Let's just say it would take months to carefully go through it. It's just a nice storage space for hundreds of articles and thousands of pieces of original artwork from the film over the years.
Arnaud Hilmarcher has offered to buy the Thief script. So I guess nobody else bid on it! I'm very grateful and will repay Arnaud with lots of DVDs.
One of these days I should probably actually watch The Thief of Baghdad (1940), to know one of the sources both Dick and Disney were working from.
When I was a kid, I remember my sister watching a later Thief of Baghdad film over and over. Steve Reeves. She liked him.
Ah yes, it's this 1961 Italian effort. Not much to do with the 1940 or other versions, same title.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054013/
Slightly off topic:
When I was a kid, the first book on animation I ever really had was The Animator's Workbook by British animator Tony White. The beautiful artwork was also my first introduction to the style of animation that Richard Williams had begun out in London.
I've spoken to Mr. White more recently giving my respect for his work, and I'm excited that he's got a new book out. I've seen his reel as well as his new film Endangered Species ... the man is as talented as ever.
Here's a great, long interview with him about the book and the status of the animation industry in general.
http://news.toonzone.net/article.php?ID=12129
Harvey Kalmanson - voice casting for the Calvert cut.
http://www.kalmenson.com/harvbio.htm
Reviews this week:
Tim Froh - "Xanadu" blog
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Butchered Masterpieces Pt. 1 - The Thief and the Cobbler (Richard Williams, USA, 1964-1992)
In a history that now spans over a century, cinema has seen its fair share of unfairly butchered films. These wild cutting practices were not only common, but some are downright notorious (Erich Von Stroheim's Greed and Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons are two of the most infamous in Hollywood history). Such butchering though, was not the exclusive domain of early Hollywood cinema. As recently as 1995, Richard Williams' as yet unfinished animated gem The Thief and the Cobbler, was butchered not once, but twice, by two different studios.
Like any discussion of a lost, butchered, or unfinished work of art, The Thief and the Cobbler must first be put into its proper creative context. Begun in 1964 under the working title Nasruddin (the film was to be based on the "wise fool" hero of its title), Williams wanted to craft an animated epic, a hand drawn masterpiece that would be enjoyed for generations. While the Nasruddin concept was dropped in 1972, all of the animation not featuring Nasruddin himself, and all of Vincent Price's voicework for the character that became ZigZag, was retained. Williams promised that the new film would be "the first animated film with a real plot that locks together like a detective story at the end."
In 1986, Williams received the backing and financing of producer Jake Eberts, and after the success of Who Framed Roger Rabit?, The Thief and the Cobbler was picked up for distribution by Warner Brothers studio. However, when Williams still had not completed the film by Warners' 1991 deadline (Williams apparently found storyboards creatively constricting, among other things) and with Disney's Aladdin project (which borrowed imagery from Thief) a looming threat, the investors asked Williams to fill in the remaining fifteen minutes of the film with storyboards and show them a rough cut. Unimpressed, they backed out and the Completion Bond Company took over control of the project.
At this point, the project completely collapsed. A television animator, Fred Calvert, was hired to finish the film. He leased out the new work to animators in Korea. The results were nothing short of disastrous as the film quickly evolved into something very far from Williams' original vision. This version of the picture, re-titled The Princess and the Cobbler, was released internationally, but in America, the film was re-cut even further by Disney subsiduary Miramax, who added new voices for previously mute characters and created new songs. This version, titled Arabian Knight, was an even greater distortion of Williams' project than the Calvert version.
All that remains for American audiences is the Miramax cut, available on DVD, and Williams' bootleg version, the very same cut that he showed to the Warners investors. For years, this bootleg version had circulated in animation circles, and was revered as something of a lost masterpiece. Now this bootleg is available to anyone willing to watch. Broken up into seventeen parts on Youtube, the bootleg version is, barring some kind of miracle, the closest thing we'll ever have to Williams' original vision. It's unfortunate that this animated masterpiece may never be finished, let alone released in this form on DVD.
What remains is nevertheless a beautiful, exotic, rapturous animated masterwork. Williams and his team of animators crafted a splendidly fluid kind of animation. That such remarkably complex frames could be pieced together without the aid of CGI and look so good is a tribute to the care with which Williams constructed his picture. Two particular sequences in the film stand out. In one, the cobbler chases the thief across the Escher-like tableau of the Golden City palace, encountering optical illusions and pitfalls along the way. In another, the film's climactic battle, Williams constructed a Rube Goldberg series of destruction that will leave you speechless.
In recent years, it has been rumored that Disney was planning on resurrecting this butchered masterpiece, but the battle for control of the company put these plans on hold indefinitely. Now seventy-three years old, we can only hope that some day Richard Williams is given the chance to complete his life's work, so unfairly snatched from him nearly fifteen years ago. It's easy to forget that the film business, particularly in the United States, is exactly that. A business. Williams was but one of many of its victims in an ongoing struggle between art and commerce.
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But don't dis Pixar ...
Empire State Blues blog:
The Thief and the Cobbler: The Greatest Movie You Will Never See
It may be Labor Day, but ESB keeps on rollin’!
Let’s be honest for a moment. How many people think that today’s animated feature films totally suck? I sure do. I mean, it may just be because I’m becoming an adult with discerning adult tastes, but seriously, I’ll fight any man who says that Cars is better fare than Aladdin or The Lion King. They just don’t draw ‘em like they used to; in fact, they don’t “draw ‘em” at all anymore. The decline and fall of animated motion pictures has been a depressing descent, as genuine art is replaced by repetitive gimmicks in familiar settings (“Cars!” “Bugs!” “Trainz!” “Toyz!”) and interesting ideas are scrapped in favor of crowd-pleasers and CGI witchcraft. And there’s no greater example of true animated art defeated by modern oblivion than The Thief and the Cobbler.
This selection comes from the “incredible crying shame” department. Whether we know his name or not, we all know the work of animation maestro Richard Williams, the brains behind the cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and the Academy Award-winning short A Christmas Carol. Williams’ masterpiece, however, was a little personal project called The Thief and the Cobbler, an Arabian Nights-esque tale which he started work on in the 60’s using his own money. Featuring epic, lush, and incredibly beautiful animation heavily influenced by Islamic decorative art, the lovingly-made but slow-to-finish TTatC was pretty much doomed the minute Disney announced Aladdin, which was staffed by numerous veterans from the TTatC team and ripped off pretty much everything in Williams’ unfinished movie. It’s unbelievable how many sequences in Aladdin were lifted wholesale from this film. Finally in 1995 a bastardized version of Williams’ baby was released sans his consent, featuring TERRIBLE voiceovers (including ones for characters who were intended to be silent), trite song-and-dance numbers and a totally kiddified version of what was intended to be a mature movie. What a sucky finish.
But thank Allah, it was not the finish. Over the summer, YouTube has been touched by the work of a benevolent and talented soul known as tygerbug, who has succeeded in piecing together (from released animation as well as rough sketches and workprints) what he believes to be a film closer to Williams’ original vision. Cleverly entitled The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut tygerbug brings justice to a piece of art which dearly deserves it.
I mean, look at this thing. It’s the most fucking beautiful animated film I’ve seen in my life. The titular characters are (mercifully) silent as intended, and the film drops the handholding introduction and absurd narration. The cut refuses to insult its viewers’ intelligence and allows them to freely follow what is mostly a silent film, save for the slippery coolness of Vincent Price-voiced villain Zigzag, who weaves his nefarious plots in rhyme. The art is INCREDIBLE, a lavish hallucinogenic effort, capturing the distinctive Islamic style and featuring some really well-designed characters. It’s just so much fun to watch.
If you want to see this movie, and really, it’s worth it, you should not rent the DVD version available at your local Blockbuster or NetFlix unless you want to be disappointed. At first I thought about suggesting watching it with the sound off, but then you’d miss out on the decent score and Vincent Price’s pipes. Do yourself a favor and go to YouTube to watch the Recobbled Cut, or any one of its seventeen bite-sized pieces. You’ll see what I mean. Plus, it’s sort of cool to see the rough sketches spliced in with the recovered animation. It gives it a real underground feel and allows you to see glimpses of Williams’ vision still on paper.
Hopefully, someone at Warner Bros. will realize what they have done and attempt to right the wrong. Somehow, someday, I hope something like the Recobbled Cut will be released on DVD or Blu-Ray or whatever. This movie needs to be saved, saved, SAVED!!
If you want a quick taste of what this movie has to offer, I suggest you watch Part 4.
