The Black Cauldron

On the data. Five novels and one film, and the film is famous for failing. Lloyd Alexander published The Chronicles of Prydain between 1964 and 1968, five books built on Welsh myth, specifically the Mabinogion. They are better than the film by a wide margin, they get steadily more serious, and the fourth one, Taran Wanderer, is the one readers tend to name as the reason to stay with the series. Disney spent roughly ten years on the film, and about forty-four million dollars, which made it the most expensive animated feature anyone had made. It mixes the first two books, invents a comic creature called Gurgi, and drops most of what the novels are actually about. It was the first Disney animated feature to carry a PG rating in America, and even then material was cut: Jeffrey Katzenberg, newly arrived, went into the editing room and had scenes removed from the finished negative, which was not how things had been done. It made under half its budget. It was beaten at the box office by a Care Bears film. Disney did not release it on home video in America until 1998, thirteen years later, which for that studio is close to disowning something. The animation division came genuinely close to being closed, and the reason it was not is that The Great Mouse Detective, made cheaply the following year, worked. It has since picked up an audience that likes exactly what sank it: it is grim, it has a villain who is a walking skull, and it does not behave like a Disney film at all. That is a fair reason to watch it. It is not a good reason to expect the books to be like it.

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