Tim here. This month at the Film Experience, we're celebrating the year 1985 in movies, and in the chronicles of animation history, that can mean only one thing. I refer to the evergreen tale of how Walt Disney Pictures nearly extinguished itself during the hideously protracted, agonized production of the animated feature The Black Cauldron.
This was near the end of almost two straight decades, following Walt Disney's death in 1966, during which time the company with his name on it couldn't put a single foot right. The days of Marvel, Star Wars, and billion-dollar cartoons weren't so much as a glimmer at this time; Disney barely existed as a film studio at all, but was internationally known almost exclusively for its theme parks. Still, live-action films trickled out every so often, and about once every four years, the animation studio would try its hand at a new cartoon. The most ambitious and expensive of these by far was an attempt at adapting the five books of Lloyd Alexander's 1960s series The Chronicles of Prydain into a high fantasy epic like the world of animation had never seen.
There were two main problems with this scheme...
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