The Thief and the Cobbler: Recobbled Director's Cut (Released) — Page 37

Originally posted by: ocpmovie
Beats me. Who knows if it still exists. You'll have to ask Dick ...


Or rather, I will ...

Originally posted by: tweaker
How much of the Nasrudin stuff was animated?

I found some old Usenet posts that shed some light on this:



Mike Dobbs - Thurs, May 8 1997

This is a long posting, but it may clear up some questions. It was written before the final decision to release the film on tape was madeand appeared in Animato! Issue 36. I plan to update it in my new magazine Animation Planet.

An Arabian Knight-mare

The story of Richard Williams' epic film The Thief and The Cobbler is a cautionary tale for all creators

by G. Michael Dobbs

The recent cancellation of plans to release the 1995 Miramax film Arabian Knight on home video is the latest sad twist in the history of Richard Williams' The Thief and The Cobbler. The award-winning Canadian animator had been working on his dream project for almost 30 years only to see the film completed and substantially altered by others. Now animation fans won't even have the opportunity to see what did remain of Williams' vision. At a time when almost every G-rated animated film priced at $20.00 or less is snapped up by parents, the decision to indefinitely postpone the video release makes no economic sense for Miramax and its parent company, Disney. But then, much about this production makes little sense.

The history of live-action motion pictures is filled with examples of films which have been abandoned before completion (Von Sternberg's I Claudius, Welles' It's All True) and films that were severely altered by distributors ( Gilliam's Brazil, Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons). Animation, though, has seldom had these kind of stories. The nature of the process of producing commercial animation is one of careful planning. Commercial animation has seldom ever had the kind of wheeling and dealing that has characterized live-action film production. The Thief and The Cobbler is an exception.

The animated feature Arabian Knight was released with little fanfare by Miramax Films last summer. There was no mention that the film was the brainchild of the man who directed the animation for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and one easily could conclude the film was some sort of cheap knock-off of Disney's Aladdin. Hardcore animation fans recognized the film for what it really was, the much-delayed The Thief and The Cobbler.

This is a story with no winners, as the outcome is that Williams' prize project will never be seen as he intended, the reputation of an animation professional has been shredded, and another non-Disney animated feature has died at the box-office.

Richard Williams is a bit of a conundrum. His work has won an Oscar and an Emmy, and although he was the animation director for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he has little name value to the general public. A Canadian who went to Great Britain with animation producer George Dunning in the mid-Fifties, Williams set up his own studio in 1958 and produced animation for commercials and independent shorts.

His big break came when he was selected to produce animated titles for The Charge of The Light Brigade in 1968. His production of A Christmas Carol received the Academy Award in 1972. Williams became better known to American audiences through the fantastic shorts that made up the titles for the revived Pink Panther series in the mid-Seventies.

Williams began work on T&C in 1964 when he had planned to do a film about a children's book character named Mulla Nasruddin. Williams had already provided the illustrations for the book. An early reference to the project came in the 1968 International Film Guide. Williams received great praise that year for his title animation work in films such as A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and The Charge of the Light Brigade. The book notes that Williams was about to begin work on "the first of several films based on the stories featuring Mulla Nasruddin."

Like director Orson Welles, Williams would take on an outside assignment in order to put money into his own project, so work went slowly on his film as reflected by subsequent editions of the International Film Guide. In 1969, the Guide noted that animation legend Ken Harris was now working on the project which was now entitled Mulla Nasrudin. The illustrations from the film show impressive and intricate Indian and Persion designs.

In 1970, the project was re-titled The Majestic Fool and for the first time, a distributor for the independent film was mentioned, British Lion. The International Film Guide noted that due to the increase in production for the small studio, the staff had increased to 40 people.

The Academy Award Williams won for A Christmas Carol undoubtedly strengthened his position in completing his feature which was now being referred as Nasruddin!. He began recording the dialogue tracks for the film, and hired Vincent Price to perform the voice of the villain, Anwar (later re-named Zigzag).

The whole focus of the film, though, was about to be changed. In a promotional booklet released in 1973, it was announced that Williams apparently decided that " 'Nasruddin' was found to be too verbal and not suitable for animation, therefore Nasruddin as a character and the Nasruddin stories were dropped as a project. However, the many years work spent on painstaking research into the beauty of Oriental art has been retained. Loosely based on elements in the Arabian Nights stories, an entirely new and original film entitled 'The Thief and The Cobbler' is now the main project of the Williams Studio. Therefore any publicity references to the old character of Nasruddin are now obsolete."

Like many publicity releases, this one didn't tell the whole story. The writer failed to mention that while Nasruddin was out, "old" footage and characters were indeed being retained. Price's Anwar/Zigzag, the Thief himself, and the elderly nurse to the princess were all being carried over to the "new" film which Williams was promising would be a "100 minute Panavision animated epic feature film with a hand drawn cast of thousands." Sequences from the old film which made it into Williams' new film included the camel laughing at the Thief at the waterhole, the wounded soldier riding to tell the Golden City of the news of the One Eyes, and the princess' nanny beating the Thief up when he tried to steal her bananas.

For the next several years, Williams continued to work on the film while completing commercial assignments. He recorded a number of British actors performing various voices during this period.

In an effort to become "bankable" (his word), Williams took on what was supposed to be the part-time job of supervising a new feature film based on the Raggedy Ann and Andy stories. Originally Williams' contract called on him to work two weeks out of every month, an arrangement he later described to animation historian Milt Gray in Funnyworld as "silly."

The Raggedy Ann film proved to be a nightmare for Williams. While he was being made responsible for the film, he had little control over the production which was being bankrolled by the publishers of the original stories and its parent company ITT. He was later removed from the final stages of production, but received most of the blame for the film's box office failure.

During the production of Raggedy Ann, Williams received a fair amount of publicity and in an interview with John Canemaker in the Feb. 1976 issue of Millimeter, he gave a hint about his vision for T&C. "The Thief is not following the Disney route. It's to my knowledge the first animated film with a real plot that locks together like a detective story at the end. It has no sentiment and the two main characters don't
speak. It's like a silent movie with a lot of sound."

A radical approach to be sure, but one must consider the animation scene at the time. The Disney Studio was still floundering from the loss of its founder, and the animated films which had stirred the imagination of the critics and audiences were definitely not Disney. Williams' old boss George Dunning had directed The Yellow Submarine to acclaim and Ralph Bakshi's violent, profane and highly personal film Heavy Traffic hadn't just made money, it was accepted with a fair bit of hoopla into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. This indeed was the time for yet another approach.

For the time, though, the pattern continued of Williams funding his film with outside jobs, while he refined his vision of the project.

A little light was seen at the end of the tunnel when trade ads appeared announcing that veteran Hollywood producer Gary Kurtz had teamed up with Williams to complete the film. The ads announced that The Thief Who Never Gave Up would be released in Christmas 1986, but, of course, it wasn't.

Williams did meet the man in 1986, though, who would bring the film to the screen. Producer Jake Eberts, whose company had financed films such as Dances With Wolves and City of Joy, met with Williams and began funding the production. According to an article in the August 30, 1995 edition of The Los Angeles Times, Eberts eventually put in $10 million of the film's $28 million budget. Ebert wasn't exactly a stranger to animation as he had co-produced Watership Down.

Williams continued to work on T&C , and reported in a 1988 interview with Jerry Beck that he had 2 1/2 hours of pencil tests for T&C, and that he hadn't used the storyboard method to make the film. Williams felt the storyboard method of production was too controlling.

For a filmmaker who was producing this feature with his own financing, this approach was certainly daring and allowed animators to push themselves into creating remarkable scenes. It is not, though, the best way to estimate costs.

Williams' bad experience on Raggedy Ann was compounded with his experience with Ziggy's Gift, a Christmas special featuring the comic strip character created by Tom Wilson. Williams also told Beck that, even though the production won an Emmy, he didn't want to be a hired hand again on a project.

Of course, he was just that on the film which brought him more attention than anything else he's done to date, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. William's supervision on the animation of Roger Rabbit gave him the chance he needed to complete T&C. Footage of T&C helped secure the job on the Disney/Spielberg collaboration, and the overwhelming success of the film certainly reassured people of Williams' abilities. The success of Roger Rabbit proved that Williams could work within a studio structure and turn out wonderful animation on time and within budget.

Following the 1988 release of Roger Rabbit, Williams concentrated on T&C. Charles Champlin in his April 11, 1991 column in The Los Angeles Times profiled Eberts and noted that "one of the projects under his wing is The Thief and The Cobbler...Williams should be able to finish it at long last."

With money coming in from Eberts' Allied Filmmakers and a distribution deal with Warner Brothers, Williams settled back into his London studio to finish the film.

It was not to be, though.

The production of The Thief and The Cobbler had been insured by the Completion Bond Co. in order to protect the films' investors and guarantee the film would actually be finished according to a pre-determined deadline. For today's independent film makers, completion insurance is a necessity in order to line up outside investors.

Williams' deal with Warner Brothers was to deliver his film so Warners could beat Disney's Aladdin to the box office in 1992. When Williams missed that deadline, the film was taken from him in May 1992 by the Completion Bond Co. His part in the project that had occupied nearly thirty years of his professional life was over.

The Thief, however, had a life of its own.

The Completion Bond Co. now had to finish the film in order to get it released and make back the company's money. With the announcement that the insurance company had taken over the film, the distribution deal previously set up with Warner Brothers fell apart.

Enter Fred Calvert.

Calvert is an animation veteran who had been hired by the Completion Bond Co. as a consultant. He had started his career on the animation staff at Disney in 1956, and left the studio after 101 Dalmatians to work for the legendary animator Bill Tytla. Calvert subsequently had stints at Format Films and Hanna-Barbera before forming his own company. Working with the Children's' Television Workshop, Calvert created 300 to 400 animated films for Sesame Street, and later entered the Saturday morning scene producing several series.

He traveled to Williams' London studio several times to check on the progress of the film, and was finally asked by the insurance company to do a detailed analysis of the production status. His conclusion was that Williams was "woefully behind schedule and way over budget," he recalled in an interview for ANIMATO!

Williams did indeed have a script, according to Calvert, but "he wasn't following it faithfully." The Completion Bond Co. did insist that Williams construct a storyboard in order to establish the film's narrative, but Calvert said Williams resisted this request.

"He sort of worked spontaneously," said Calvert "It led him down some futile paths, I think, and he wasn't getting the footage done."

The Completion Bond Co. wanted Calvert to finish the film, an assignment he tried to avoid. When the arrangements with another producer fell through, he took the job "somewhat under protest."

His job was to take the completed footage and literally fill in the narrative gaps in order to make it a commercially-viable film.

"We took it and re-structured it as best we could and brought in a couple of writers and went back into all of Richard Williams' work, some that he wasn't using and found it marvelous...we tried to use as much of his footage as possible."

Of the footage Williams completed, Calvert was only able to use about 50 percent of it, because of the repetitive nature of the scenes. "We hated to see of all this beautiful animation hit the cutting room floor, but that was the only way we could make a story out of it.

"One of the problems, there were a number of these situations...in the script, there might be two or three sentences describing the Thief going up a drain pipe. But what he animated on the screen was five minutes up and down that pipe which would ordinarily be five pages of script...These were the kind of imbalances that were happening. He was kind of Rube Goldberg-ing his way through. I don't think he was able to step back and look at the whole thing as a story.

"[He's] an incredible animator, though. Incredible. One of the biggest problems we had was trying our desperate best, where we had brand new footage, to come up to the level of quality that he had set," said Calvert.

Inserting several song sequences and giving the film's hero, Tack, a voice were commercial decisions which flew in the face of Williams' concept. While having a speaking hero wasn't Calvert's choice, he felt it was a logical decision in order to tell the story.

To get the film produced in a timely manner and within budget, Calvert sub-contracted certain sequences out to other producers. The first song sequence was produced by the Don Bluth Studio and the second song was by the Kroyer Studio. The third song, sung by the desert brigands, was produced by Calvert.

Most of the footage Calvert produced was with animators who had been working on the film under Williams, and he was finished with the film in about a year and a half. By the time Calvert had completed the film The Completion Bond Co. was out of business, largely because of the loss it had sustained on T&C.

"I don't know why they [Miramax] did what they did to it domestically, but it was a sad mistake. If Richard had been able to finish it with a strong story, it would have been magnificent. I think we did our best and delivered a releasable picture."

Once Calvert finished the film, he went to other projects, and was surprised when he learned his version of the film had played in two foreign markets, South Africa and Australia. Known as The Princess and The Cobbler, the film is a revelation for those who saw the Miramax cut.

It is radically different in both content and tone from the Miramax release. It seems clear that Calvert had indeed made an earnest attempt to preserve as much of Williams' vision, while adding elements which would heighten the conventional commercial appeal of the film. The changes Calvert made include a voice for the Cobbler (who has about 10 short lines in the film), three song sequences, and adding a romance for the Cobbler and Princess. What Calvert maintained is more important to the film...many of the original voices, has far less narration, more footage of the film's climax concerning the War Machine, and the Mad Holy Witch sequence.

To show off even more of the Williams' footage, Calvert used out-takes as the images under the end credits. There is more footage from the War Machine sequence (the Thief in the air in an accidental airplane); a scene of the Thief falling from the minaret attempting to steal the golden balls; more footage of the Thief attempting to steal the gem from the statue at the base of the Holy Mountain; and a scene in which the Thief is about to steal something from the Princess' bedroom, but discovers the "carpet" on which he is walking is actually a pack of vicious white dog-like beasts. The longest of the end credit sequences shows the Thief attempting to steal green gems out of a bottle, getting caught and having his hands cut off in Islamic justice, only to hobble away to a safe place to reveal his hands hadn't been cut at all!

As animation fan Luke Menichelli pointed out to this writer, the Calvert version of the film does have some loose ends. Tack is carrying a mouse in his pocket after his jail break, but we never see what happens to it. What character is in the sedan chair that is carried into the king's court and is seated next to the king during the polo game?

Even with its additions and cuts, the Williams/Calvert The Princess and The Cobbler is a dazzling film, but is not for all tastes. It is not a film that pulls at the heartstrings, or goes for big obvious laughs. It is an adult film in many ways, and its strengths are not necessarily commercial.

In the thirty years in which Williams worked on the film, theatrical animation has seen several downturns and rebounds. Twenty years ago when a director like Ralph Bakshi was making news with Heavy Traffic, the farthest thing from a the mind of an artist like Williams is whether or not his film could inspire a line of action figures.

Today, from the point of view of distributors and theater owners, an animated feature ideally has elements for children that can be exploited by a potentially lucrative merchandising campaign, yet have an edge which adults can enjoy. The Princess and The Cobbler does not fit into this definition. Williams' idea for his film is one which substitutes emotional content for visual splendor. Seldom has there been a more incredible example of non-computer-aided animation.

There are more than a few instances to suggest that Williams wanted to do a film more for adults than for children. After all, the chief of the One-Eyes doesn't sit on a throne, but rather on a group of women who are forced to pose in the shape of a throne! Later these women kill the One-Eye chief by throwing him off a cliff. There is a Benny Hill-like urination joke, and Zigzag will probably go down in cartoon history as the first villain who is eaten alive on screen.

There have been a number of reports on how Williams pushed his animators to the breaking point by having them constantly revise sequences and by editing the story of the film by eliminating completed animation.

For instance, in the January/February 1975 edition of Film Comment, a profile on animator Grim Natwick includes a cel from the Mad Holy Witch sequence with another character, the Enchanted Prince. This scene isn't in the completed sequences and neither is a scene in which the witch is pointing at a castle which was reproduced in a late Seventies edition of the International Film Guide. Did Williams actually edit out finished animation by Natwick whom he had lured out of retirement? How much animation was eliminated because Williams' vision of the story changed? Interestingly, Natwick (and another animation vet, the late Ken Harris) aren't included in the credits of the Miramax version.

Williams obviously wanted to make a film which was based on a non-commercial production model; a film that was born more out of spontaneous creativity than careful planning. His manner truly tested the limits of hand-drawn animation.

Williams' designs certainly tested the skill of his staff. For instance, look at the character design for the film. Zigzag simply doesn't have hands; he has long fingers which each have three large rings. What an incredible pain that must have been to animate! Tack doesn't have a mouth, per se; his mouth is defined by the cobbling nails he holds by his teeth. The animators must always draw the mouth to allude to this stylistic joke.

The background designs are almost hypnotic, and all of the years of studying Near Eastern art certainly paid off. The palace scenes are amazing, but the War Machine sequence with its obvious M.C. Escher look surpasses even those set at the palace.

The problem with the film, though, lies in its strength. By subjugating character development and emotion to the animation, the film's moment of triumph rings a little hollow.

The War Machine sequence is the climax of the film. The Cobbler confronts Zigzag who is leading the vanguard of the unstoppable One-Eyes, a barbarian warrior nation on its way to sack the Golden City. The Cobbler, following the advice of the Mad Holy Witch, flings a tack at Zigzag. This tack sets off a chain of events which destroys the War Machine and defeats the One-Eyes. Erected over the middle of the War Machine are the three Golden Balls stolen from the Golden City by Zigzag, and the object of the fanatical efforts of the Thief. In the middle of the destruction, the Thief goes about attempting to reach the balls in order to steal them once again.

Every frame of the sequence is crammed with action and reaction. Clearly based on the Buster Keaton school of comedy, the Thief is an "innocent" whose survival is based on simply being in the right place at the right time as the War Machine falls apart.

Unlike Keaton, though, whose unsmiling heroes were always sympathetic, there has been no effort to build any sort of emotional attachment between the audience and the Thief, and, therefore, the sequence has surprisingly little suspense.

The lack of an emotional bond between the audience and the film is The Princess and The Cobbler's greatest problem. It is easy to see why Calvert and the Completion Bond Co. believed that building up the romance between the leads and the inclusion of the three songs by Robert Folk and Norman Gimbal were essential in building up the film's commercial appeal. The songs advance the plot and the relationship of the characters, and are used in the same way the Disney studio uses songs in its films.

So, if an acceptable version of this film existed, then why re-structure it?

In The Los Angeles Times article of August 30, 1995, Eberts is quoted as saying, "It was significantly enhanced and changed by Miramax after Miramax stepped in and acquired the domestic [distribution] rights. They made extremely good changes."

Eberts may have struck a brave pose for the press, but Miramax's treatment of the film didn't translate into respectable receipts at the box office. The film opened on only 510 screens, and grossed just over $300,000. In most areas, the film was out of first-run within two weeks.

In an effort to make Williams' work more accessible for family audiences, Miramax made a number of changes. Rather than try to sell the film as a modern milestone in animation and emphasize the film's strengths, the powers-to-be at the company tried to sell it as another kiddie show.

The company changed the title to Arabian Knight which smacks of the worst of back-room brainstorming. It's not an accurate title (no one in the film is referred to as an "Arabian knight") and it makes a self-serving reference to Disney's Aladdin.

The company re-dubbed the film using "name" actors as an effort to build the box office appeal of the film. The completely acceptable performances by Bobbi Page as Princess Yum Yum and Steve Lively as Tack were replaced by performances by Jennifer Beals and Matthew Broderick. Additional lines were given to Tack, and, in a move that was decidedly bone-headed, the Thief was given a "voice."

Actually the Thief's "voice" is his thoughts, ("The Thief was a man of few words, but many thoughts," Broderick explained in the film), and these thoughts are voiced by Jonathan Winters. Designed to sound like ad libs, Winters' lines come across flat and very unfunny. They detract from the visuals, instead of adding to them.

Miramax also made the decision to cut the Mad Holy Witch sequence out of an apparent commercial concern. The Mad Holy Witch is a wizened old women with elongated and floppy breasts. One doesn't have to be Einstein to see the concern of possible ratings problems here. To complicate matters, at the end of the scene, she breathes in vapors, swoons a bit, lights a match and explodes! A drug and self-immolation reference may have also been responsible for killing the scene.

Miramax eliminated any box office draw that Williams' name might have by never mentioning in any ad that the film was from the "animation director of Who Framed Roger Rabbit."

According to Williams' son, Alexander, who was working on the film, there was only about four months work left when the Completion Bond Co. took over the project. The legacy of finger-pointing and mystery unfortunately overshadow the accomplishments of the film, but at the heart of the controversy is a very thorny issue.

In these kinds of stories, the good guys are always the artists who are victimized by the villainous money people, and the white and black hats are easy to see. But what about an artist, working in a very competitive commercial medium, who can't finish a project that has taken almost 30 years of his life? What responsibilities are assumed when an artist accepts outside funding in order to complete his project? What Miramax did to Richard Williams' work is inexcusable, but what about what Williams did to himself?

In a perfect world, an artist would be allowed to present his or her work unedited and untouched. Commercial animation is not a perfect world. Perhaps one day, someone will release The Princess and The Cobbler to laser disc and include as much of Williams' out-take animation as exists.

After several years of low key activity, Richard Williams once again is making himself known in animation circles. He is teaching animation in seminars in Los Angeles and London, and there are reports of his planning another feature.

Fred Calvert, who expressed nothing but admiration for Williams' skill as an animator, hopes Williams will be very active again.

"There is a quote from Chekhov, 'Talent forgives all.'," he said.

Originally posted by: OgOggilby
By the way, in a more ironic sense, I never would have thought the original Star Wars trilogy would be released on DVD. I would have bet money that an official "Thief" restoration would hit DVD before that. Oh well.

Originally posted by: ocpmovie
I agree with how Calvert cut it.

Originally posted by: ocpmovie
If someone can spot the shot I'm talking about, the shot in the middle that Calvert kept in, but Miramax cut, and which I cut also, I might have a free prize to give.