The Black Cauldron 1985

This is and I think shall always be my favorite Disney film. John Hurt voices the villain brilliantly and Gurgi is awesome.

Loved this movie as a kid and it frightened the hell out of me (like it did to every kid I guess).

Watching it all those years later, it's still as scary but I didn't connect to the story or the characters as much.

However, at the end of the movie I mainly felt the nostalgia of watching this with my sisters when I was young so I can't give this lower than 4 stars hihi.

Like a hotel built on a sewer, I checked out of this very early on.

A visual hodge-podge, The Black Cauldron tries to make up for its lack of heart, story and true villain with an overabundance of random scenes and more characters than a Hindi keyboard.

'The Black Cauldron' is a rather solid, if unspectacular, film.

I had a decent time, all thanks to the premise which is entertaining enough. The characters are all good, I like the variety. The villain, Horned King, is satisfactorily worrisome. I would've preferred extra depth into all those involved, especially the king and even Taran & Co.

None of the voice cast are notable in all honesty, though they all serve the purpose for what they are intended for. The animation and music, like basically the whole film in general, is perfectly fine. Everything could've been grander, but I think it does enough to warrant a respectable rating.

Probably forgettable, but this is definitely a good Disney animated film.

A notorious relic from Disney's back catalog that was censored and shunned internally for years due to its "distressing" content. In a modern light, it's tough to see what all the fuss was about. A few marching skeletons? A bit of swordplay? It all seems so quaint now, with the benefit of hindsight on our side.

Not that the film should be mentioned in the same breath as the studio's calling cards, of course. It's short, shallow and more than a little murky, with a distinct lack of Disney charm, but it still has a lot going for it. The animation, for instance, is superb - a great blend of photo-reference and vivid exaggeration that looks and feels like a Don Bluth classic (though Bluth himself, having departed six years prior, was uninvolved with the production). It also enjoys a much more loyal fantasy tone than many of Disney's efforts, sharing many themes (and maybe a few characters) with the then-neglected Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Fascinating for many reasons, most of which occur behind the scenes, it's too narrow-sighted and streamlined to be taken all that seriously.