The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut

[tygerbug]

That's in Northern Pennsylvania if I'm reading correctly. It is the Recobbled Cut - they mention as much in a previous post.

[archagon]

Will there ever be an official release for Mark III? As far as I can tell, even though the Mark III DVDs were sent out to some people (and subsequently posted on TPB), Mark II is still the "official" version.

Also, will the extra DVDs ever be put up on TPB or the like?

Thank you for this amazing project.

[tygerbug]

Um, the Mark 3 version was posted on Pirate Bay a long time ago, and has been the official version for a long long time now.

About a year.


Raggedy Ann and a Best of Richard Williams compilation have also been posted at The Pirate Bay.

There are far too many extras discs to post them online. The Youtube account TheThiefArchive has most of the material.

[tygerbug]

The Strange Tale of The Thief and the Cobbler

An internet article by Garrett Gilchrist


The Thief and the Cobbler was 26 years in the making. More, since director Richard Williams began it in the mid 1960s as another film, Nasrudin, and it was taken away from him in 1991. Richard intended the film to be the greatest animated film ever made, and to this day it remains the most ambitious independent animated production ever attempted.

The film was never finished. It was perhaps 90% complete in 1991, when Warner Bros, who had been funding the film since 1989 in a major push to finish what Richard had started years before, got cold feet and backed out.

The film was never released in any recognizable form. The reason is a shameful moment in Disney's history, a moment that most people writing about this subject still avoid talking directly about.

Richard Williams has won three Oscars. He's the legendary animator of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? -- the animator's animator, called by many perhaps the greatest animator alive today. He is most famous for bridging the gap between the great old animators of Disney and Warners during the 30s, 40s and 50s, and the new generation of animators who eventually started the Disney renaissance of the 80s and 90s. He hired great old animators like Art Babbit and Ken Harris and had them train the new generation, passing on their genius .... animators like Eric Goldberg (The Genie in Aladdin) owe a lot to Richard. Richard, so long as the student, is now, at just over 75 years old, the master, teaching today's CGI artists some of his tricks.

Recently a new generation has discovered Richard's work, through his book The Animator's Survival Kit (the best textbook that's been written for animators), and through bootlegs of his unfinished masterpiece, The Thief and the Cobbler .... which was also known as Once .... and, appropriately, The Thief Who Never Gave Up. Over 26 years, Richard never gave up on the film .... but it was eventually taken away from him.

It remains, to this day, a footnote in animation history -- poor quality VHS bootlegs of a copy of Richard's unfinished film have been passed around eagerly by animation enthusiasts for two decades.

In 2006, I decided to do a small project restoring the film, unofficially, to as much of its former glory as possible. I wanted to find as much high quality footage as I could and edit together a higher quality DVD, which could quietly replace everyone's poor quality VHS bootlegs and show the film in a new light. This was for free on the internet, not for profit. Eventually as the project got more ambitious I wound up losing a lot of money on it, but several friends pitched in so that it could be completed.

I expected that few people except myself would be interested in this project. But to animation scholars, The Thief and the Cobbler remains a Holy Grail of animation - even though it's unfinished - perhaps because it's unfinished. The film is artsy and hypnotic and strange, and unlike any other film ever made (with one exception, which we'll get to). It's debatable how great a film Richard Williams was really making, but the fact that he was TRYING to make the greatest animated film he could shines through on every insanely detailed frame of the film. Armies of thousands of armored warriors in a huge war machine, thousands of arrows and cogs and gears and more complicated animation than was ever attempted before or since. Today, Richard's effects would be done with CGI. They were all done by hand. He and his team animated the camera sweeping over miles and miles of countryside, to fall upon an army of thousands.

Richard Williams no longer discusses the film ....It was his life's work and having it taken away broke him. He is not involved in any way in this restoration and has resisted the efforts of hundreds of people to contact him about it ....

Richard had spent millions and millions of pounds of his own money on the film over the years. Every penny he had went back into this film, and every free moment. It was his film.

Largely, it was a side project to keep him sane inbetween doing very successful and award-winning (and amazing) TV commercials over the years. It entered MAJOR production in 1989 when Roger Rabbit was a huge success. Warner Bros. decided to fund the film and most (a little over half) of the animation was done at this point, working from what had already been established over the years, redoing, refining ....

However, since the project had been in production for so long, it already had a reputation that worked against it, as an art project that would never be finished, even though Richard and team were now working on a much faster schedule, and it would have been done on time. Warners thought the film was artsy and uncommercial, and started to balk.

Although Richard had spent millions of his own money on the film over the years, by giving it to Warners they now owned it - and they could take it away from him ..... imagine, a man's entire life, his entire life's work .... now owned, now able to be taken away.

It then became very clear that Disney was doing Aladdin, a big budget ripoff of many of the basic characters and themes and style and storyline of The Thief and the Cobbler. Aladdin is a good film, but it's not a terribly original film, and from what they could see of it, Warners knew which way the wind was blowing -- a suspiciously similar film would come out from Disney and railroad over The Thief.

So Warners ran a mile. Dick was fired. The film went into default and was taken over by the accountants at The Completion Bond Company. It was finished as cheaply as possible by an idiot called Fred Calvert who had it animated in Korea and elsewhere, ridiculously badly. The story was changed, dumbed down. Everything was redubbed and it was turned into a cheap Disney ripoff with songs.

Eventually Disney bought it (through Miramax), cut out whatever good scenes still remained in the film, and redubbed it with celebrity voices as a parody of itself .... much like Mystery Science Theater. Their dubbing makes the film seem like a ridiculous joke. They included a number of references in the dubbing to their own film Aladdin, and marketed the film as a cheap Aladdin ripoff. It was released in something like two theaters for two days, and dumped on video as a freebie given away in boxes of Froot Loops, in Canada only, in a pan & scan, oversaturated transfer that makes it look like the worst film ever made, which is pretty much true at this point ...

A film has never been ruined to this extent, turning one of the all time classics of animation into a joke.

My cut, combines the best available footage from all versions, but it's not a perfect solution, as it contains some of the horrible material animated by Calvert .... I wanted to make the film watchable, and even bad finished animation is more watchable than storyboards. I made some deviations from Richard's original unfinished workprint to make the film appear more watchable and finished, but I believe I was true to the spirit of the film. A lot of animators who worked on the film supported it, and donated materials to it. Even people from Disney supported it. But it's still technically illegal, even done for no profit. Disney will never put out a proper DVD of the film as intended, so it's up to unofficial sources. But I've avoided publicizing the cut.

The Thief is more and more being considered an essential film for study among animators and in animation schools. Many screenings of it are occurring in film schools and elsewhere (always my restored version) .... the film is considered something that should be studied in the way that Fantasia and Pinocchio are studied - as an artifact of the kind of amazing animation technique that needs to be preserved, learned from, and remembered .... just as Dick himself sought to teach people the techniques of the Disney/Warner masters, so that those techniques would not be forgotten. The art of animation is one that is evolving but not improving. During the 60s and 70s, when Dick Williams was starting out, animation had sunk to a low, the great Disney features losing ground to cheap Hanna Barbera type techniques. The new generation had forgotten everything the masters of the 40s knew. We have not, to this day, bettered the animation skills of the original Disney masters, and as CGI takes over the artform, a new generation is forgetting everything the new masters of the 80s and 90s knew.

I have never read any articles written about this film that got all the facts right. I have read several that got every single fact wrong. This is a difficult film to write about - it's a complicated story, because it's the story of a man, and people are complicated. You may have a tendency to oversimplify the story - to lionize and demonize. You have to remember that as human beings we are all angels and demons.

I will tell the story to you now in my own opinionated little way. My account will also be wrong, frankly. In truth, Dick Williams' is the only perspective on this film, and its sad story, that's worth hearing .... but you won't hear his perspective any time soon. He would never tell the truth either, especially since his truth is so subjective - he was the eye at the heart of this storm - but whatever he said would be more false and more true than the truth. He is the film, in many ways - he spent 26 years making it - it was his life, and his life was the film.

Richard Williams, born in Canada just over 75 years ago, was a young animator doing commercials and title sequences in the UK during the 1960s. He had been interested in fine art and painting, finding animation to be juvenile. He had "artsy" leanings. But eventually he realized that animation could be anything he wanted it to be - it could be "artsy," it could like a painting, it could delve into deep philosophical questions. His first film, made in 1958, The Little Island, is a philosophical film without dialogue, starring three men who transform into monsters as they seek the ideals of Truth, Good and Beauty. The character design is 60s-simple, and most of Dick's early animation has the big-nosed, simple characters of most 1960s cartoons. However, Dick was a much better artist than that, and his massively complex designs for the title sequence of Charge of the Light Brigade, done in the style of old woodcuts, show that even early on, Dick had no problem with animating something massively complex.

But he didn't know how to make the characters "move well." For all his drawing skill he was not a great animator, and he sought to be one. He was a perfectionist, and a madman. When he saw The Jungle Book, and rewatched the great Disney classics of the 40s, he realized he didn't know anything about animation, not really. He had a lot of tricks, and a lot of skill, but he needed to learn the basics, from the masters.

Art Babbit and Grim Natwick - the great Disney animators who had animated Snow White and so many others - they were old now, but they joined his studio. He gave them work, and he had Art Babbit give lectures teaching the students .... young animators just starting out .... and they taught Richard himself. Richard was also obsessed with temperamental Disney master Milt Kahl, and sought his advice ... though the animator never taught at Richard's. Richard perhaps saw something of himself in Kahl .... Richard too had a bad temper. He was a genius, a prodigy, and difficult to work with, but he pushed everyone around him to do their very best. Scenes were never good enough. Only the deadline of having to work quickly and get commercials done pushed them to finish their work .... On The Thief, Richard could work and rework a scene over and over and over. He was a perfectionist, and on The Thief, his baby, he wanted to achieve perfection.

Art Babbit's eyes were failing and some of what he animated was in stick figures - but the stick figures moved so well. All the classes were taught to animate stick figures well, throwing away all the style and frippery of Dick's style. Although Dick's style was impressive in short bursts, without any tricks he would have to really learn how to make figures move.

The key animator, for the Thief project, was Ken Harris, the master animator of Warner Bros., who had done great work with Bugs Bunny and The Coyote for Chuck Jones. Harris animated Scrooge for Richard in a realistic and ultra-detailed production of A Christmas Carol. Drawn in a Victorian style, the half hour piece won an Emmy and features some of the best animation of realistic humans ever done anywhere.

Dick and Ken complemented each other well. Ken was a master at making things move well, but felt he was not the greatest artist. He had relied on well drawn key drawings by Chuck Jones and others. Dick had the opposite problem - a great artist, with a great intuitive skill for movement, Dick needed to really learn the basics of moving characters well.

He needed to become humble, become the student, even though Richard had a PT Barnum quality and was great at selling himself. He wanted to have the greatest animation studio in the UK, perhaps in the world, and perhaps at that point he did. The output of the studio in the 70s was phenomenal. Many good animators, sick of Dick's temper and perfectionism, his genius and madness, and feeling they'd learned enough and were now good enough animators to work on their own, quit the studio and started their own studios -- it was a new golden age, with great small animation houses popping up all over London.

However, Dick's studio's strength was still in short form films - flashy commercials that pushed the boundaries of what animation could do. In 1975 (to 1977) Richard attempted a feature, animated mostly in New York, called Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure. Although his team, including Art Babbit and Tissa David, did some good work, the backers of the film kept pushing for it to be done faster and cheaper. The budget was too small -- the film became compromised. The final scenes of the film were animated more cheaply in California -- Richard had lost control of the film, which became a slapdash mishmash of good work and lesser work -- shades of things to come? In the end the film lacks story, and is weighed down by dozens of songs by Joe Raposo. Richard was never a master of story ..... The Thief and the Cobbler, his masterpiece, was animated for years without a story!

In the 60s Richard had illustrated, in a simple comic strip like style, a series of books by Idries Shah collecting folk tales of the "wise fool" Nasrudin. Celebrated in Turkey and the Middle East, Nasrudin is a philosopher who appears foolish, using humor to show the absurdity of life.

Richard felt that Nasrudin would make a great lead character for a feature, and in the late 60s he had begun work on it. However, Idries Shah himself was demanding 50% of the profits from the film, an impossible number to reach, and Idries' brother Omar Shah, who was producing the film, was also looking for money ..... Always wearing dark glasses and having a touch of the sorcerer about him, Omar was also embezzling massive amounts of money from the film's budget.

Richard cut ties with the Shahs, and decided to make an original film instead. The Nasrudin script was overlong and talky (and would have made a terrible, terrible film). He decided to take a few scenes that had already been animated, a few characters that were obviously his, and fashion a new story out of them. He wasn't sure what yet, though. Ken Harris had animated an amusing Thief, who always gets caught. Grim Natwick had animated a mad old witch. And there was a dying soldier, a sleepy king, an evil grand Vizier ....

Calling it "The Thief Who Never Gave Up," or sometimes "The Cobbler and The Thief," Richard continued work on the film with only a vague idea of storyline ..... Ken Harris animated The Thief scenes so quickly that Richard simply kept coming up with things for The Thief to do. The result are many, many hilarious sequences of The Thief attempting to steal various objects, Wile E. Coyote style.

The voice cast included Dick's hero, Vincent Price, who he delighted in impersonating.

Over the years, the style of the film evolved. Richard had started talking about it as a giant epic, his attempt at making the greatest animated film ever made. It's not clear how much of this was just PT Barnum style showmanship, since what was being done on the film wasn't of a quality to seriously rival the Disney classics. But he was a perfectionist, and he had a dream. Since the film had been designed in the 60s, it all had an oddly stylized, flat style, similar to the cartoons of the day -- looking like "Yellow Submarine," or comic strips like "B.C." and "The Wizard of Id."

As Dick worked on the film over the decades, he would make the style more and more complex. The Thief himself remained a simple, stylized character, but less so as time went on. Scenes would be redrawn, reworked. The film retained a simple, 60s flat style, but as new characters were added, we see a shaggy, hairy 70s style in the characters of the Brigands. We see a cleaner 80s style in King Nod, Zigzag and One Eye. And finally, we see a more realistic early-90s style in the heroic characters of the oh-so-sexy Princess Yumyum, and of the ragdoll like Tack the Cobbler, who originally looked like the Hawaiian Punch man in the 70s but in his final design looks like Aladdin played by Raggedy Andy, with a touch of Tim Burton in his pale face and monochromatic color scheme.

Strangely, it all fits together. The film looks strangely timeless. It moves amazingly well, complex movements of characters outdoing even the classic Disney features in many ways - it is simply some of the greatest ANIMATION of characters attempted ..... subtle and full of character. But the character designs retain that eerie 60s simplicity, a Yellow Submarine like quality, even as the complex movement belies the character's apparent simplicity. Everything is two and a half dimensional. Sometimes the characters move as flat, sometimes as 3d - and Richard Williams is always moving the camera, in breathtaking, sweeping shots where the entire world of the film animates and rotates in front of us.

Characters register as blobs of color onscreen -- the superb backgrounds originally designed by Errol LeCain adding to a look of a film that is simply so well designed, and far stranger in its look than the generic human beings of the late-80s and 90s Disney features.

No, this is animation design as abstract art, and due to the strange circumstance of the film having been animated in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, it looks it -- the film becomes timeless because it encompasses elements of how animation was done in all those decades. It's odd to look at, and becomes hypnotic in being like no other film, because it isn't ...... In a way the film can be taken as a meditation on Richard Williams' entire life's work as an animator over 4 decades, and thus encompassing the history of 4 decades of animation. Richard, with the final version of the film, or as final as it ever got, was revising scenes animated in the late 60s in the early 90s. He was literally looking over work done when he was just starting out, characters designed when he was in his 30s, 40s ..... and revising them now as an old man who had learned all there is to know about animation.

And Richard had learned. Once a student, he was now a master teacher. The entire team who animated (and re-animated) the bulk of the Thief material from 1989 to 1991 were young people, often fresh out of college. Richard was a harsh teacher, and working on the film could be torture, but it was also the best teaching experience imaginable. Richard simply expected the world of his young team -- he expected an entire team of young animators who had never worked on a feature before to create absolute perfection, his idea of the greatest animated film he could possibly make, tracing and reworking characters and scenes created by some of the greatest animators who ever lived, now all dead and buried -- this film a testament to their greatness, particularly Ken Harris' work on The Thief.

The young team had big boots to fill, and they paid for their inexperience in blood. By all accounts Richard was an incredibly inspirational man to work for, and also impossible. He was often angry, and insisted that scenes be done and redone and redone until they were absolutely perfect ..... a perfectionism which shows onscreen. He had by this time become a great teacher, and pretty much everyone who studied under him achieved greatness in their animation, learning quickly and learning much. But it was exhausting, painful work. They really had to believe that there was a point to this toil and struggle - killing themselves for the glory of the film, under Richard, a tough taskmaster who wouldn't allow them to, say, listen to music with headphones, since Milt Kahl had insisted that he not listen to music as a younger animator .... but then he would sit in his own office and play the trumpet (Richard was an avid Jazz musician, and may have composed original music for the film).

Richard had by this point become an acknowledged master - perhaps the acknowledged master. He storyboarded the entire film in a matter of a couple weeks, drawing furiously, and with amazing skill. His small storyboards, done quickly in marker, are as good as any other animator's final drawings, and they feature often in my Recobbled Cut of the film .... since some scenes were never finished. The storyline had evolved much over the years. A dialogue-heavy film had become a film where dialogue was sparse and rarely important. Everything evolved around the movement. The screenplay had been cowritten in the 70s by his wife of the time, Margaret French. It had evolved since then, and he was now married to filmmaker Imogen Sutton. He insisted on doing everything on the film himself when possible. Although he had many great animators working for him at this time, he animated as much as he could himself, and certainly Dick's style, and his drawings, are evident in every scene, every shot, of the picture. This is Dick's film .... Perhaps the film is Dick Williams.

He was a genius, with all the good and bad implications of the word. He had internalized the lessons of Art Babbit and Ken Harris, and passed them on to a generation of animators back in the 70s and 80s, who were now starting to do great work at Disney.

In the 70s and 80s, Dick had been unable to find financial backing for the film. It took so long because he didn't have a full team to work fulltime on anything except commercials - not really The Thief, though everyone who passed through his studio, including many big names, worked on The Thief at some point. Once, Dick got funding from the Shah of Iran, and as a taster of the film animated large, expensive scenes of the huge One-Eye army and War Machine - the most complicated animation ever attempted on film. The scenes took so long to complete that, amazing as they were, the Shah backed out. Dick was never good with deadlines - the disadvantage of seeking perfection in his art.

The reputation of the film was starting to precede Dick - several TV specials had been made about it over the years, and Dick always hyped it up as the greatest film he could make. In the 80s, Disney was looking for someone to animate Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a combination of live action and animation that would baffle any animator on earth. They needed the best, period.

Dick Williams came in with a reel from his unfinished Thief film. Disney was dazzled and amazed. They had never seen animation quite like this - one of Dick's trademarks was a moving camera - where the entire scene would be animated and move in perspective, something almost never seen in animation. These shots were usually designed by the brilliant layout artist Roy Naisbitt, Dick's right hand man for his entire career. Roy would use cardboard cutouts and plan the scenes in detail - the result being similar to today's CGI animation, but done by hand.

This was the breakthrough that would make Roger Rabbit work. They needed a moving camera in the film, so that the animated characters would have weight and be believable.

Dick disliked animating in a traditional Disney style, but as an homage to Ken Harris he made Roger Rabbit look like a Chuck Jones Coyote, and dressed him in the colors of the American Flag, figuring that the American filmmakers would love him. And they did. (Canadian-born Dick now was something of an Englishman, and had an English son Alex, who was becoming an animator himself.)

Roger Rabbit was the test, to see if Dick had finally gotten as good as he had claimed he was for all those years. Dick passed with flying colors. Dick animated Roger Rabbit (and The Thief) almost entirely on "ones" -- every single frame is animated, 24 frames per second. Usually animators animate only fast movements on ones and animate slower movements on "twos" or even less, so that they don't have to draw nearly as many drawings. Richard never took shortcuts in his work. To make a moving camera work, everything had to be on ones. Characters had to have weight -- they had to be believable - for once, he really did have to be as good as, or better than, the Disney masters.

The results were perfect. I think people forget how perfectly animated Roger Rabbit really is, what a huge splash it made.

Dick's trademarks are all over Roger Rabbit. There is the moving camera and unusual Roy Naisbitt uses of perspective in the opening scene in particular. But there's also the hands. Dick animated most of Baby Herman himself. Baby Herman carries a live action cigar and has shaky, expressive hands. This is a Dick Williams trademark - characters who express everything through their hands - through shaky, complicated, unpredictable hand movements. His ultimate character was Zigzag in The Thief and the Cobbler, the Vincent Price character of the evil Grand Vizier whose hand movements are hypnotic - the blue-skinned villain has six fingers and five glowing rings on every finger. The character is simple in design yet so complex in detail that he can take an hour to draw - typical for Dick Williams, showing off with extra detail. Effects like the glowing rings were done using double exposures by cinematographer John Leatherbarrow - who double, triple and quintuple exposed every frame of the film giving it a glowing, dreamlike quality ..... every scene contains compositing and light effects that would today be done with CGI. The Thief loses much of its quality when not seen on the big screen - sadly it never has been seen on the big screen ....

Roger Rabbit made Disney a name again. They had been in the ghetto for many years, making unsuccessful little films ever since Walt Disney had died. Under Michael Eisner Disney was about to become the biggest name in entertainment again, and a lot of that is due to Dick Williams, or more broadly his entire philosophy, which was now shared industrywide -- For several decades it had been considered uncool, unfashionable to adore the classic Disney films of the 40s and study from them. There had been a shift to shaggier 70s type animation, more stylized graphics like in a UPA film, more adult themes as in Ralph Bakshi - every kind of animation had been tried, but no one was doing a classic Disney style and doing it well.

But Dick and others had laid the groundwork during the 70s and 80s -- studying from Art Babbit, Ken Harris, and the other great masters, finding out how they did it, what they knew. There was a new generation now and although the great masters had largely passed away, this new generation were doing damned good work - good animation had come back. Dick Williams had been there the whole time, and he was a major driving force behind the scenes in a way that he only sometimes gets credit for.

The Little Mermaid represented a seismic shift - Disney was big again, and Disney was good again. Some of those animators had worked for Dick the decade before.

After Roger Rabbit, Dick was a big, bankable name. He was able to secure funding from Warners for his film "Once" ..... later renamed "The Thief and the Cobbler" again.

But trouble was brewing. Disney had been so impressed by Dick's reel of scenes from The Thief and the Cobbler that they had not only decided to hire Dick for Roger Rabbit, but also commission their own Arabian Nights film which would be heavily "inspired" by Dick's characters, storyline, and style ..... though given a more realistic, Little Mermaid type twist.

Leading the Aladdin project were Glen Keane doing Aladdin, Andreas Deja doing Jafar (a similar villain character to Dick's Zigzag character, who has a similar storyline, seeking to overthrow and rule the kingdom, and marry the king's daughter against her will), and Eric Goldberg doing The Genie, who is also similar to Zigzag. Goldberg, one of the master animators working today, started out at Dick Williams' studio and has a fluid and cartoony style of movement that is head and shoulders beyond most animators working today. It is reminiscent of Dick's work in some ways as it's stylized.

Also finding analogues in Aladdin - The Thief becomes the monkey Abu, plucky Princess Yumyum becomes plucky Princess Jasmine, sleepy, befuddled King Nod becomes the befuddled Sultan. Several scenes from The Thief are played out shot for shot in Aladdin .... Abu stealing a ruby in the Cave of Wonders is identical to a Thief scene involving the Buddha Ruby. Jafar hypnotizing The Sultan and seeking his daughter is identical to Zigzag and King Nod. Both The Thief and Jasmine are threatened by having their hands chopped off. One could go on for hours. In an early Aladdin rough cut, even a snatch of music from The Thief was used - from "Scheherezade" by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Aladdin is one of Disney's best films. The animation by Keane, Deja and Goldberg is peerless. It contains great songs by Menken and Ashman, their last score together. It moves well, it's funny and well written.

But it's not original. It's inspired by Dick Williams' original, and both films suffer as a result. Dick's hypnotic, briliant, art film can't be compared to Disney's more accessible blockbuster. Where The Thief is purposely slow and thoughtful, Aladdin is fast and quippy. Whereas the Thief is deep and intelligent in its style and setting, Aladdin has more complex and talkative characters.

Disney's next film, The Lion King, is a similar situation - based on the classic anime TV series "Kimba the White Lion." One of Disney's greatest films, it's still not an original film, and that taints the film's qualities. Surely Disney, which was creating such great films around this time, could have come up with something original without stealing ideas, plot and character designs from other classic films?

The real crime is what they did to it when it was done.

Yes, as you know, Warners got cold feet and fired Richard Williams from his own film. He had been working on it for so long that they had the feeling he would never finish it. In truth, from 1989 to 1991 Dick and his team were working like madmen and would have had the film finished within 6 months. But Dick's reputation preceded him, and Warners didn't believe - they felt he was making an art film, an artistic wank as Dick would say. They wanted him to make it more Disney like, add songs. Dick had included music in the film, but in a very experimental way that enhanced the film's eerie mood. His film was as unlike Disney as it was possible to get, and the fact is, Warners didn't understand the film. There's a trailer they did for licensors, saying how much money they hope Thief film will make, and it's just embarrassingly written. They just didn't "get" it.

The workprint, the unfinished version of the film that's been passed around like a holy grail amongst animation enthusiasts for decades, is exactly the same unfinished version that Warners saw and hated. They fired Dick. They pulled their funding.

Dick's entire studio was liquidated. Everything was being taken, thrown out. People were rushing around trying to grab whatever they could. Several animators grabbed as much art as they could and ran.

In his office, there was Dick, still working on a scene. The film was his life. Working on the film was all he knew how to do.

That was the end.

The film was given to Fred Calvert, a producer who was the exact opposite of Dick in every way. Fred had always thought Dick a fool, obsessed with art and perfection. To Fred, animation was a business. Things needed to be done as fast and cheap as possible. He had no interest in art or quality. Calvert had done a couple of TV series that were awful even by 70s Saturday Morning standards. His resume includes nothing you've heard of, and if you track down clips from any of the shows it's a shocking walk of shame.

Fred was hired to do a job -- to add songs to a film now renamed The Princess and the Cobbler. To add more voices, more music, to make it more Disney like. To cut the film down, make it shorter and simpler. To finish it, as quickly and cheaply as possible.

The goal was no longer to make it good or even decent. The film was in the hands of The Completion Bond Company, accountants who had already largely written it off as a loss and just wanted the film completed in some form.

Calvert called Roy Naisbitt, Dick's assistant, and asked if he would stay on the film. Roy said yes, if he could bring his assistant along with him -- a man named Dick Williams. Roy then hung up.

Calvert called Dick's original team and asked if any would stay on to animate this new version of the film. They knew he was destroying Dick's masterpiece, so few took him up on his offer. But a few did. The "London Team" completed a few scenes for Calvert's version of the movie, and they're quite good, almost on the level of Dick's work at times, though animated on much smaller paper than the huge sheets Dick would use to achieve his level of perfection.

After only a couple of scenes, the "London Team" was fired for being too expensive and taking too long - by Calvert's low standards.

Most of Calvert's new animation was animated to the lowest standard possible by teams in Korea and elsewhere in Asia. Often the Asian teams were working (poorly) over Dick's original drawings. which they then threw out on masse once they were done with their own versions. The worst segment in Calvert's film is "She is More," a hilariously bad song which Princess Yumyum sings about how much in love she is wish herself - it's animated with shocking ineptitude by the Sullivan Bluth Studios in Ireland, Don Bluth's company, who frankly should know better.

Most of the artwork from the film was lost - perhaps all of it -- thrown out by the Asian teams working on the film, though Alex Williams, Dick's son, says that when Disney later bought the film, they bought a lot of artwork as well, and now keep it in a "bunker in Burbank" somewhere. It's not really known how much of the film still exists today, or how much of the film Dick Williams actually completed. The original Nasrudin film from the 60s - how much of that still exists? How much of the old scenes animated in the 70s and 80s and discarded? My research for my own edit of the film has turned up tantalizing snippets of deleted footage. If any art from The Thief survives, as it must, there must be a lot of material there no one has seen - finished animation. Dick managed to keep very little himself, but he must have something. Disney must have something. Getting in there would be another matter.

Disney, in my opinion, will never finish or release this film properly. As Judge Doom says in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, they only purchased The Thief so that they could dismantle it. It's an embarrassment to them, a reminder that Aladdin, a hit film which inspired two sequels and a TV series, was not an original piece.

Richard Williams himself would likely not want to be involved in a restoration -- this film is a difficult subject for him, for all the obvious reasons. He lost his life's work, and died a little. He has never spoken about the film publicly since. He might not be legally allowed to talk about it. I know of only one person who was able to interview him about the film, and that interview was never released at Dick's request.

Fred Calvert's "The Princess in the Cobbler" was released in about 2 theaters in Australia and South Africa. It made no money. In interviews at the time Fred Calvert defended his film, saying that he'd taken a bad film and saved it, made it commercially viable. Fred Calvert no longer discusses the film.

Miramax, a Disney-owned company at the time, purchased the film and retitled it "Arabian Knight," for release into about 2 theaters for about 2 days in the United States in 1995.

Disney had recut Fred Calvert's version further, to ruin it as much as possible. As bad as Calvert's version is, it's a masterpiece compared to the Disney edit. There is no other explanation for what Disney did to this film than that they wanted to turn Dick Williams' movie into a laughingstock and end allegations that Aladdin was in any way based on this turkey of a film.

The celebrity voices of Matthew Broderick, Jonathan Winters, Jennifer Beals and Eric Bogosian were added - presumably to make the film more commercial. Broderick was voicing Tack, who doesn't speak in Williams' original, and Winters was voicing The Thief, who certainly doesn't speak in any version. Eric Bogosian talks over the vulture Phido, presumably to make him seem more like Aladdin's Iago character.

However, these voices were applied with malicious intent. The Thief and the Cobbler is largely a silent film - very thoughtful, philosophical and meditative. In Arabian Knight there is no rest from constant talking from characters whose lips don't move. These voices simply run over the top of the film, being as annoying as possible during its entire running time. The film has now been cut in half and lost all of its best scenes, but this is mercifully short considering how irritating to watch the film has now become. The effect is that of the TV series Mystery Science Theater 3000, where comedians talk over a bad movie to make fun of it. Except that The Thief was a good movie before this unwanted commentary got hold of it. Jonathan Winters talks over all The Thief's scenes, and appears to not have a script. He's just talking. Endlessly, over scenes that are very funny when silent, and aren't funny with him talking.

Both Broderick and Winters make references to Disney's Aladdin, talking about genies ("Who needs a genie when you've got a Tack?"), referencing Aladdin (in the first scene of the movie) and referencing Robin Williams (also in the first scene of the movie - "Good morning Arabia!") .... This establishes the film, upfront, in the first scene, with several outright references in dialogue, as a cheap, badly animated ripoff of Aladdin.

That was Disney's goal here - they had ripped off The Thief, and now sought to make it look like a ripoff of Aladdin.

Thanks to Calvert's inclusion of several of the worst songs you've ever heard and seen in an animated film, it looks every inch the ripoff.

Williams' original superb animation now stands alongside some of the worst animation you've seen, unsuitable even for saturday morning viewing - making the whole film look like a messy hodgepodge of nonsense. The entire One Eye Army scene, Williams' masterwork, was cut in half for Calvert's version and cut entirely for Disney's. Most of The Thief's scenes are cut entirely - Ken Harris' amazing work being left out in favor of some crap done on a penny budget in Korea. The Witch is now missing entirely as well.

For most of the film, we're now seeing Tack and Yumyum - as animated by the Fred Calvert team, not by Williams.

Most of the best scenes are simply missing. Those that remain are rendered so annoying by the new soundtrack as to be unwatchable.

Even as a fan of the film, and a huge supporter, I can't make it through more than a few minutes of Disney's version. It is clear that everyone involved with the Disney recut was deliberately trying to sabotage the film.

There are many at Disney who love The Thief film, and would love to see it finished and released. There's Eric Goldberg, and there's Don Hahn, who I spoke to at some length. Roy Disney was leading a fight to have the film completed a few years ago.

These efforts never went anywhere, and never will go anywhere. Because even with the people who made Aladdin, and who bought The Thief to destroy it, long gone from Disney, Disney is still a corporate company run on profit. The idea that a proper release of The Thief could be profitable is more of interest to those with art on their minds. The fact is, The Thief is still an embarrassment to most of the lawyer types at Disney. To put it out properly would publicize the fact that here is a movie that inspired Aladdin - and should have inspired a huge lawsuit against Disney.

Disney is not your friend here. They will never release the film properly.

The film eventually came out on DVD. Only in Canada. Only given away free on the side of a Froot Loops box. The transfer used was pan & scan - the film was originally cinemascope, using a wide, wide screen and using it to its fullest. So what you see on the DVD is maybe 1/3rd of the actual picture. It's a very bad cropping job, and you see very little of what you're actually supposed to be seeing onscreen. Also it's a blurry VHS looking transfer, but the actual VHS transfer looked much better than this. On the DVD, the color levels have been turned way up to illegal levels by some idiot. So you see smudgy, very bright oranges and blues everywhere. It looks as ugly as a film can look on DVD.

Oh - and it's the horribly unwatchable Disney Arabian Knight edit of the film, of course, but now with the title changed to Dick's original "The Thief and the Cobbler," just to shame him completely. It's enough to make the great animator crawl into a hole and die.

Recently, the Weinstein Company (the remnants of Miramax) heard that The Thief and the Cobbler, despite their best efforts, was being seen as a masterpiece, one of the greatest animated films ever made, as long as you don't watch the Disney version and instead watch my Recobbled Cut or the original VHS workprint.

So they rereleased that same DVD. The same horribly colored, smudgy, blurry, dot-crawly pan and scan mess of a DVD of the Arabian Knight version of a film.

Except now it's in more subdued packaging, with text all over the box saying what an amazing masterpiece of animation this film is. It goes on and on about Richard Williams and his Oscars, and oh, what an incredible feat of animation we have here ....

Except that when people open the box, they'll be getting the horrible version of the movie. And the company putting it out must know this. They might even find it funny.

Because this DVD release seems designed to sucker in people who've heard what an original masterpiece this film is, and get them to open it up to discover it's not a masterpiece at all.

You see - when you open up this box, inside it's a pop up book. Expensively designed - they put more money into the packaging than the actual DVD. It suddenly turns into a DVD for kids -- there's a pop up model loosely based on the Golden City, and partly based on Aladdin's city of Agrabah.

And there, on the pop up model, are our heroes Tack and Yumyum ...

Riding a flying carpet.

Fuck you, Disney. Fuck you, Miramax. Tack and Yumyum of course do not ride a flying carpet in The Thief and the Cobbler. Their equivalents do so in Aladdin, and this packaging is just another attempt to mock the film, compare it to Aladdin, make it seem like a cheap ripoff of Disney's film, and yet still sucker in one or two people who might actually buy it, to their inevitable disappointment.

People who think that these same people are actually going to turn around and put out a proper version of the film should have another thought.

I recall seeing the trailer for Arabian Knight in theaters. I was 14 years old. When I was 7, I had seen Roger Rabbit and loved it. I had the toys; I slept on Roger Rabbit bed sheets. With excitement I read in Comics Scene magazine as Richard Williams described how he was making his masterpiece, a film he'd been working on for 23 years which he hoped would change animation. There were no pictures in the article - ironically, Dick was scared that his character designs would be stolen if he revealed them. He was unaware they already had been stolen.

The trailer I saw in theaters was horrible. I thought, wow, that's the same movie - that's that guy's masterpiece? Something horrible has clearly happened to this film along the way.

Little did I know.

My own perspective, for a moment, if you'll forgive me that indulgence.

I was in high school, in 1999, when I searched for The Thief and the Cobbler on the internet and came across a website by a fellow named Eddie Bowers. He detailed the whole story - how the film had been ruined. I watched the Arabian Knight version of the film on VHS. It had some amazing animation in it - some of it was terrible, but if you knew the story of how the film had been recut and ruined, it was very obvious which parts were Dick's original. It really helped to just turn the sound off and watch it as a silent film. Even in pan & scan VHS some parts were mindblowing. Eddie Bowers sent me a VHS tape containing the workprint and Princess versions of the film in terrible quality. They really blew my mind. The Princess version, Fred Calvert's cut, was less annoying and more complete than Disney's massacre, though still an insult to everything Dick Williams ever stood for. But the workprint - Dick Williams' original workprint - the quality of the VHS tape was terrible - I could barely see the film - but the hypnotic quality of the film haunted my dreams for months.

I created my first "Recobbled Cut" on VHS in 2000. I just wanted to cut together a more watchable version of the movie, using the audio from the workprint, and some video from the Arabian Knight and Princess pan & scan VHS versions.

By the way, though I say "Arabian Knight," that edit was released by Disney on VHS and DVD under the original title, "The Thief and the Cobbler" - an insult to Dick Williams of course.


By 2006, I was a filmmaker who had directed several low budget features. I had done a few popular fan DVDs, in the Star Wars realm, released for free in a quiet way on the net. On a website I belonged to, which was about fan-edited DVDs, I suggested that someone ought to make a proper DVD of The Thief and the Cobbler, edited with today's technology to put back as much of the film as possible in as high quality as possible.

It turned out that, like a lot of animators in the UK, one of the guys doing Star Wars fan edits on that message board had actually worked on the film back in the day. He sent me a widescreen version of the Arabian Knight edit, from a rare Japanese DVD, as well as some other rare material - pencil tests, documentaries, and the like - and said, get to work.

So I edited together The Recobbled Cut of The Thief and the Cobbler. It got quite a bit of attention. I actually took Fred Calvert's awful version of the film and rehabilitated it -- I reanimated a couple of scenes by hand so that Tack wouldn't talk, but I could still use some of that Calvert animation and make the film look more complete.

I based everything on Dick Williams' original workprint, which we'd found in slightly higher quality. When possible, I took footage from the Arabian Knight and Princess versions of the movie, sourced from DVD, so that you could see the film in much, much higher quality than anyone had before. It was a hodgepodge, but then so was the workprint in its unfinished state.

Although by necessity of the sources I was working with, the Recobbled Cut is not 100% faithful to Dick Williams, it is 95-98% faithful. It's far, far, far more watchable and complete than any version available previously. I used every trick up my sleeve.

A lot of people liked it. I was surprised, as it's not the best known film and I only made this edit for my own amusement, not figuring anyone else would care.

Animators who worked on the film, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, came out of the woodwork to help me out - sending me rare materials. I collected 18 DVDs worth of rare Dick Williams/Thief related materials -- all sorts of documentaries, rare bits of footage, rare films, and something like 8 gigs worth of thousands and thousands of pieces of original art from the film and thousands and thousands of newspaper articles written about the film over the years.

I realized I was starting a Richard Williams archive, and becoming a noted scholar of some sorts. Douglas Kirk, a great background artist who worked on The Thief, now teaches animation at Santa Monica City College, and he had me come in and talk to his students - who loved, and are now obsessed with, The Thief.

Due to all the new material, The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut was revised twice. The Mark 3 version contains a lot of material, mostly of the Thief, that was transferred directly from 35mm film! Most of The Thief's scenes were cut from Arabian Knight so I only had them in poor workprint quality. However, a film collector who I'll call K.A. had saved seven reels of Thief material on 35mm film. He took them from Jean MacCurdy's trash at Warner Bros! She didn't want them. She didn't like the film and wanted nothing to do with it. Mostly, this 35mm material was scenes that had been animated prior to 1989, so there was a ton of Ken Harris Thief stuff in there, including some footage we'd never seen before - deleted scenes and things. The audio track was also very high quality, although unfinished compared to the workprint version of the film.

Fascinating stuff. So we spent some money. A lot of people helped out, pitched in to support the film. A whole community came together. We transferred that to video, along with a ton of other rare Richard Williams stuff, like his first film The Little Island which I'd never seen before. This collector K.A., he's a very good animator himself with a resume a mile long, and he seems to have everything.

So I cut that together, and it really improved the Recobbled Cut - there's much less material that's only in poor quality now - it's a more complete and higher quality film now.

Karl Cohen of ASIFA-SF, the animation society in San Francisco, also invited me and my girlfriend up there to present an evening of Richard Williams animation - rare stuff including some of The Thief. He paid for everything, put me up in this beautiful Victorian home they have - such a nice guy. I'm dirt poor, jobless and starving, so to spend that time in San Francisco, that was lovely, lovely, lovely.

Holger Leihe, an animator who did a lot of animation of The Thief, picking up where Ken Harris left off, eventually started a blog called Thethief1.blogspot.com, and many of the animators who worked on the project have chimed in, talking about their memories of The Thief and of Dick - lots of in depth info and very fascinating.

Richard Williams, the master teacher, did tour the USA recently, promoting his Animator's Survival Kit DVD set - which is a 16 DVD set, that costs a thousand dollars. Expensive, but if you can watch those 16 DVDs, that's going to be the best animation school you ever had, and it's cheaper than college. It's also about a hundred times more knowledge than you'd get at any college.

I've tried to speak to Richard Williams about the film - it seems that at this point I've spoken to almost everyone else! But I've never been able to reach him. He doesn't talk about the film publicly, and I don't think he's interested in my cut of The Thief, though by now he's certainly heard about it! It's a painful memory to revisit, and my version of his film isn't 100% faithful, I was just working with what I had. Could be slightly sacriligeous to him. I haven't met Dick. I feel like I've gotten to know him a lot through studying him, and reading way too much about him. That sort of genius and madness that drives a man to spend 26 years on one project, to try to achieve something perfect, to be the animator who never gave up. He is the madman, the prophet, the master. Temperamental and difficult, inspiring, enlightened, brilliant.

It's debatable whether he ever achieved the perfection he sought, though there are moments in The Thief which are undeniably beyond anything anyone tried to animate before or since. The thing is, he tried. He tried to make the best animated film ever - he tried harder than anyone ever did, harder than anyone ever will. The film was his quest film, his quest for perfection. And in the end it was chewed up and spit out and destroyed by Hollywood because it was different. Because it was a personal project, and had taken longer, and wasn't the same as anything else. It wasn't something they could explain.

It's not exactly the story of the great innocent artist being attacked by big evil Hollywood, because in some ways Dick was bigger than Hollywood himself, and no innocent. To pursue one film for 26 years is a very particular kind of madness. He made this film his life. He wasn't pursuing a business model, he was pursuing art. He's not the great innocent artist - he's the greatest artist, the guilty artist, the man who was guilty of art. He's guilty because the failure of the film, and its destruction, is half his own fault, because of this culture he'd created. This hype around the film, this desire for perfection which no film could live up to. And on the other hand he's guilty because if you watch The Thief and the Cobbler, he did achieve perfection. He created some of the greatest animation ever seen on film, animation which can serve as an antidote to all the commercial bullshit out there, every crap cookie cutter movie you've ever seen -- He created this strange, cockeyed film which has such a haunting beauty about it.

He intended The Thief to be a blockbuster, to be his Raiders of the Lost Ark, but he couldn't help but create an art film. When he was young he spent some time hitchhiking around Spain, looking at works of fine art - he never wanted to be an animator, he wanted to be a great artist.

And so he became one - with all the good and bad that that entails.

When he was there in Spain, and quite young, he drew some images of the Circus - realistic, wispy sketches, life drawings of the circus performers. Quite beautiful. And he was animating them, back then - realistic animation. He wasn't quite good enough to do it then, but he did it anyway, bits of it, as much as he could.

Apparently, the rumor has it, he's still working on that film today. Something from back in the 60s, maybe even the 50s - I have footage of this film going back to 1967 .... A little film that's older than The Thief. He's gone back to it. And he's animating it now.

That's the rumor. The other rumor, and maybe it's the same rumor, says he's working on another movie, entirely by himself ..... something epic and insane as usual. Maybe something based on a play by Aristophanes. Maybe something based around jazz.

He calls it the film he hopes to finish before he dies.

But if he never finishes the film, would that be such a tragedy? Perhaps he should just keep drawing, keep doing the best he can, not thinking of whether he finishes it or not. And then when either the film is done or he is, we can look at what he's done and see the genius in it.

The Thief and the Cobbler was 90% finished as a film, but it's that 10% that fascinates people. It was always an ideal, of one man wanting to create the greatest animated film ever made. It's an ideal that's most fascinating because it's unfulfilled, maybe unfulfillable. We can debate on how good a film he actually achieved, how much greater it could have been if finished ......

It's slow, it's strange, and audiences wouldn't have loved it the way they did the more accessible blockbuster Aladdin. It might not have made its money back at the box office, even with the best publicity campaign, even without Aladdin as competition. It would have been a film that animators love, that they talk about in hushed tones - not just for what Richard achieved, which was very good, but for what he wanted to achieve. Would that we all had such high standards, if we could occasionally achieve them.

In a way, despite its being unfinished, The Thief is doing fine. You can watch it, in its unfinished state, and marvel at its beauty - an unpolished diamond. People talk all the time of finishing it - there wouldn't be much more animation left to handle - and that would be lovely too, but perhaps never the same. Never happen.

The Thief Who Never Gave Up became the Thief who never was, the Thief who never will be. And the Thief who is. Perhaps a young animator can watch The Thief now in its unfinished state ..... and finish the film in his own dreams, just as beautiful and lush and perfect as he would want it to be.

Perhaps that young animator can then go out and make his own film ..... and see just how close to perfection he can get.

[nagymarci]

Hey,
This again, would just another "Thank you" letter, so if you had enough,
you may stop reading it right now

I've known about this movie since quite a few years, but whenever i was asking, it was apostrophed as lost for eternity.
Since I'm not willing to watch any badly edited bullshit version of it, I skipped both the Miramax, and the Disney versions,
and went directly with your recobbled cut.

Oh boy,
It was BY FAR the most useful one+half hours I've spent in the last years.
As we all know, the original Williams-team animation is the best 2D stuff ever been produced.
I might be one of the the worst animators ever (student animator, to be honest), so I really know the difference:)
But the fact, that you've kept in sequences from other versions, parts from the animatic, and even storyboard pictures, makes
this release SOLID GOLD. And of course: the audio commentary which is more interesting to listen to, than the movie itself (despite the presence of Vincent Price himself)!
I'm dead serious, when I say, that this disc should be shipped with every reprint of "The animators survival kit", because it's educational value is something very hard to match up with.
This is a MUST HAVE for every starter, and pro animators.
As for the "casual" audience...
Screw them.
This version will always be an "insider" material, but as we all know, we are much harder to please.
But you did it, and I'm very grateful for it.

Thanx again!!!!

[tygerbug]

Thanks NagyMarci!

I appreciate it. It's nice to know that this cut of the film is still circulating and being appreciated. My goal was to replace everyone's shitty copies of this wonderful film with a better quality copy, and I think that succeeded.

Also try the torrent of "The Best of Richard Williams" at The Pirate Bay. If you've got that, The Thief, and The Animator's Survival Kit, you can learn all you need to know about Dick Williams, and about animation.

Glad you liked the commentary. I was embarrassed to do it, but the people who actually worked on the film (several of whom I recorded for commentary purposes) were scared to be legally on the commentary track for it, which I fully understand ..... so a fan commentary it had to be. It was fun to do, me and Patrick throwing out whatever we could think of.

I only had a quick glance at your Youtube and Deviantart, but I liked what I saw. You've got a loose, unusual style, it's unusual and has a lot of character. Very much the opposite of the way I draw!

[Karasu]

The Recobbled Cut is the best! The Mark 3 Cut update made it even better that those scenes with the Thief in the war machine are so crystal clear!
The commentary was surprisingly good for something that was fan-made, even reached a level of semi-professionalism. Very informative.

[tygerbug]

Glad you like, Karasu.

I was extremely happy that we were able to acquire lengthy sections of the film in gorgeous full 35mm quality thanks to KA. Mostly these were Thief sections particularly every Thief shot in the War Machine sequence. It made a huge difference.

Several people on this board helped in donating the money to do this, as well as Raggedy Ann and The Little Island. They deserve all the thanks and praise in the world, including our own Patrick McCart who also runs the TheThiefArchive Youtube account and appears on the commentary.

Previous cuts of the film had had to rely on whatever had survived into the atrocious Miramax version, and to a lesser extent the Fred Calvert "Princess" cut. With these scenes the Recobbled Cut really asserted itself as a much more serious version of the film, not nearly as compromised by quality issues.

Links for those who might be new here:

Holger Leihe's Thief blog
http://thethief1.blogspot.com/

Patrick McCart's Thief Youtube account
http://www.youtube.com/user/thethiefarchive

[tygerbug]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnNUVpas ... r_embedded

Williams newspaper ad, with a British "Spitting Image"/woodcut look to it - quite ugly, quite 80s, quite complex.

[Nailwraps]

That ad was pretty cool.

[tygerbug]

Is it just me, or has Keepvid.com and other utilities for saving Youtube videos stopped working?

Youtube must have altered their code .....

[TServo2049]

I still don't think that Aladdin was directly inspired by Thief. Hans Bacher's production designs look nothing like the film. Jafar is based more on Conrad Veidt's performance in the 1940 version of The Thief of Bagdad. Actually, the whole film is closer to that film than Williams'. Abu is even named after Sabu's character.

Furthermore, also remember that the plot was vastly different when Disney started the film - Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio overhauled the film when it seemed to have hit a dead end, and I doubt they ever even saw The Thief. If it got closer to The Thief after Elliott and Rossio's involvement, it may be a coincidence.

Also, from all I know, even though Disney bought Miramax in 1993, the Weinsteins were still running it themselves. Wouldn't it have been the Weinsteins who were interested in the film? Also, the butcher-job has all the markings of the kind the Weinsteins have done to many films they acquired, the kind that led Hayao Miayazaki to send them a samurai sword as a threat against changing a frame of Princess Mononoke.

If Disney was so intent on destroying the film, why would they have released it at all? Why not just buy it and sit on it? They've done a good job at keeping The Sweat Box hidden from the public, not to mention Song of the South. (And for another obscure example, Disney has successfully buried the Ron Miller-era semi-controversial PG-rated bomb Trenchcoat; it hasn't been released since before Miller stepped down, and it wasn't even licensed to Anchor Bay in the late 90s like some of their other currently buried Miller-era films were.)

And if they wanted to bury/destroy it, why would they let Weinstein acquire some kind of rights to it when they split from Miramax? I even heard somewhere that Weinstein acquired some kind of rights because it was a personal favorite of Harvey's.

And why would they have let Roy Disney pursue that ill-fated restoration of the film in the early 2000s? Apparently, it only derailed due to reservations on the part of Dick, not Eisner or any other Disney execs.

Garrett, your concept of Aladdin as one big attempt to kill The Thief, of Disney as a morally bankrupt entity who can only steal other people's ideas, etc., seems to stem more from your bitterness over what happened to the film, than actual facts.

If your version of the story is true, wouldn't some ex-Disney employee have come out about it? I just find it hard to believe in some huge overarching conspiracy.

Eric Goldberg even had an interest in helping finish The Thief. If he was complicit in plagiarizing Williams, why would he want to? He's never said anything about ripping off The Thief in his Genie designs, even though there was a period when he was not employed by Disney. Eric Goldberg wouldn't have involved himself in such a "betrayal" of his mentor.

And besides, Warner probably dropped out because the film was going more and more into the red, not because they were afraid of being accused of ripping off Aladdin. Wouldn't press info mentioning the film's long production period have been sufficient to confirm that the film predated Aladdin?

Williams said at ASIFA-SF that it was a money issue - some big Japanese backer pulled out because of the 1991 economic recession.

I just can't accept your version. It seems too implausible that such a massive conspiracy to destroy and bury the film could exist. For just one more example, if they wanted to bury the film, why would they allow Don Hahn to talk about his interest in the film as he did a couple years ago?

[tygerbug]

There's quite a few sequences and characters in Aladdin that are direct steals. I'm not sure why you're blind to this, perhaps you haven't seen the film recently. I don't think that's my problem.

At one point I was going to edit together a reel of the scenes that are identical in both films, but I thought it was a waste of my time, at the time - as it might have taken a little while, and might have stirred up controversy I wasn't interested in - I was more interested in promoting a great film, that is The Thief and the Cobbler. But I did the research -- I watched Aladdin with a notebook and wrote down a few hundred specific instances. I never did the edit ... I wish I had in retrospect, as it would stop posts like the one you just made.


>> It seems too implausible that such a massive conspiracy to destroy and bury the film could exist.

What? It doesn't take a "massive conspiracy" to destroy and bury a film that is already destroyed and buried. No one saw Calvert's version. When the Thief wound up in Miramax's hands, it was already as good as dead. It didn't take much more work to recut it into an obvious Aladdin ripoff (their only idea on how to sell it anyway) and bury it further, and it only took one or two executives taking an "interest" in the film in a detrimental way. No massive conspiracy required -- just a couple of executive decisions to bury a film they saw as embarrassingly similar to their own, and repackage it in a safer way as a forgettable Aladdin ripoff.

>> For just one more example, if they wanted to bury the film, why would they allow Don Hahn to talk about his interest in the film as he did a couple years ago?

What, 15 years later?? None of the people who ran Disney then are still around. Don Hahn wouldn't have had anything to do with the reediting and burying of The Thief in the first place. Disney is not a monolithic entity.

I mean, you're not thinking this through for a moment.

[TServo2049]

Well, what I'm saying is that the Arabian Knight changes were probably the work of Harvey Weinstein and Miramax, and were just boneheaded decisions, decisions on the level of people like Carl Macek who butchered anime in the same fashion. You know, decisions like "Hey, this thief character is silent. Nobody likes a character who doesn't talk. He should say funny stuff all through the movie. Hey, I know, Jonathan Winters is funny, let's get him!" Or "Hey, this film is set in the Arabian Nights, let's put in some in-jokes about Aladdin since it was a big hit two years ago."

What I'm saying is that I believe that Miramax's butchering was sincere; it wasn't a cynical attempt to turn it INTO an Aladdin ripoff and *ensure* that the public dismissed it. However, it's extremely plausible that Disney/Buena Vista didn't put effort into the actual release, the distribution and marketing, because the film was too similar to Aladdin. I believe the Disney buyout of Miramax stipulated that the Weinsteins would manage the studio independently of Eisner and Disney management, but that Disney and the execs in charge of release/marketing had final say on what they would let Miramax release. I quote Wikipedia: "During their tenure, the Weinstein brothers ran Miramax independently of other Disney companies. Disney, however, had the final say on what Miramax could release"

In other words, sure, perhaps Disney buried it in theatrical release because of its similarity to Aladdin. But keep in mind that Miramax has screwed up other animated releases - I didn't even know that Freddie as F.R.O.7 got a theatrical release from Miramax, but Jerry Beck's Animated Movie Guide said it did. It was obviously a short, extremely limited release. Miramax bungled that on their own.

But I remember Arabian Knight being advertised on TV, either Nickelodeon or the local Fox affiliate in San Francisco (those are the two channels I watched most often in 1995). But I clearly remember finding out that no theaters in my area were playing it.

I just can't accept that Disney, working through Miramax, set it up to be some kind of "Springtime for Hitler" to ensure that it was forgotten and to protect the reputation of their Aladdin.

I'm not a big fan of Aladdin, but I have seen it time and again and I find only minor similarities with The Thief, most often archetypes and conventions which go back to the Arabian Nights themselves. Oh, and it was common to punish thieves by cutting off their hand.

The shot of Abu looking at the ruby, now, I can accept that as being ripped from The Thief. But, say, Iago was different from Phido - both were hench-birds, but Phido was more the typical "villain's vulture" while Iago was made as a loud, annoying comic relief.

And I don't take the Lion King/Kimba thing seriously, only because other than the Tezuka estate, the people who espouse it usually seem to be the typical anti-Disney people who despise them for whatever reasons; because they believe Disney is responsible for dumbing down animation and stigmatizing it as kiddie fare, because they hate American animation and flock in thrall to anime, because they despise Disney as representing American capitalism, because they despise them as representing a reactionary "cultural establishment" (which they justify by pointing to Walt's traditional conservative values), because they just look down and sneer on Disney's brand of "entertainment for the masses."

But I digress.

There is a connection between the two, yes. And certainly Disney would rather that the film disappear. I just can't believe that the Miramax butcher-job was ordered by Disney specifically to set the film up to tank. I will continue to believe that Miramax was completely responsible, and that they actually thought the changes improved the film and would make it more palatable to the general moviegoer. (Hey, Jake Eberts of Allied Filmmakers thought that the Calvert and Miramax changes improved the film, too, and said as much in some interview.)

Now, as I said before, its release could indeed have been meddled with by Disney studio politics. But I believe that the main Walt Disney Company itself didn't have anything to do with the actual decisions behind the Miramax chop-job.

I am not blind to anything, and I am not trying to fully exonerate Disney. The film passed through tons of executives who didn't understand it - the Aladdin issue is only one aspect of it. It certainly didn't help that Aladdin, in cementing what execs automatically associated the Arabian-fantasy theme with, actually seems to have influenced not just what Miramax did to it, but in part what Calvert and co. did to it - I almost wonder if the rough workprint was put together after seeing an advance screening of the film. I swear, in the Calvert WIP at least, it does sound like Yum-Yum is humming a thinly veiled ripoff of the verse melody from "A Whole New World" when the Thief comes up through the drain...

[tygerbug]

"I quote Wikipedia" indeed.

...

It was common to chop off people's hands. What it wasn't common to do was run music from "Scheherezade" by Rimsky-Korsakov as part of the scene, which both The Thief and the Aladdin workprints managed to do.

"The shot of Abu looking at the ruby, now, I can accept that as being ripped from The Thief."

Yeah, okay, you got one, now how about all the other shots?

What about the Grand Vizier hypnotizing the King and attempting to win his daughter? What about the scenes of pole vaulting and falling off awnings? What about Jafar/Zigzag shouting "Faster!" while riding and sounding and looking like the same character?

"And I don't take the Lion King/Kimba thing seriously, only because other than the Tezuka estate, the people who espouse it usually seem to be the typical anti-Disney people"

So you ignore blatant similarities in character and set design just because you've got some view of the people who might have noticed said blatant similarities?

I mean, whatever opinions you have about people as a stereotyped group which may or may not be true or exist, the similarities are there in both films, and not hard to point to.

Are you then being a typical pro-Disney person here?


"There is a connection between the two, yes. And certainly Disney would rather that the film disappear."

You said it, not me.

Two major Aladdin references in the Miramax Cut occur in the first scene. Objectively this seems designed to sway the audience into Aladdin ripoff mode as early as possible.


"I almost wonder if the rough workprint was put together after seeing an advance screening of the film. I swear, in the Calvert WIP at least, it does sound like Yum-Yum is humming a thinly veiled ripoff of the verse melody from "A Whole New World" when the Thief comes up through the drain..."

Yeah, no. Never happened.