Movie: The Black Cauldron
Release year: 1985
My reaction: Have you seen this movie? Chances are good you haven’t. I don’t know why no one has seen it. The Black Cauldron is starting to feel like the Disney movies of my childhood (which I would say start with The Little Mermaid). The animation looks familiar and the story arcs feel familiar. It’s all there.
This one is kind of a weird mishmash, though. They are constantly introducing new characters, but I’m not sure to what end. To be fair, it’s not like we’re sitting down and quietly watching these movies from start to finish. We miss big chunks of them, when B needs to drag us into another room and show us something, etc. He seems to especially need things during the ends of the movies. Mostly that’s okay, because we are super familiar with the movies. But with The Black Cauldron, there was a lot of “Wait, who are those fairies?” “Wait, why is that sword magical?” “Wait, what happened to Hen Wen?”
Also, this one is surprisingly scary. The villain – the Horned King – is purely evil, there’s nothing funny about him. He has no snarky sidekicks or charming one-liners, like most Disney villains have. There’s moment early on when the main character, a young man named Taran, is knocked to the ground by some dragons. When he gets up, his mouth is bleeding. You wouldn’t see that in Tangled, just saying.
The best part about watching The Black Cauldron was the series of selfies I took of the two of us, as I tried to get a good picture for this post. He was in a really smiley mood yesterday.
The Cameraphone Diaries 