'The Black Cauldron' Production Layouts.

'The Black Cauldron' was certainly not Disney's biggest succes to date, nor their most memorable, as this eighties' animated feature was severly butchered before it reached the cinema's. Considered 'too dark' for a Disney feature animation by then newly appointed chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, the changes were not received with much enthusiasm by the Disney staff and Katzenberg threatened to cut the movie himself until Michael Eisner (then CEO of Disney) convinced him otherwise. It meant the film wouldn't make the Christmas 1984 planned release date, and didn't reach cinema's until the summer of 1985.

Based on the 'Chronicles of Prydain' book series by Lloyd Alexander, the 'Cauldron' had a great score by Elmer Bernstein with John Hurt as the main villain and John Huston doing naration. It had great character animation by Andreas Deja and I think a lot of quirky characters were typically designed by Tim Burton, who still worked for Disney's animation department at that time.

Below are some of the layouts for the film, which were very stylised and amazingly done by Mike Hodgson and Don Griffith and their team. So let's hope the future will bring a restored edition of this movie to Bluray so we can enjoy all the great artwork that was intended for this project (click to enlarge).