The Black Cauldron

Year 2, Day 77 - 3/18/10 - Movie #442

BEFORE: I'm done with movies about knights, but I'm sticking with animated films with fantasy/magic elements...

THE PLOT: A young boy and a bunch of misfit friends embark on a quest to find a dark magic item of ultimate power before a diabolical tyrant can.

AFTER: Definitely a Disney film, and definitely made during Disney's low period in the 1980's. By that I mean there are too many sidekicks, and too much slapstick. I'm going to place much of the blame for the rise in attention-deficit disorders on movies like this one that have to give kids no less than 7 cutesy animal sidekicks, and something crashing into something else every 30 seconds. Kids get conditioned to that sort of thing, and then when you ask them to read a newspaper or hold a conversation, they get no bang for their buck, and tend to wander off.

The plot (what little there is of it) concerns a pig that has visions of the future, and must be kept out of the hands of the Horned King, or else he can see how to gain control of the magical Black Cauldron. Point of order: a future-telling pig, or any future-telling device, shouldn't be able to tell you HOW to do something, just what WILL take place. I'm just sayin'.

Young Taran is put in charge of the pig, and loses it to the Horned King - great job! So he's thrown in a dungeon where he meets Eilonwy who says she's a princess, but is later referred to as a scullery maid - well, which is it? They rescue an old minstrel from the same dungeon - I guess security's not too tight there - and with a weird forest creature named Gurgi, they decide they'd better get to the Black Cauldron first, and destroy it.

There's fairy-folk, a bunch of witches, and an army of the dead, but it doesn't add up to something nearly as cool as it sounds. I mean, it's no "Willow".

RATING: 3 out of 10 harp-strings