The Black Cauldron (1985)
Directed by Ted Berman
Taran is an assistant pigkeeper with boyish dreams of becoming a great warrior. However, he has to put the daydreaming aside when his charge, an oracular pig named Hen Wen, is kidnapped by an evil lord known as the Horned King. The villain hopes Hen will show him the way to The Black Cauldron, which has the power to create a giant army of unstoppable soldiers.
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What critics compared The Black Cauldron to
Nevertheless, this is the first big-budget full fantasy animated movie since 1985's tragically ignored The Black Cauldron .
Despite a comfortably profitable run in theaters, Pocahontas was still regarded as the first significant box-office disappointment at Disney in years, and it was one of only two films to violate an otherwise uninterrupted run of Disney features each outgrossing their immediate predecessors that began when The Great Mouse Detective outperformed The Black Cauldron .
While he's not nearly as annoying as, say, Gurgi from The Black Cauldron , Frozen 's living wisecracking snowman Olaf (Josh Gad) is still a non-entertaining and pusillanimous presence.
While it's true that there have been animated fantasy movies before, they have either been hampered by poor production values (Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings) or aimed at a less mature audience (Disney's The Black Cauldron).
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Burton, a graduate of the Disney factory (he worked on "The Black Cauldron," among many films, and made a memorable short called "Frankenweenie"), fills the movie with unforgettable compositions: Jack's poetic posings against the moon, for one thing, are aesthetically stunning.
The requisite role of the villain who is far more visually exciting and thus more memorable than anyone else in the film was this time played by the wicked vizier Jafar, voiced with silky tones by Broadway actor Jonathan Freeman, and supervised by Andreas Deja, one of the poor bastards whose first job at the studio was during The Black Cauldron .
In terms of fitting into the Disney canon, Aladdin belongs somewhere in the middle; it's better than something like The Black Cauldron, but not even remotely as effective as The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast.