PG Thrills in the Land of Legend

By Richard Schickel

It is a wondrous bestiary tended by young Taran and his winsome would-be princess Eilonwy. The menagerie includes Hen Wen, the clairvoyant pig, whose bottom is rounder and wigglier than Madonna's; Gurgi, whose species is unknown, but who is definitely cute, cuddly and comical; the Fairfolk, minuscule fairy creatures who come and go in clouds of Disneydust; and the three witches, who are more funny than frightening. Leading the forces of evil is the Horned King. His body is skeletal, his voice sepulchral, and his eyes glow red like coals. His aide-de-camp is a little green horror known appropriately as Creeper, and his castle is guarded by two pterodactyl-like birds, flapping, screeching, ever ready to swoop down and carry off the better elements populating this mythical kingdom. Eventually, the evil monarch and his minions find out from our friends where the long-hidden black cauldron lies and set loose upon the world the dreadful army of the dead it contains. "But Daddy," a million tiny voices will ask, "is it going to come out all right?"

To that inevitable query, there are two plausible responses. One is "Of course, this is a Disney picture." The other is "Shut up." Shut up and marvel anew at the wonders of Disney animation. It used to be that serious people objected to the strange, destabilizing jumble of motives and styles that so rapidly alternate in the typical animated feature from the studio. Always trying to have it both ways, they said, blending the humorous and the horrific, the benign and the baleful. Scared the grown-ups and muddled the moppets. Or was it the other way around? Anyway, it was thought to be less than ideal, aesthetically speaking. Distressingly popular too.

Time to put all that behind us. The Black Cauldron, based on the Chronicles of Prydain series of books by Lloyd Alexander, is the 25th full-length "cartoon" from Disney. That means that by this time the only tradition to which it must be true is its own--not the folklorists', not the child psychologists', not the literary world's. And within those terms it is fine, and perhaps more ambitiously so than any other recent work from the studio. This is the first Disney cartoon feature to receive an admonitory PG rating; more important, it is the first to be entirely the work of the new generation of artists who have taken over from the "Nine Old Men" who created the house style almost half a century ago. There are a freshness and a desire to prove themselves animating these animators.

It is too expensive nowadays to attempt the miraculously detailed subtlety of Pinocchio, which remains the masterpiece of the Disney manner. But the new boys know how to create wonderful transformations in a character's expression with a deft stroke or two, and they have mastered the deliciously parodistic plasticity required by the movements of their ever twisting-turning-tumbling creatures. Their pastoral scenes still glow with the old Disney sweetness, and the ones of foreboding glower with the old relish for the grotesque. They satisfy an older viewer's nostalgic feeling for his childhood's delight while fulfilling the younger crowd's need for a kind of magic the movies too rarely even try to provide of late. It is never too early to learn that animation is still the best special effect. --By Richard Schickel