Review of The Black Cauldron (1985) by Brunovn00 — 25 May 2019

The Black Cauldron is infamous for being the biggest box office flop Disney Animation Studios has ever made. This is one of the lesser known Disney movies and I watched it looking for a hidden gem, like Treasure Planet or Atlantis, but it wasn't the case.

This movie has tons of clichés and it was a pretty generic movie, extremely predictable and none of the characters have an actual character or anything memorable and ended up being pretty stereotypical. The villain was weak and really had no motivation, he was just the typical, generic cartoon villain that wants to conquer the world just cause.

The only thing I actually liked was the animation. This is the first Disney movie to use CGI and in some scenes it shows and I guess for the time it looked impressive, sure now looks outdated but considering that's probably the best they could do at the time, it's impressive. I can't call this movie a schlock because the animation as expected from a Disney movie is amazing, the amount of effort and hours of painstaking work really shows, it seems like the animation director(s) cared and made sure the characters and effects were well animated, I really love 2D animation because when done right, it can lead to beautiful results.

I liked the fact that Disney took risks with the color palette. Insted of the vibrant colors Disney movies usually have, this one has darker, more washed out colors that suit the setting of the movie.

One of the major problems this movie has besides the generic plot and characters is its tone, this movie seems to be made for no one. I don't know if this was made for kids because there are some disturbing and scary images, which I loved because it's not usual in a Disney movie, but I don't think this is aimed towards teenagers or adults either because the writing is so dumb that it will make them roll their eyes out, like I did several times, specially with Gurgi, the worst character of the movie and one of the most annoying characters I've seen in a movie.

Overall, this is a pretty dated, mediocre movie, one of Disney's weakest films with some impressive animation. If you're curious to watch "the film that almost killed Disney", do it, it's not like I don't recommend it.