The Black Cauldron
July 24, 1985 in theaters
Taran is an assistant pigkeeper with boyish dreams of becoming a great warrior. However, he has to put the daydreaming aside when his charge, an oracular pig named Hen Wen, is kidnapped by an evil lord known as the Horned King. The villain hopes Hen will show him the way to The Black Cauldron, which has the power to create a giant army of unstoppable soldiers.
Cast
Director
TRAILER
QUOTE
"The Horned King will stop at nothing."
DID YOU KNOW?
The film was 25 years in development -- Disney had been trying to adapt Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles since the late 1950s.
THE VERDICT
Synthesized from published reviews
Disney's darkest and most troubled animated film -- an adaptation of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain that the studio spent years making and then partly dismantled in post-production. The Horned King remains one of the most genuinely frightening villains in Disney history, and the animation itself has moments of real beauty, but the narrative feels compressed and incomplete. It is a fascinating artifact of a studio in transition: too dark for its audience, not dark enough to be subversive, and worth revisiting for exactly that tension.
GALLERY
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