Disney Should Adapt This Incredible Fantasy Book Series (Even Though Its First Attempt Flopped)

The 1980s were a hard decade for Disney. Its animation studio was doing so poorly that there were rumors that it was going to shutter for good. The studio would begin diversifying at this time, trying out some darker, less kid-friendly fare and attempting to prove to the world that it could compete in a broader marketplace. If "The Little Mermaid" hadn't been a hit in 1989, there would have been no Disney Renaissance, and we'd be living in a much different world.

But in 1985, the studio was driven to the brink by directors Ted Berman and Richard Rich's "The Black Cauldron," the film that nearly ruined Disney animation. It reportedly cost a then enormous $44 million to make and tanked spectacularly, grossing only $21.3 million in theaters. One can see that "The Black Cauldron" represented Disney's attempt to replicate the success of other high fantasy movies of the era. Films like "Conan the Barbarian" and "The Dark Crystal" were turning heads, and Disney's placid, old-world fairy tales had started to look childish in comparison. The biggest blow to Disney in this respect was the high profile success of director Don Bluth's 1982 film "The Secret of NIMH," as Bluth had previously worked for the Mouse House. He then left Disney after many disagreements and started his own studio, taking some of Disney's best animators with him. Rumor had it Disney even developed "The Black Cauldron" as a direct response to "NIMH."

"The Black Cauldron," based on two books from Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain novel series, wasn't good. It was too scary for little kids and too whimsical to be a legit fantasy epic.

But here's the thing: adapting the Chronicles of Prydain isn't a bad idea. Disney could easily try again and get it right this time.

The Chronicles of Prydain books may be well-known to fantasy readers, although they're semi-obscure in the mainstream. They all take place in a fictional medieval kingdom called Prydain, which is very clearly extrapolated from Wales, the place where Lloyd Alexander was stationed during World War II. There are five novels in the series and they were published from 1964 to 1968, arriving a few years after C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia and right in the middle of a surge in mainstream interest in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" books. The books center on the adventures of Taran, an impoverished young man who dreams of being a great adventurer but who has only managed to land a job as an assistant pig farmer. The pig he is minding, however, seems to possess the power of foresight, and he is able to protect his loved ones by seeing into the future.

There is also evil magic in the land, natch, overseen by Arawn, a wicked sorcerer who can resurrect the dead and force them to fight as an army of darkness, all thanks to the magical Black Cauldron. Arwan also has a wicked enforcer, a skull-faced being with antlers called the Horned King. Taran quests across the land to stop Arwan, bringing with him the Princess Eilonwy, a weird creature/human named Gurgi, a bard known as Fflewddur Fflam (gotta love those Welsh names), and a dwarf named Doli. Disney's "The Black Cauldron" is based on the first two Chronicles of Prydain novels, "The Book of Three" and "The Black Cauldron," but it remixes elements from later books as well. Gurgi, for example, is re-envisioned as a dog-like being with a squeaky voice (provided by (John Byner), and he's the fantasy film equivalent of Scrappy-Doo.

"The Black Cauldron," as mentioned, was far scarier than any of Disney's animated films up to that point. The climax saw hundreds of skeleton warriors rising from a flood of primordial evil, and it's the stuff of nightmares. Tim Burton famously worked on the movie (and hated it), and early concept sketches make it seem like "The Black Cauldron" might have looked more like "The Nightmare Before Christmas" if cooler heads hadn't prevailed. 

But the scariness wasn't the issue. "The Black Cauldron" arguably stumbled at the box office because it failed on both a storytelling level and on a design level. Taran, Eilonwy, Gurgi, and several other characters possessed Disney's usual big-eyed friendliness that had become its house style, and those silly cartoon figures clashed with the horror tone of the film's climax. They were also "funny," which is to say they weren't funny at all ... especially Gurgi. Lloyd Alexander was once quoted by Scholastic as saying that he liked the movie on its own terms but that it bore "no resemblance" to his original work.

Still, if Disney was feeling bold, and it wanted to stray from its house style, it could easily make another fantasy epic based on the Chronicles of Prydain at some point. It's been over 40 years now since "The Black Cauldron" came out, so surely the taste of its failure has been washed away. Alexander died in 2007, and Disney has an opportunity to return to his vast, magical fantasy world and give it a proper cinematic treatment. Not an overpriced Disney+ series, either, but a feature film. 

Back in 2016, Variety reported that Disney was, in fact, trying to bring Alexander's saga back to the screen. Let's see some movement on that, please.