Geek Girl Navigating the World – A Thief Worth Saving
It’s never been any secret that I am a total animation geek. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I realized how much I enjoyed animation, or even that point at which I started to understand that someone had to draw all of the stuff that I was seeing on the screen. When I was little, on Saturday mornings my dad and I would sit on the couch with big bowls of cereal and watch Looney Tunes before he went in to work.
At some point, I started to realize that there were differences in animation, not just in quality but in writing, just as I was recognizing those same differences in the books that I was reading. The Looney Tunes cartoons had a frenetic, rapid-cut style with precision editing to the accompanying music that made the shorts so much more than the sum of their parts. Anything directed by Don Bluth had unparalleled effects animation, especially any time light or water were involved, and a characteristic fluidity of motion that doesn’t always happen in animated movies. Disney studios became masters at picking an art movement or style and creating film styling around it that gave each movie a distinctive and individual look, always with an eye for remarkable consistency.
I learned to identify the flat, bold lines of Jay Ward, where, more than anything, the whipcrack farce makes the experience of George of the Jungle or Rocky and Bullwinkle come alive. Hanna-Barbera had a somewhat similar look, but relied so heavily on stock-footage that certain lamps have become as much a part of the cast of characters as the interchangeable characters themselves. Still, regardless of the recycled bits of scenery, whoever drew that lamp is a better artist than I could ever hope to be, and, as such, gets admiration from me because, quite simply, I can’t do that. Even in my wildest dreams, knowing all of the things I know about animation from all of the books that I have read and all of the research I have done on my own, someone else will always have to make that magic happen at 24 frames a second.
Later on, I discovered the world of independent animation. Through The Animation Show, a regular touring collection of independently animated short films, I found out about the scratchy, colored pencil brilliance of Bill Plympton and got to see “Rock Fish” by Blur Studios on a big screen. To this day, “Rock Fish” remains one of my favorite animated pieces. “Rock Fish” shows what, given time, passion, and talent, computer-generated animation can really achieve. The film is gorgeous on a level that never seems to happen at the Hollywood tier of the animated movie process. In less than 10 minutes, there is more world-building going on than in many full-length science fiction flicks that I’ve seen. It is art. It is very beautiful art.
One of my favorite memories involving animation was going to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with my dad. The theater we went to had only a single screen (and still does, making it one of my favorite places to go see movies), and also has a balcony. Roger Rabbit was the first time that I ever got to sit in the balcony of the theater, because the tickets were slightly more expensive. We sat there with our giant bag of popcorn and our sodas and watched Bob Hoskins’ Eddie Valiant get taken for a madcap ride by a ridiculous cartoon bunny. This was also the first time that I would see animation directed by Richard Williams.
The next thing that I would see that he had any part of would come much later, and I didn’t have the first clue that he’d had anything to do with it. One of my little cousins was coming over to visit while I wasn’t feeling well, and she decided to bring along a movie because she knew that I hadn’t seen it yet. She was pretty small–in fact, she hadn’t even started kindergarten yet–but she understood that I liked cartoons and was usually pretty willing to watch them with her. She also understood that most of the cartoons in the movie collection at my house were mine, rather than my parents’.
I’d seen a few ads for The Thief and the Cobbler on TV, but had mostly dismissed it as some kind of horrible, cheap knockoff of Disney’s Aladdin. I didn’t protest when she put the movie in, though, because she was so excited that I hadn’t watched it yet and that it had Vincent Price in it. By that point, she was old enough to have seen some of the Scooby-Doo episodes that had him in them, so she knew who he was. I figured we’d watch the movie, I’d tell her it was okay, and then I would suggest watching something else any time she mentioned wanting to see it again in the future.
The Thief and the Cobbler wasn’t exactly good. Even to my untrained eyes, I could see inconsistencies in the animation. Some of the backgrounds were lush and intricate, and the color palette seemed to vary between rich and vibrant and ludicrously pale. I wasn’t quite sure if the problem was with the transfer to videotape or apathetic animators. Whatever the case, there were still some flashes of brilliance there. I could see the nods to M. C. Escher and Rube Goldberg and traditional Islamic art in many of the sequences. Then there were the songs.
The songs that were thrown into the movie were clearly never meant to be there. Transitions leading to the musical sequences were some of the bits of animation that faltered and fell flat the most often. The lyrics were horrible, and the scoring of those songs was even worse. It was more painful to watch than someone performing drunken karaoke five seconds before last call. Unfortunately, when watching an animated movie with a little kid, fast-forwarding through the bad music really isn’t an option.
After the movie was finished, I found myself wondering what, exactly had happened to that movie. It had started out as something else. I could see that. It should have been so much more, and the more that I thought about it, the less I thought it had to do with the animators. So I started to do some research. What I found out about The Thief and the Cobbler that was released and The Thief and the Cobbler that was intended broke my geeky heart.
The Thief and the Cobbler is kind of infamous in animation circles. Richard Williams started making the movie in 1964. It was intended to be an adaptation of stories about Mulla Nasruddin. After a falling out with Idries Shah over how royalties would be divided, Williams decided to take the film in a different direction and call it Arabian Knight. Sean Connery was a member of the vocal cast, as well as Vincent Price. As production dragged on, the vocal cast was replaced, leaving only Vincent Price’s work in the version tht was finally released.
The funding history of The Thief and the Cobbler is even more convoluted. Backers came and went as Williams learned from the best animators in the business and consistently missed deadlines and went over budget. Williams often took on other projects in an effort to get more money to devote to completing The Thief and the Cobbler. When Williams directed the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, he showed he could meet deadlines and stay on a budget and finally secured the rest of the money to make The Thief and the Cobbler.
In 1991, when The Thief and the Cobbler still wasn’t complete, the film was seized, and Williams lost control of the project with only about 15 minutes left to complete. Fred Calvert was brought in to finish the movie so that it could finally be released. The movie was thoroughly re-edited, with many sequences deleted and others reanimated and spliced in. This fitful and uneven process has resulted in the cobbled together movie that was finally released.
The Thief and the Cobbler was meant to be Richard Williams’ masterpiece. He is regarded as a master animator, and his book The Animator’s Survival Kit is an incredible reference manual for anyone who is interested in creating their own animation or, like me, just dreams of having the talent to create their own animation. What little original footage remains in the releases of The Thief and the Cobbler does show what it could have been.
As someone who does create (though my creations tend to be in the form of writing), the story of The Thief and the Cobbler is, essentially, my worst nightmare. The movie was a true labor of love, the kind of inspired project that is supposed to be a testament to someone’s lifelong passion. To end up being forced to fall short when completion is in sight would be so far beyond devastating it’s difficult, not only to imagine, but to put into words. That it was subsequently rendered into a diluted version of what had been artistic vision just makes it even more heartbreaking.
Workprints of the original film still exist. Before he left Disney, Roy Disney himself started a restoration project which Williams supported. When Roy Disney left, the project was suspended. Since then, fans of Williams have created a fan edit, know as The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut, which gets much closer to what Richard Williams had envisioned. Sadly, but, understandably, Richard Williams himself wants nothing to do with the movie.
Still, I think that this is one of those movies that should be restored. It deserves to be presented in the form that Williams had intended all along. There is a possibility for taking The Thief and the Cobbler from sad cautionary tale into a triumph for fans of
animation–of course, that means that animation fans are going to have to be galvanized into action. There is an online petition calling for Disney to either restore the movie or release it to someone who will. It can be found at:
http://www.petitiononline.com/thiefcob/
If you’d like to see this movie the way it was intended to be seen, please, go sign it. Maybe we’ll be able to save it.
Research for this column mostly done through these sites:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112389/
http://www.thiefandthecobbler.com/
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