an assistant pig-keeper on the farm of Caer Dallben where Dallben the Enchanter (Freddie Jones) lives. Taran dreams of becoming a warrior, a dream he’s able to make real when Dallben learns that the evil Horned King (John Hurt) is looking for the magical relic The Black Cauldron, planning to use it to create an army of undead warriors. Dallben’s pig, Hen Wen, is a psychic that can see into the future and, fearing that The Horned King might try to steal the pig, Dallben sends Taran on a mission to take Hen Wen to safety. Taran is nowhere near the hero he dreams of being though and almost immediately, Hen Wen is captured by Gwythaints, the Horned King’s dragons. He’s irritated by Gurgi (John Byner), a dog-like creature who wants to be his friend, is captured by The Horned King’s forces, befriends Princess Eilonwy (Susan Sheridan), escapes with the bard Fflewddur Fflam (Higel Hawthorne), visits the underground kingdom of the “Fair Folk” (Fairies) and their leader King Eidilleg (Arthur Malet) and finally prepares to face down The Horned King and his minions.

The signs weren’t great for The Black Cauldron from the very start. Disney was still dealing with the fallout from the departure of many of their animators who had upped sticks to join fellow Disney escapee Don Bluth at his new production company, as production neared its end in 1984 Disney executives were fending off a series of potential corporate takeovers and during the lengthy period of development and production, Star Wars (1977) had come along and radically altered what family audiences expected from their filmed entertainment. So it’s perhaps no surprise that they stayed away in droves.

But there are many problems with the film itself. It looks stunning and the score by Elmer Bernstein is everything you would hop it to be but the story is bland and derivative (look closely enough and you’ll find elements from Macbeth, Star Wars, and inevitably Lord of the Rings), the two lead characters even blander (Eilonwy is just about the only Disney princess that virtually everyone forgets) and the tone is… odd. There are moments of real horror here, particularly in the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)-inspired finale when the Cauldron unleashes its magic on The Horned King’s forces. All this sits uneasily alongside the obligatory pratfalls and slapstick routines and the cute talking animals. It feels as if, post-Star Wars, Disney hadn’t quite got to grips with its place in this new filmic landscape.

Certainly recently installed studio boss Jeffrey Katzenberg was baffled by what directors Ted Berman and Richard Rich came up with. Katzenberg took their work back to the editing suite and cut out 12 minutes in a doomed attempt to give it more pace and shape. The result was still a mess, albeit a gorgeous looking and sounding one (it was the first Disney feature to dabble with computer animation, to be shot in full widescreen and to have been recorded in Dolby Stereo). The characters are so dull that even talented actors like Hurt, Jones, Hawthorne and the rest can do little to rescue them, the story is so non-descript you’d be forgiven for remembering much about it by the time the end credits roll around and fans of the books were, understandably, dismayed that the complex and densely imagined novels were so bastardised and “Disneyfied.” See it for the gorgeous animation (some of it is as good or even better as anything else that Disney had done so far) and Bernstein’s magnificent score, but don’t expect much from the dull characters and not much more from the insipid story.

One assumes that the plan had been to adapt, if not all of the five books, then at least to continue the story, to encompass some of the main storyline. It was not to be. This was a time when Disney were dead set against making sequels and besides The Black Cauldron‘s  poor performance at the box office put paid to any such plans. Disney were so traumatised by its failure that for many years it just vanished from sight – it didn’t surface on home video until very late in the day, limping out in pan-and-scan form in the UK as late as 1997 and not in the States until the following year. It’s not really enjoyed much in the way of re-appraisal – though it remains beloved by those who first saw it in 1985 at the right age, it remains a low point in the long history of Disney animation and its failure put the future of the animation department in some doubt. Luckily, the subsequent The Great Mouse Detective (1986) was a lot more fun.