Thief and the Cobbler

Continuing on with last weeks' obscure animated classic, I'll jump right into what may well be the most intricate and detailed hand drawn animated feature of all time, one that took thirty years to finish. That would be the Richard Williams opus The Thief and the Cobbler.

A little background on Richard Williams... a Canadian animator, he worked on the early Pink Panther cartoons, the Raggedy Ann and Andy movie, and the animated adaptation of A Christmas Carol from the 1970s. His most famous work is Who Framed Roger Rabbit and he was directly in charge of the ToonTown sequence. After the success of Roger Rabbit, Williams got money from Warner Brothers to complete the Thief and the Cobbler. He had been working on the project by himself for twenty years (only completing twenty minutes) and was given a staff and several million dollars to finish it. By early 1992, it was obvious that the project was running over budget and wouldn't be done on time, so with about fifteen minutes of movie left to finish, Warner Brothers cut Williams out of the project completely, hastily finished the movie on their own and added several musical numbers.

Beyond being over budget, the actual story of the Thief and the Cobbler closely parallels a popular Disney movie. Let's see if you can figure out which...

In a fantastical middle eastern land, a poor teenage boy is arrested and meets a beautiful princess who he befriends. Along with a wily thief, the boy and the princess have to defeat the evil grand vizier. The vizier has plans to take over the kingdom and to marry the princess himself. He also has magic powers that he's used to enchant the king/sultan so that the vizier himself is basically in charge of the royal palace. Among the supporting characters are a tough bodyguard for the princess, a burly set of palace guards, and a bird sidekick to the grand vizier.

And to make matters worse, Warner Brothers decided to rename the movie Arabian Knight...

So if you are going to watch this movie, both the Arabian Knight cut and the Thief and the Cobbler cut are available on Youtube. I strongly recommend the Thief and the Cobbler recobbled cut - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgQy2I9NCS8&feature=PlayList&p=18B0CA620B61D076&index=0... This has several unfinished sequences that were never animated but is the closest thing to Williams' vision that has been released.

Why do I love this movie? Like I said earlier, it contains some of the most innovative, wildest, and most energetic sequences from any animated movie. The two titular characters are both silent the whole time (in the Arabian Knight version, Matthew Broderick is dubbed over the Cobbler and comedian Jonathan Winters dubbed over the thief) which gives the movie a really old school Looney Tunes vibe, especially with some of the antics of the thief (who' s a combination of Abu from Aladdin and Wile E. Coyote)

The two vilains are the high point for me though - for one thing, Vincent Price voices ZigZag, the evil vizier. I've always been a giant fan of Price (and his other vocal performance as Professor Ratigan in Great Mouse Detective) and his fairly comic (he speaks entirely in rhyme) and menacing performance defiantely steals the film. (although it may have been confusing to audiences because this film was released theatrically two years after Price died: he recorded his lines in 1968). Zigzag looks like a combination of Jafar and the Genie from Aladdin. I wouldn't mention this but a lot of the character animation is similar to Aladdin because many of the animators worked on both projects (making Thief not an Aladdin ripoff because it was started 20+ years before Aladdin came out).

The other villain, King One Eye, is another amazingly impressive and scary villain. The vocal actor, Paul Matthews, apparently delivered a package to Williams who was so impressed with his deep, booming voice that he cast in the movie despite having no acting experience at all. As much as I enjoyed James Earl Jones as the Emperor in my last review, the force and malice of Matthews' performance similary impresses. In fact, a several of One Eye's scenes were cut out of the actual theatrical release because they would have given the movie a PG instead of a G rating.

So anyhow, this is a really strange yet beautiful movie, (I haven't even mentioned the brigands, the witch, Donald Pleasance choking and coughing as Phido the vulture, or the absolutely insane, Rube Goldbergesque finale) I don't want to ruin the plot any more. It's free on Youtube, check it out...

Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled - 8 out 10 (only because it's kinda hard to watch because of the unfinished animation in parts)