DIsney News Magazine summer 1985

interesting stuff you can find on Internet Archive

this topic I'm bringing up is the Disney News Magazine

https://archive.org/details/DisneyNewsMagazine_Vol20.3_1985.Summer/page/26

Mel Shaw's art for DIsney's The Black Cauldron

Jim Korkis’ Animation Anecdotes #265: When it came to doing The Black Cauldron (1985),
part of the five volumes of Lloyd Alexander’s The Prydain Chronicles, storyman Mel Shaw was given the task to read all the books and condense all the heroes,
villains and storylines into a workable cinematic story.
He made close to 250 colored pastel sketches of key dramatic moments and put them onto 35mm slides and then synchronized the slides to a recording of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (and some other music).
This resulted in a twenty-minute presentation for Shaw to pitch the story of a young boy’s quest for a sinister cauldron that must be destroyed.
http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/animation-anecdotes-265/


images from Heritage Auctions 

Lloyd Alexander

                         
                           Documentary about Lloyd Alexander produced by Jared Crossley

          If you like, you can also check out his blog  http://lloydalexanderfilm.blogspot.com/


Excerpt from   Wielding the Two-Edged Enchanted Sword Starlog Magazine, #101, 1985-12 pp. 40-41
Alexander had very little creative input into the Disney adaptation of The Black Cauldron “When the Disney Studio began working on the story treatment several years ago, they invited me to work with them,” he says. “I wanted to, but I knew that I didn’t have the skill. So, I wished them the best of luck, told them to have a good time and kept my hands safely off.

"So many authors are eager to sell movie rights, but complain when it doesn’t turn out the way they expected. That’s ridiculous! The Disney writers and animators are every bit the artist that I am. It would be silly for me to get in the way of their creative process.

"I haven’t seen the film yet, so I don’t know how good a job they’ve done. The bits of animation that I have seen are spectacular. The colors and detail are incredible — it’s vin-tage Disney of the 1930s and ‘40s.”

So, Lloyd Alexander waited for the official release of The Black Cauldron to view the first film adaptation of one of his books. “I suppose that if I flew out to California they would have arranged a screening for me. But to be honest, I would rather wait. Otherwise, it’s like peeking at Christmas presents early. I prefer to open them slowly and savor them. Because once you get them open, you have to wait another whole year for next Christmas.”

https://www.dix-project.net/item/3149/starlog-magazine-issue-101-wielding-the-two-edged-enchanted-sword



from Chris Baker’s flickr photo of his 1997 response letter  from Lloyd about the petition to get The Black Cauldron on video

"Dear Chris Baker:
Many thanks for your fine letter. It's surly the best compliment that any writer would hope for.
That's a fascinating idea. an online petition for a re-release of Disney's version of The Black Cauldron: or, for that matter,
even a videotape. (I'd buy a few myself) Yes, I'm certainly all for it: however,
I mustn't add my name to the petition: it would be a sort of conflict of interest.
Even so, I was delighted by your comments: and very deeply touched, and send appreciation and all warmest greetings.
Lloyd Alexander"

https://www.flickr.com/photos/c-bake/507315170/



Jim Korkis’ Animation Anecdotes #144:
Author Lloyd Alexander was interviewed by Scholastic Inc. before he passed away in 2007 and one of the questions the students asked was his feeling about Disney’s animated feature “The Black Cauldron” (1985)
based on his books.

Alexander replied: “First, I have to say, there is no resemblance between the movie and the book. Having said that, the movie in itself,
purely as a movie, I found to be very enjoyable. I had fun watching it. What I would hope is that anyone who sees the movie would certainly enjoy it,
but I’d also hope that they’d actually read the book. The book is quite different. It’s a very powerful, very moving story, and I think people would find a lot more depth in the book.
There is a very good possibility of other movies. Disney, again, is interested in an animated movie of ‘Time Cat’. This could happen in the next several years. Time Cat should be a lot of fun as an animated movie
– I just hope I’m around to see it.” Time Cat is about Gareth a talking cat who can visit nine different points of history (his nine lives, basically).

http://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/animation-anecdotes-144/

The Comic Book of the Film

 The comic book panals follow a little bit close to that of the storyboards, with some abridged and altered dialogue.

some of the deleted stuff made it in the comic. And a addition to note: the dialogue has been dumbed down for this comic book, 

(like the 1985 Theatrical Cut, the violent parts that Jeffery Katzenberg and the Disney employees cut did not make it to the comic book)

http://gurgi27.tripod.com/~gurgi27/

here are some glimpses 

although  the some parts of the panels in this comic resembels the the earlier alternate fairfolk scene from 1983

the rest resemembels the finalized film

what was trimed

Like in the story boards these comic panels prove this scene was a bit longer

you might think it is strange to see deleted and alternate stuff in the comic book. 

back then it was common for comic book adaptations of movies to have such things, 

30 years later (on October 2015)

an event I never gone to

on October of 2015, The Black Cauldron had a showing at the El Captain Theatre

you can read the article here:
https://www.laughingplace.com/w/articles/2015/10/31/the-black-cauldron-at-the-el-capitan-theatre/

                 Don Hann producer of The Lion King (1994) and  Beauty and the Beast (1991) promoting  the El Captain Theatre The Black Cauldron screening event.

                                 "The Way It Was Meant To Be Seen" on the big screen
                       
          the  July 1985 Theatrical cut,  not the 1984 work in progress cut.  please don't be disappointed

             
                                               

          footage from the panal discussion, (only the end part of it, with the alternate fairfolk scene.)    

Technirama widescreen and The Layout Man's Picture

                 short video essay by the Geroge Eastman House on the Topic of Technirama


Excerpt from Animated View's interview with Black Cauldron Producer Joe Hale:
http://animatedviews.com/2010/the-black-cauldron-producer-joe-hale-talks-munchings-and-crunchings/

AV: The film was shot in 70mm. Was that a tricky part of producing the movie?

JH: Actually, that part was not that difficult because we’ve been doing films in CinemaScope. It was a just matter of having a lot more animation and bigger backgrounds. So, it was probably a bigger problem for animation than it was for layout.

AV: Layout is somehow one of the most obscure parts of the animation process. Can you tell me about that not-so-well-known art?

JH: Basically, there were a lot of very talented animators. There were the Nine Old Men, and other animators that were talented as well. So, there was – God, I don’t know – thirty animators working at the time and I figured that I didn’t want to be an animator.

So, I got to my boss, Andy Engman, about getting into Layout. What the Layout man does is: he takes the storyboard and breaks it down into individual scenes. And then you draw, you “lay out” that scene and you make drawings of the characters. You work very closely with the director and you have a lot of input.

On Cauldron, being a Layout man, I was heavy on layout. Cauldron is really a layout man picture. What I wanted to do was show the audience the world that they’re placed in. So, I wanted a lot of long shots.

The way we approached layout in those days, like in the pictures that Walt was involved in, was we approached each scene as if they were a painting that you could frame and hang on a wall. We made each scene very attractive. The layout man is like an art director. He’s certainly like an assistant director combined with art directing.

Somewhere along the line, they started to call it Layout, but most people never knew what layout really meant. The Layout men are the unsung heroes of animation because nobody knows what we do. When you look a scene on the screen after it’s painted, the people say “oh, what a beautiful painting!”. The background men pretty much get the credits for it. But basically, it was all designed by a layout man with just a pencil, a black and white drawing that the animator and the background man could follow.

Special Effects:: computer animation and the APT process

Excerpt from:
Animating "The Black Cauldron"
by Brain Lowery
https://www.dix-project.net/item/3061/starlog-magazine-issue-97-animating-the-black-cauldron

"One of the problems we've had in the last few years," Hale admits, "is that Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and others have moved in and taken over special effects – they do in live action what we used to do only in animation. If we are going to have any kind of an impact and keep this industry going, we must go farther in animation than they have in live action."

Inspired by the CG the Disney animators were doing for "Basil of Baker Street" (later "The Great Mouse Detective"), Joe Hale asked them to do some computer animation for The Black Cauldron.

Excerpt from Computers in the 'Cauldron'
by  Patricia Berry
March 1985
https://www.dix-project.net/item/2926/enter-magazine-issue-2-5-computers-in-the-cauldron

This animated fantasy took Disney five years to make. All of the characters and most other moving objects were done by hand by Disney's staff of artists, But computers helped with the animation of solid objects,
 and with the filming process itself.

On many scenes, a computerized device, appropriately called the Animators' Helper System, assisted the artistic staff.
The Animators' Helper improved and speeded up the work, according to Cauldron's producer, Joe Hale. "In one scene, we have a boat that Taran and Eilonwy escape in," says Hale.

"First, the boat's just sitting in the water. But when the kids get in, it tips with their weight, and balances again.

"It takes a very long time to make that kind of movement look real by hand-drawing each frame," Hale explains. "If it's not done precisely, you get a kind of rubbery look instead of a fluid movement."
But with the computer, animators simply had to input the dimensions of the boat, its various angles, and the directions in which it was to move. The computer then printed outlines for each position of the boat.
The computer can do some fancy work that hand-drawn animation can't.

But Disney's animators didn't want to use the full power of the computer For example, in the boat scene, the computer drawings could show three dimensions of the boat,
including the inside ribs that you wouldn't normally see. But that would have looked very different than the rest of the animation.

 "So we traced only the part you'd see from the front," explains Hate, "for the painters to fill in later"
In the filming process, computers helped Disney artists create depth of field. This is very difficult to achieve in the two-dimensional world of animation.
 By using a multiplane camera with precisely timed computer-controlled exposures, the filmmakers were able to get an image that seemed deeper and more lifelike.
Yet while computers have proved very helpful, there are certain aspects of animated filmmaking that are off-limits to these machines. For instance, says Hale,

 "we don't use the computer to add color [to the animation]. We do all that by hand. We even grind our own pigments."
Computers also do not play a part in creating the studio's memorable animated characters, Disney animators pride themselves on creating life-like characters — like the Horned King and Taran — out of pen, paper and paint.

"While [the computer] is great for animating solid, geometric objects that have [little or no] human characteristics, I doubt if the computer will ever be used tor animating personality," says Hale,

"The computer can save thousands of hours for us, but it's just a tool," he concludes. "The real work is done by the artists. A computer will never replace them."

Excerpt from Mike Pareza 's "Cauldron of Chaos, Part 3"

https://michaelperaza.blogspot.com/2010/09/cauldron-of-chaos-part-3.html

"A new process was also developed during Cauldron called APT which was meant to replace Xerography at the studio. Dave Spencer would go on to receive an technical merit Aademy Award for the process however it never did take the place of Xerox as foretold. Computers would eventually provide that little change."