I’m sorry once more! But, COME ON! Who knows Taran?! Who knows Hen Wen?! Who knows Princess Eilonwy?! Who knows Doli?! Who knows King Eiddileg?! Who knows Flewwwdur Flflflammm or however you spell his name?! It’s Disney’s black sheep! It’s just…AARRGHH!!!!
Ok, inhale!
Exhale!
Inhale!
Exhale!
Right, sorry about that, folks! Let’s start at the beginning!
We arrive at the black sheep of the Disney Canon, “The Black Cauldron”! Released in 1985, Disney’s 25th animated feature
became famous for many things! First of all, it was a flop at the box office!
Secondly, to rub the salt in the wounds, it was released in the same year as “The Care Bears Movie”, and “The Care Bears Movie” made more money than this did!
Thirdly, this was the first animated Disney film to be rated PG and apparently had to be edited to prevent a PG-13 rating!
As you can see, this movie is pretty infamous on its own. Based on Lloyd Alexander’s “The Chronicles of Prydain” series, the film tells the story of a young “assistant pig-keeper” who dreams of becoming a hero. But he can’t become a hero and instead has to spend his days looking after a pig that has powers to see into the future when putting its mouth into a container of water.
Yeah, anyway…the pig is in danger from being captured by the Horned King! He’s one of the purest devilish
Disney villains, yet doesn’t appear much in the film nor does he do much in the film!
Anyway, the Horned King wants the pig so that he can find the whereabouts of a special black cauldron with which he can devise an army of “un-dead” soldiers! And the pig ends up getting captured and taken to the Horned King’s castle.
The rest of the movie is about Taran, along with the help of new characters, getting the pig back from the Horned King and locating and destroying the Black Cauldron.
I think you can see why this film is the darkest film in the Disney Canon!
So anyway, why do I choose everybody as my forgotten/minor characters from this movie? Well mainly, because this film is so obscure and weird that I don’t think the majority of people think of this movie first when they think of the name, Disney! I actually believe that besides “Saludos Amigos” and possibly, “Fun and Fancy Free”, this is the least-seen animated Disney film in the canon! Hence, its story isn’t well-known and its characters as well!
Ask someone to name a Disney character who’s a young assistant boy and carries a sword in the film and that person will tell you, “Arthur from ‘The Sword in the Stone’“!
Ask someone to name a Disney character who carries a stringed instrument and is meant to play it to tell a story and that person may have to think for a while! But in the end, the person might possibly say, “Alan-a-Dale from ‘Robin Hood’“!
Ask someone to name a Disney character who’s a small, weird-voiced comic relief and that person may say “One of Maleficent’s goons from ‘Sleeping Beauty’“!
Ask someone to name a Disney character who’s a pig! You know what they’re gonna say!
Ask someone to name a Disney movie featuring fairy-like people! They’ll say “Peter Pan” or maybe even “Fantasia”!
Ask someone to name a truly dark, evil, and devilish Disney villain and they’ll say, “The Devil Himself or Chernabog from ‘Fantasia’“!
And finally ask someone to name a Disney princess!
Oh yeah, they’ll definitely think of Princess Eilonwy who happens to be MY FAVORITE DISNEY PRINCESS, and yet isn’t considered an official Disney princess whilst Mulan, for some reason, is! AARRGGHHH!!
So you may be wondering that if the main reason that I’m choosing all the characters is because they’re obscure, then why didn’t I do the same when I was at Disney’s package films because they’re quite obscure too! Well, the thing about the package films is that they’re composed of separate shorts and some shorts are MORE FAMOUS than others! So the movies themselves might be obscure, but many people would know certain characters from certain segments over the rest of the characters!
In this case however, this is one full film as a whole, hence its characters are all remembered equally, and in this case, not at all! If you were to go up to someone and say,
he/she may call the cops!
Or you may be lucky and bump into a Tolkien fan, and he may reply with
Anyway, I hope you can see why I had to choose all the characters from this film as forgotten ones! I’m not a huge fan of this movie, although I don’t hate it either! But it seems that the name “The Black Cauldron” shall live on in infamy!
The Animation Commendation 
I really loved this movie when I was a kid. Well, technically I loved the Read-Along Adventures version, which couldn’t have been longer than 30 minutes, and doubtless cut alot out. I’m not sure if I ever saw the full movie. But still, I practically wore out the tape.
All that said, I had all but forgotten about it. Great selection on your part.
Thanks! It really is a forgotten film, and probably justly so!
The Black Cauldron is based on a Book….never mind that all Disney Princesses (with the exception of Jasmine, but “Aladdin” is such a fairy tale movie, it would feel wrong to exclude her) are protagonists of their movies.
I never got why Eilonwyn is a Princess in the first place…actually, when I was a child, I thought that the Princess thing was just an act (like Taran’s hero story and Flewydurs great bard story), because the horned kind calls her a kitchen maid at the end of the movie….and the thing is, she could be one, it would make no difference for the plot whatsoever.
True, I guess I feel bias towards her, because she’s so forgotten and not thought about by people, so I feel like she should be a princess.
Yeah, they don’t really address it in the movie, but in the book she pretends to be a kitchen maid for awhile and you don’t find out she’s a princess until the very end. Without that context, and the fact that Disney changed it, it’s definitely a weird reference!
Ugh, one of my least favourites. It is so boring and just drags and drags. The characters are irritating and it was a frustrating experience watching it. I really do not ever want to watch this again.
Do you dislike this more than “Home on the Range” and/or “Chicken Little”?
Actually yes. It bored me more than I ever thought I could be. The films you mentioned are cringe worthy, but at beast they did not make you go numb.
I just watched this movie for the first time the other day, because I read the book and enjoyed it. I really did not care for it. I’ve not seen every single animated Disney film yet, but it’s definitely one of my least favorites ever. There were so many things I didn’t like about it, but I thought some of the voice work was pretty bad and distracting.
Yeah, Disney considers it their “black sheep” amongst the animated films and tries to forget about it as much as possible.
A laughably bad movie, but I’d be lying if I denied that I like Eilonwy, and I love to hate on Gurgi.
Yeah, I think my crush on Eilonwy is one of the reasons why she’s my favorite technical princess!