The Thief and the Cobbler: How the Best Was Lost, 1968-1995
A Review by Daniel Briney
08/21/2001
The Thief and the Cobbler had passed into legend long before it ever saw release. Richard Williams' perpetual work-in-progress boasted the talents of some of the giants of animation, from Grim Natwick to Don Bluth. As it took form over the years, the excited consensus among those lucky enough to have seen the ongoing "workprint" was that it was destined to be the greatest animated motion picture ever made.
Watching the final product today, though, you'd hardly know it.
For The Thief and the Cobbler is a murdered movie. A labor of love under the direction of one of the world's most gifted animators, it ultimately came under the control of people who neither understood nor fully appreciated it.
What is left of this would-be masterpiece is available on video, and animation fans will be alternately wowed by the outstanding production quality; and repulsed at the hopelessly muddled plot, cipherous characters, and substandard bridging sequences that bind the stretches of great work together.
The Film
The story—what little of it that can be made sense of—begins long ago, in the ancient city of Baghdad. Baghdad is protected from the warrior hordes of the evil King One-Eye by the three Golden Balls of Fate, which rest atop a towering minaret in the center of the city.
The kingdom is ruled by the complacent, apathetic King Nod; Nod is advised by his villainous Grand Vizier, Zig-Zag (voiced by the wonderful Vincent Price, who helps a great deal in making him one of the most engaging characters). In turn, he casts his wandering eye on his liege's beautiful daughter, Princess Yum-Yum (yeah, yeah; I know, no cracks, please).
Fate conspires to place a lowly cobbler, Tack, and a wily and cunning Thief at the center of Zig-Zag's Evil Plan to win the hand of Yum-Yum (who, of course, is a '90s kind of liberated woman: As this walking anachronism observes, she's much smarter than any man in the kingdom).
While Tack languishes in prison for accidentally obstructing Zig-Zag's path, the obsessive Thief manages to steal the Golden Balls—but just as quickly loses them to Zig-Zag, who has his own sinister designs upon them.
Now possessing the key to the kingdom's defenses, Zig-Zag attempts to blackmail the King for the hand of his daughter; when rebuffed, he joins forces with the monstrous One-Eye in a campaign to destroy Baghdad. Yum-Yum's solution to all this is to go wander the desert with Tack for a day or two, in a series of completely pointless scenes.
The Thief and the Cobbler and its characters have gotten absolutely nowhere fast, though they certainly took a visually pleasing route.
By the end, the kingdom has been saved, Zig-Zag is defeated, One-Eye's war machine is destroyed, the contrived romance between Tack and Yum-Yum has culminated in marriage, and the Thief, by inadvertently retrieving the Golden Balls, is lauded as a hero (though, confusingly, Tack the narrator notes that he "spent years in jail"). Thus, The Thief and the Cobbler stumbles to its hurried, contradictory conclusion.
The Production
Richard Williams, the famed London animator, began work on what would eventually become The Thief and the Cobbler in 1968. In an era in which the quality of animation as an art form was sinking fast, due in no small part to the rapid (albeit necessary) encroachment of Hanna-Barbera's "limited animation" techniques for television, Williams' film would be a sort of compromise between the lush, classical style of the Golden Age and the more abstract, minimalist stylistics brought about by the UPA revolution of the '50s.
Though it adopted many of the pared-down artistic conventions of the UPA style, The Thief and the Cobbler would be animated entirely on "ones"—in other words, it would employ full, frame-by-frame animation, as opposed to the more restricted style practiced by virtually every other studio in the '60s.
Since Williams was financing The Thief and the Cobbler via revenues from numerous other projects, and because of his exacting perfectionism, production dragged on for years.
The project grew and evolved in an extremely haphazard fashion: As time went on, animation legends such as Grim Natwick, Art Babbitt, and Ken Harris came aboard to create startlingly beautiful sequences; they didn't always fit into the story, but Williams hadn't the heart to cut them. The 1970s came and went, and the '80s hummed along, and still The Thief and the Cobbler was nowhere near completion. It was then that fate intervened.
In the mid-1980s, Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis were fishing for candidates to handle the animation chores for Zemeckis' high-concept combination of animation and live-action: Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
They tapped the well-known and respected Williams, took a look at his workprint of The Thief and the Cobbler, and were absolutely blown away by what they saw (as was Roger Rabbit's production company, Disney, which later apparently "borrowed" a number of Williams' ideas for its 1992 feature Aladdin).
And so, Williams got the job; his studio did tremendous work on Roger Rabbit, and after the runaway success of that film in 1988, found himself more bankable than he had ever been.
In 1990, Warner Bros., determined to ride the rising tide of the burgeoning animation renaissance, struck a deal with Williams to finance The Thief and the Cobbler. After 25 long years, his masterpiece was finally on the fast track to completion.
Unfortunately, Richard Williams' old problems with working within deadlines—which had earlier manifested themselves in 1977's disatrous Raggedy Ann and Andy—came back to haunt him, with a vengeance.
After missing the agreed-upon completion date, Williams was in 1992 summoned to Los Angeles to show the Warner executives what he had. At the time, The Thief and the Cobbler was about 85 percent complete, but the execs took one look at the workprint and decided that the existing footage was nothing short of disastrous.
Before he knew it, Richard Williams had been fired from his own film, the one he had spent a quarter-century laboring over; to add insult to injury, responsibility for finishing The Thief and the Cobbler was turned over to the Completion Bond Corporation, a now-defunct company that was exactly what its name suggests.
To this end, the C.B.C. employed a television animator named Fred Calvert to create new bridging sequences that would tie the existing footage together; the result was released in Australia in 1993 as The Princess and the Cobbler.
This was not a proud day for animation by any means. Calvert's additional footage was obviously and pitifully inferior to the work of Williams, Babbitt, Natwick, and Harris, and all the others who had spent so many years pouring their talents into The Thief and the Cobbler—and yet the Australian release was, by all accounts, reasonably fair to Williams' original vision.
In 1994, the rights to the The Princess and the Cobbler were purchased by Disney subsidiary Miramax, in preparation for an American release.
The effects on the already-diluted film were disastrous. Entire sequences—entire characters—were deleted. In order to (supposedly) increase its marketability, a gratuitous romance subplot between Tack and Yum-Yum was shoehorned in, as were several really bad musical numbers (there is apparently some federal law in the United States dictating that all animated films must be musicals).
Tack and the Thief, both originally intended to be silent characters, were served with awkward voice tracks added by, respectively, Matthew Broderick and Jonathan Winters, who recorded their parts some 25 years after Price did his. The voice-overs for Tack, a remarkably passive hero, are merely annoying, but Jonathan Winters' bizarre, unscripted, stream-of-consciousness ramblings for the Thief do extensive damage to what was meant to be a mute character, whose hapless perseverance reminded one (in an appealing way) of Wile E. Coyote.
Williams' original story was ripped to pieces and rearranged in an extremely haphazard fashion. Miramax, in short, chose to chuck half of The Thief and the Cobbler, working in horrendous "improvements" that fatally cheapened what might otherwise have been salvageable.
This eviscerated version was finally released in the U.S. in 1995, under the title Arabian Knight. It died a quick death at the box office, and wasn't even deemed worthy of a video release until many years afterward.
It was a sad, ignominious end for what was supposed to have been the greatest animated feature ever made.
The Legacy
Was Warner Bros. making a necessary, sound business decision in firing Williams, and were the C.B.C.'s and Miramax's steps to "improve" The Thief and the Cobbler justified? Or is Williams the martyred, misunderstood artist, whose refusal to compromise his art for commercial concerns was a bold stand against studio bureaucracy?
The answer, perhaps, lies somewhere in the middle. The C.B.C. and Miramax made some truly bad creative decisions, yes. The addition of insipid musical numbers, extraneous dialogue and narration, and a poorly done romance, turned the whole film into a cheap, fifth-rate Aladdin clone (ironic indeed when one considers that much of Aladdin itself appears to have been ripped off from the work-in-progress version of The Thief and the Cobbler).
However, as beautiful as Williams' animation was, he did his film no favors in terms of plotting, having allowed it to meander along over the years in an extremely unstructured fashion.
Worse, his history of being unable to stick to schedules or budgets, long established by the time Warner Bros. stepped in, gave the delay with The Thief and the Cobbler the appearance of being the continuance of a pattern. As it had done so many times before, Williams' inefficiency and uncompromising perfectionism proved to be his undoing.
In the end, I'll draw no recriminations. The agonizing gestation of The Thief and the Cobbler left much bitterness and hard feelings on all sides, and its production history was so incredibly long, complicated, and traumatic that it may never be possible to get the entire story straight.
All we can do now is judge the final product; nevertheless, it makes me positively sick to consider what The Thief and the Cobbler could have been, had Williams been allowed to retain control and complete it himself.
It's rumored that Williams, at one of his famed animation-masterclasses, confirmed that a DVD release of the unfinished workprint—warts, storyboard frames, pencil tests, and all—is in the works.
I sincerely hope this is true; for I would much rather see pure, 85-percent complete Williams than the 100-percent complete hack job we're currently stuck with.
If you're not an animation buff, it's highly doubtful you'll have the patience to sit through this mess. If you are, though, then please—if you haven't already—see it. Do your best to shut out the songs, the dialogue, and the incoherent plot, and lose yourself in the work of some of the greatest animators.
Keep reminding yourself that, though we now live in a world enchanted by the possibilities of computer animation, the superhuman feats of characterization and perspective that you will see here were done entirely by hand. And do not lose sight of the likelihood that we will not see craftsmanship of this caliber again.
© Copyright CultureCartel.com 08/21/2001
