The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Cut Mark 5

[Inkwright_67]

Hello, Garrett, I hope you have been doing well. I have been in your streams before to ask questions as well as watch you restore the war machine scene and ink promo artwork. Me and my friend have admired your cut of the film for several years (she practically grew up on your version and adores any scenes with the Thief) and I just want to say that I'm very eager to see this new cut you have in store. It seems you have some incredible talent in store for your batch of new shots, along with the fellow animators like Dennis and Kiko who contributed. I grew up on this film quite a bit and have had many ups and downs with seeing how its legacy has shifted. It's really lifting my spirits to see the Recobbled Cut is going to get even better, and I'm highly anticipating this new version whenever all of this effort pays off. Thank you for what you do, Garrett, and I wish you the best of luck!

[GrandeurWazir]

Do you think this 35mm Trailer of Arabian Knight could be used for HD Rebuilds? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GB_veC2_-E

[Garrett Gilchrist]

No. It has very little unique material, is very cropped and shockingly low quality.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Small reminder that while I've had a lot of help, the Recobbled Cut restoration is a project by Garrett Gilchrist, and has been for over twenty years. Posts that credit this restoration to someone I've never heard of will be deleted.

Hello, Garrett, I hope you have been doing well. I have been in your streams before to ask questions as well as watch you restore the war machine scene and ink promo artwork. Me and my friend have admired your cut of the film for several years (she practically grew up on your version and adores any scenes with the Thief) and I just want to say that I'm very eager to see this new cut you have in store. It seems you have some incredible talent in store for your batch of new shots, along with the fellow animators like Dennis and Kiko who contributed. I grew up on this film quite a bit and have had many ups and downs with seeing how its legacy has shifted. It's really lifting my spirits to see the Recobbled Cut is going to get even better, and I'm highly anticipating this new version whenever all of this effort pays off. Thank you for what you do, Garrett, and I wish you the best of luck!

Thank you!

[Garrett Gilchrist]

https://youtu.be/FC4sYmilGF8
The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut Mark 5
Work in Progress 06/20/23

This restoration is still a work in progress. It contains new animation which has not yet been completed, and is "half done" in this preview. At times, there are unfinished edits and smudgy frames.

"Animation among the most glorious and lively ever created!" - The New York Times
"The best and most important 'fan edit' ever made." - Twitch Film

Chief Restorationist: Garrett Gilchrist

Directed by Richard Williams
Screenplay by Richard Williams and Margaret French
Master animator Ken Harris
Produced by Imogen Sutton and Richard Williams

Here is your first sneak preview of a newly re-restored version of this lost animation classic, written and directed by legendary three-time Academy Award winning animator Richard Williams (animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the author of The Animator's Survival Kit). Nearly 30 years in the making, a labor of love by a team of animation greats, this was to be the masterpiece of Williams’ career, perhaps the most ambitious independent animated film ever conceived. It was taken away from Williams when he couldn’t meet his deadline, recut and destroyed. It has never been seen the way it was intended to be seen ... until now. Based on Williams’ original workprint, missing scenes have been restored using storyboards and unfinished animation. Restored to its true form, this lost cult classic has finally been found - for you at home.

2023 could be considered the 60th anniversary of when production began on the film that would become "The Thief and the Cobbler." 2023 is also the 30th anniversary of when production ended on the film, when a reedited version called "The Princess and the Cobbler" had a very small release in some countries. 2023 is also the 10th anniversary of "The Thief and the Cobbler Recobbled Cut Mark 4," a restoration by filmmaker Garrett Gilchrist which intended to restore the film to its original intended form, as much as possible. This is also, approximately, the 25th anniversary of Gilchrist's first experiments with restoring this film. (Today is also, approximately, the 35th anniversary of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit.")

So we thought it would be a good idea to go back and restore the film further, and see what could be done with it. We still do not have access to a high quality HD copy of any version of the film (such as the released version "Arabian Knight" or Williams' workprint "A Moment In Time"). We do have some 35mm workprint scenes, which we transferred in HD for this project, and which make up over 30 minutes of the film. Some scenes were also upscaled and rebuilt in HD, and all scenes were cleaned up and restored frame by frame by Garrett Gilchrist. Any Blu-Ray labels that would like to take on this project with us officially can contact us.

Garrett Gilchrist writes:

I had often said that I wouldn't do a "Mark 5" edit unless an HD version of the film (in any form) was released and could be used for a better quality version. The "Recobbled Cut" project was begun in 2006 and continued until 2013, originally. That's eight years of work restoring the film (frame by frame in Photoshop!) and building up a huge data archive of Richard Williams' work (Available via ocpmovie at archive. org). I wasn't going to return to the project without a very good reason to do so. No new footage has turned up in our hands in the last ten years.

But it's been ten years since the "Mark 4," and I was approached by animators Dennis Van Hout and Kiko Pablo (The Crow Artist), who had animated a few new shots for the film. It's very difficult, without a budget, to create the sort of high quality animation that this film requires. However, their efforts showed me that it's possible. I had just completed inking a Thief and the Cobbler Coloring Book (available at archive) and felt more confident that I could draw and ink in Richard Williams' style. I chose about twenty shots that seemed possible to animate, and began work on them in early 2023. You can see a half-finished version of the results in this video. I am still working to bring the results up to standard as much as possible.

I also "re-restored" most of the film for this version, rebuilding some shots in HD using cropped DVD sources, recoloring some shots to appear higher quality, removing dirt and damage in Photoshop frame by frame, and doing months of new work to bring the film to life like never before. We were never happy with the HD transfer of the scenes of The Thief in the War Machine, which are very red and dark and lack detail. Some color correction trickery helped bring more detail to the scenes, and dirt and damage was removed by hand in Photoshop over the course of several months.

Other HD scenes were also restored by hand, which had been overlooked for the previous version, because I'd been working on it for eight years at that point and had to stop somewhere. The U-Matic video source for the workprint was also revisited. Pencil test scenes are hard to see due to the low quality of the video source, and I went back to the original source for this version, and cleaned up the scenes very carefully frame by frame to bring out quality and detail that was previously lost. Scenes that previously switched from one source to another have been cleaned up as much as possible so that the sources match seamlessly. Some workprint scenes have been recolored by hand to improve their quality.

Previous versions were edited on Mac hardware, and there were always serious brightness issues when converting from MOV to AVI and editing the material generally. I put a lot of thought and time into solving those issues on PC this time round and making it look the way I intended.

The scenes directed by Fred Calvert were done on the cheap and are not up to the quality standards that Richard Williams intended. In this edit I have reworked the Calvert scenes as much as possible, so that they play more smoothly with additional inbetweening. I have removed animation errors and improved scenes with special effects, and rebuild some scenes in HD. This work will continue as time allows.

Our newly animated scenes are also a work in progress, and will require further work to make the animation smoother and more in line with the rest of the film. I am just one illustrator and do not have the budget of a professional animation studio, so I'm really pushing my luck by trying to insert new animation into a cult-favorite masterpiece by one of the greatest animators who ever lived. But I also was careful to choose scenes that are less complex in how they move. It's been a lot of work, and it's still a work in progress. But I hope you enjoy seeing what I've been up to all these months, as well as the delightful new animation by Dennis Van Hout, Kiko Pablo, Chris Fern and others.

[Inkwright_67]

I just saw the rough cut and I was pleasantly surprised at how well you reconstructed the old footage. I of course noticed some editing incompleteness that took me out of the film a bit, but I overall appreciate the massive improvements to the more crucial sections to the film. All of the new shots you're producing for the main characters are coming along wonderfully so far, and I can't wait to see the finished results for those.

The biggest thing I anticipated was the giant War Machine scene with our friendly neighborhood Thief . It was no longer an eyesore to look at, and the color correction and restored details made the sequence even more engaging to watch. The fact this high-quality finale could be produced in the year of Star Wars still irks me, and I adored every second of painstaking restoration you devoted yourself to make it come to life like never before.

I also admire the decision to smooth out the Calvert scenes. While some could still be considered less than desirable, I think the higher frame rate finally got me to look past their glaring issues from back in the butchered cuts. All I can simply say is the general outline for Mark 5 is outstanding and I look forward to seeing it all come together (and re-recobbled, if you will) to present possibly the most ambitious cut of the film yet. Kudos to you, Garrett, as well as Dennis, Kiko, and the brilliant minds who worked under Richard Williams for everything you do.

[adventuremaster18]

Planning to watch the whole thing on Sunday as a watch party with friends on Discord, but I skimmed it and wanted to talk about some of it:

- The new animation by Dennis Van Hout and Kiko Pablo looks great! They did such a great job with the animation that you could've told me that they were newly discovered scenes and I would've believed you! They are so accurate to the original film.
- The new animation by you is pretty good, very accurate to the style of the film, although it's not as smooth as it probably should be. I think you nailed the style, but the original film was animated on 1s, and without that smoothness, it does look a tad off. Still, I understand that it's a WIP and will probably be made smoother.
- The Calvert scenes look a whole better! How did you get the animation to look so much smoother? Did you create new frames for certain shots?
- I noticed the eunuchs have been slightly redrawn/redesigned face wise. Was this based on any specific designs by Richard or any moments in the film? Or was it to uh... make them look less offensive? Lol.
- The abrupt audio cut to the Midi playing was quite funny lol. I understand the audio has yet to be redone/retimed, just thought that was humorous.
- Nice job on the color correction, looks a lot better than Mk 4!

Aside from the obvious WIP elements (such as unfinished animation and such), this is looking to be yet another upgrade to the film! Great job!

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Thank you Inkwright_67.

1- The new animation by you is pretty good, very accurate to the style of the film, although it's not as smooth as it probably should be. I think you nailed the style, but the original film was animated on 1s, and without that smoothness, it does look a tad off. Still, I understand that it's a WIP and will probably be made smoother.
2- The Calvert scenes look a whole better! How did you get the animation to look so much smoother? Did you create new frames for certain shots?
3- I noticed the eunuchs have been slightly redrawn/redesigned face wise. Was this based on any specific designs by Richard or any moments in the film? Or was it to uh... make them look less offensive? Lol.
4- The abrupt audio cut to the Midi playing was quite funny lol. I understand the audio has yet to be redone/retimed, just thought that was humorous.

1) The new animation by myself is a work in progress. I am continuing to fix problems with it and add inbetweens gradually. It was very ambitious of me to try to animate so many new shots, and it has been a gradual process, starting with key drawings and inbetweening them into finished sequences. I am only planning to animate some of the scenes "on twos" though. Even the sequences which are semi-finished here need further work to clean up animation errors which became more obvious in color.

2) Many Calvert scenes were given new inbetweens for this edit. This was, perhaps, only possible due to the relatively low quality of the video material. The scenes were roughly interpolated using Rife, and redrawn or cleaned up in Photoshop. I remember having to redraw a lot of Yum Yum eye blinks, and other details like that, as well as removing dirt and animation errors. Some movement was simply sped up to be "on ones." Some Calvert scenes were also rebuilt in HD, using the cropped 4x3 Miramax DVD as a slightly higher quality source (but with very different coloring). I still plan to do more of that, but it's a difficult process. Some scenes were also recolored using EBSynth or given other effects elements.

3) Calvert's animation of the Eunuchs chose a different design with purple skin, and in previous versions of the Recobbled Cut I've had to rework the purple Eunuchs to be more in line with what Williams was doing. The result has to resemble (existing animation of) both the Williams and Calvert Eunuchs at least vaguely, so that really dictates what I can do. Since I had to revisit the scenes again anyway, I basically gave the Eunuchs noses this time (during still scenes), and darkened their skin using a yellow/gold overlay. I was trying to find the simplest solution that wouldn't stand out as strange. I have seen concept art for the Eunuchs where they have noses and ears, so I worked from that. I did not touch their appearance early on in the Williams footage, which would have been more difficult. I would always have had to do something like this, if I wasn't using the purple Eunuchs. The Eunuchs were controversial even in the 90s. They're a simple design which looks stereotypical. You can argue that the entire cast is made up of people of color with simplified designs, as the Nasrudin script was set in Persia and India. (It appears to still be canon that King Nod is Persian and Yum Yum's mother was Indian. He probably fought a war in the fairytale equivalent of India.)

4) I haven't done anything with the audio yet, and so a couple of scenes which were extended here have some weird audio editing as a placeholder. That includes Yum Yum and Tack getting to know one another, and Tack opening up the hand mountain. I am not a musician and was trying to find someone to rearrange the "love theme" for that scene. I've had to do a lot on this project - wear a lot of different hats, so to speak - and some elements haven't been dealt with yet.

[adventuremaster18]

I'm quite interested in seeing the early Eunuchs concept art with the nose and ears. Is that available anywhere?

[Inkwright_67]

4) I haven't done anything with the audio yet, and so a couple of scenes which were extended here have some weird audio editing as a placeholder. That includes Yum Yum and Tack getting to know one another, and Tack opening up the hand mountain. I am not a musician and was trying to find someone to rearrange the "love theme" for that scene. I've had to do a lot on this project - wear a lot of different hats, so to speak - and some elements haven't been dealt with yet.

You're in luck. I remember you putting up the midi a while ago, and because I had been doing a lot of video game compositions lately, I immediately got it and did my own arrangement for it. EDIT: I had the incomplete version here before, here's the fully revised arrangement. I made a separate one that sticks closer to how Garrett did it.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11n2R1s ... p=drivesdk