The Thief and the Cobbler (Miramax Cut)

The Miramax Version of The Thief and The Cobbler, Known As "Arabian Knight". is a 1995 Miramax Dub of The Unfinished Animated Fantasy Film, Created By Harvey Weinstein. 
This Version Is Most Infamous for heavily cutting Scenes, Some Dialogues, & Elements, and hastily re-edited with Music, Bad Dialogues and Adding Both Thief and Tack's Monologue by Fred Calvert Without Williams' Explanation. It was Released in August 25, 1995. Despite Being Praised By Audiences, This Version Received Mixed Reviews from Critics. However, It Was a Bombed at the Box Office, Received an $319,723 at the Box Office Alongside With An estimated budget of $24 million.
== Plot ==
The prosperous Golden City is ruled by the narcoleptic King Nod and protected by three golden balls atop its tallest minaret. According to a prophecy, the city would fall to "destruction and death" if the balls are removed, and could only be saved by "the simplest soul with the smallest and simplest of things". Living in the city is a cobbler, Tack, and a nameless, unsuccessful yet persistent thief, both mute.
When the thief sneaks into Tack's house, the two fight and stumble outside, causing Tack's tacks to fall onto the street. Zigzag, King Nod's Grand Vizier, who speaks in rhyme, steps on one of the tacks and orders Tack to be arrested while the thief escapes. Tack is brought before King Nod and his daughter, Princess Yum-Yum. Before Zigzag can convince King Nod to have Tack beheaded, Yum-Yum saves Tack by ordering him to fix a shoe she intentionally breaks. During repairs, Tack and Yum-Yum become increasingly attracted to each other, much to the jealousy of Zigzag, who plots to take over the kingdom by marrying the princess.
Meanwhile, the thief, having noticed the golden balls atop the minaret on the courtyard, breaks into the palace through a gutter. He steals the repaired shoe from Tack, prompting the cobbler to chase him through the palace. Upon retrieving the shoe, Tack bumps into Zigzag, who notices the shoe is fixed and imprisons Tack in a dungeon.
One-Eyes, a race of warlike, one-eyed monsters, plan to destroy the city, and have already slaughtered much of its frontier guard, all except for one mortally wounded soldier who escapes to warn the city; the next morning, Nod has a vision of them. While Zigzag tries to convince Nod of the kingdom's security, the thief steals the balls after several attempts, only to lose them to Zigzag's minions; Tack escapes from his cell using his cobbling tools during the ensuing panic. Nod notices the balls' disappearance when the soldier warns them of the invading One-Eyes. Zigzag attempts to use the stolen balls to blackmail the king into letting him marry Yum-Yum; when Nod dismisses him, Zigzag defects to the One-Eyes and gives them the balls instead.
Nod sends Yum-Yum, her nurse, and Tack to ask help from a "mad and holy old witch" in the desert. They are secretly followed by the thief, who hears of treasures on the journey but fails in stealing any. In the desert, they discover a band of dimwitted brigands, led by Chief Roofless, whom Yum-Yum recruits as her bodyguards. They reach the hand-shaped tower where the witch lives, and learn that Tack is prophesied to save the Golden City. The witch also presents a riddle—"Attack, attack, attack! A tack, see? But it's what you do with what you've got!"—before destroying the entire tower with a storm cloud.
Tack and the others return to the Golden City to find the One-Eyes' massive war machine approaching. Tack shoots a single tack into the enemy's midst, sparking a Goldberg-esque chain reaction that destroys the entire One-Eye army. Zigzag tries to escape, but falls into a pit where he is eaten alive by alligators and his vulture, Phido. The thief, avoiding many deathtraps, steals the golden balls from the collapsing machine, only to run into Tack whilst escaping, and after a brief scuffle, he reluctantly gives up and leaves Tack with the balls. With peace restored and the prophecy fulfilled, the city celebrates as Tack and Yum-Yum marry; Tack finally says "I love you" in a very deep voice. The film ends with the thief stealing the reel of film and running away.
== Development ==
=== Development and Early Production (1964–1972) ===
In 1964, Richard Williams was running an animation studio assigned to animate commercials and special sequences for live-action films. Williams illustrated a series of books by Idries Shah, which collected the tales of Mulla Nasruddin. Nasruddin was a philosophical yet "wise fool" of Near Eastern folklore. Williams began development work on a film based on the stories, with Shah and his family championing production. Idries Shah demanded 50% of the profits from the film, and Idries Shah’s sister Amina Shah, who had done some of the translations for the Nasrudin book, claimed that she owned the stories. Production took place at Richard Williams Productions in Soho Square, London. An early reference to the project came in the 1968 International Film Guide, which noted that Williams was about to begin work on "the first of several films based on the stories featuring Mulla Nasruddin."
Williams took on television and feature-film title projects in order to fund his project, and work on his film progressed slowly. Williams hired the legendary Warner Bros. animator Ken Harris as a chief animator on the project, which was then entitled "The Amazing Nasrudin." Designer Roy Naisbitt was hired to design backgrounds for the film and promotional art which showed intricate Indian and Persian designs. In 1970, the project was re-titled "The Majestic Fool." For the first time, Williams had a potential distributor for the film, the British Lion Film Corporation. The International Film Guide noted that the Williams Studio's staff had increased to forty people for the production of the feature. Williams gained further attention when he and the studio produced a TV adaptation of A Christmas Carol for Chuck Jones, which won the studio an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
After the project being re-titled again as "Nasrudin," dialogue tracks for the film were recorded at this time. Actor Vincent Price was hired to perform the voice of the villain, Anwar (later renamed "ZigZag"). Even though Kenneth Williams was supposed to voice Anwar, Price was hired instead to make the villain more enjoyable for Williams, as he was a great fan of Vincent Price's work and was based on two people Williams hated. Sir Anthony Quayle was cast as King Nod.
By 1972, Williams and the studio had animated around three hours of footage for the film, according to composer Howard Blake. Blake insisted to Williams that while he thought the footage was excellent, he needed to structure the film and his footage into a three-act plot. The Shah family had a bookkeeper that wasn't keeping track of the studio's accounting, so Williams felt that producer Omar Shah had been embezzling financing from the studio for his own purposes. As a result, Williams had a falling-out with the Shah family. Paramount withdrew a deal that they'd been negotiating. Williams was forced to abandon Nasrudin, as the Shah family took the rights of Williams' illustrations. However the Shah family allowed Williams to keep characters he designed for the books and the movie, including a thief character that was Williams' favorite.
=== Gaining Financial Backing (1978–1988) ===
In 1978, a Saudi Arabian prince, Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, became interested in The Thief and agreed to fund a ten-minute test sequence, with a budget of $100,000. Williams chose the complex, penultimate sequence of the Thief in the War Machine for the test. The studio missed two deadlines, and the scene was completed at the end of 1979 for $250,000. Faisal, despite his positive impression of the finished scene, backed out of the production because of missed deadlines and budgetary overruns.
In the 1980s, Williams put together a 20-minute sample reel of the Thief, which he showed to Milt Kahl, a friend and one of Williams' animation mentors, at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California. Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz even worked with Williams to attempt to get financing in the mid-1980s, although he left later during production. In 1986, Williams met producer Jake Eberts, who began funding the production through his Allied Filmmakers company and eventually provided $10 million of the film's $28 million budget. Allied's distribution and sales partner, Majestic Films, began promoting the film in industry trades, under the working title "Once...."
At this time, Eberts encouraged Williams to make changes to the script. A subplot involving the characters of Princess Mee-Mee, Yum-Yum's twin sister (played by Catherine Schell), and Prince Bubba, who had been turned into an ogre (played by Thick Wilson). Both characters were deleted, some of Grim Natwick's animation of the Witch had to be discarded, and Ken Harris' sequence of a Brigand dreaming of a Biblical temptress was also deleted.
Steven Spielberg saw the footage of the film and was impressed enough that he, along with film director Robert Zemeckis, asked Williams to direct the animation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Williams agreed in order to get his film the financing it needed to get finished. When Who Framed Roger Rabbit was released in 1988, Williams won two Oscars for his animation and contributions to the visual effects. Although it ran over-budget before animation production began, the success of the film proved that Williams could work within a studio structure and turn out high-quality animation on time and within budget. Disney and Spielberg told Williams that in return for doing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, they would help distribute his film. This plan, however, did not come to pass. Disney began to put its attention more on its own feature animation, while Spielberg instead opened a rival feature animation studio called "Amblimation."
Warner Bros. negotiated funding and a distribution deal for The Thief and the Cobbler with Williams, which included a $25 million marketing budget. Williams' current wife, Imogen Sutton, suggested for him to finance the film with European backers, citing his appreciation of foreign films. Richard insisted he could produce the film with a major studio. Williams and Warner Bros. signed a negative pickup deal in late 1988, and Williams also got some financial aid from Japanese investors. Williams himself later stated, "In hindsight, we should have just gone to Europe, take another five years, made it on our own, and then go to a distributor and get people who find it as a novelty."
=== Production Under Warner Bros. (1989–1992) ===
With the funding from Warner Bros., the film finally got into full production in 1989. Williams scoured the art schools of Europe and Canada to find talented artists. It was at this point, with almost all of the original animators either dead or have long since moved on to other projects, that full-scale production on the film began, mostly with a new, younger team of animators, including Williams's own son Alexander Williams. In a 1988 interview with Jerry Beck, Williams stated that he had two and a half hours of pencil tests for Thief and that he had not storyboarded the film as he found such a method too controlling. Vincent Price originally recorded his dialogue from 1967 to 1973, a period of 6 years. Williams recorded further dialogue with Price for the 1990 production, 16 years later, but Price's age and illness meant some lines remained unfinished.
Williams had before experimented with shots animated by hand to move in three dimensions with characters, including several shots in Roger Rabbit's opening sequence. With The Thief, Williams began planning several sequences to feature greater use of this animation technique, including Tack and the Thief's palace chase – which was achieved without computer-generated imagery. According to rumors, Williams approached The Thief with a live-action point of view coming off of Roger Rabbit. Williams was creating extra footage and extending sequences to trim down later and that he would have edited down the workprint he later assembled.
Warner Bros. had also signed a deal with The Completion Bond Company to ensure the studio would be given a finished film, if not they would finish The Thief under their management. Williams, dedicated but pressured, was taking his time to ensure sequences would look perfect. Animators were working overtime, sometimes sixty hours a week, to get the film done. While Williams encouraged the best out of people, discipline was harsh and animators were frequently fired. "He fired hundreds of people. There's a list as long as your arm of people fired by Dick. It was a regular event," cameraman John Leatherbarrow recalls, "there was one guy who got fired on the doorstep." Williams was just as hard on himself: "He was the first person in the morning and the last one out at night," recalls animator Roger Vizard. Funders pressured Williams to make finished scenes of the main characters for a marketing trailer. The final designs were made for the characters at this time.
The film was not finished by a 1991 deadline that Warner originally imposed upon Williams; the film had approximately 10 to 15 minutes of screen time to complete, which at Williams's rate was estimated to take "a tight six months" or longer. From Warner Bros.' perspective, the animation department at the studio had put their enthusiasm towards high-quality television animation but had little confidence towards backing feature animation. Warner Bros. had already released The Nutcracker Prince, a Canadian-produced animated feature, in 1990 to almost no promotion. Warner Bros.' head of animation Jean MacCurdy didn't know anything about animation, as she admitted to an artist that had worked for Williams while she was seeing footage of the film. Another animator working in Warner Bros. salvaged almost 40 minutes of 35mm dailies footage from MacCurdy's trash. Meanwhile, Walt Disney Feature Animation had begun work on Aladdin, a film which bore striking resemblances in the story, style, and character to The Thief and the Cobbler; for example, the character ZigZag from Thief shares many physical characteristics with both Aladdin's villain, Jafar, and supporting character, the Genie, as animated by Williams Studio alumnus Andreas Deja and Eric Goldberg.
The Completion Bond Company asked television animation producer Fred Calvert to do a detailed analysis of the production status. He traveled to Williams's London studio several times to check on the progress of the film, and his conclusion was that Williams was "woefully behind schedule and way over budget." Williams had a script, according to Calvert, but "he wasn't following it faithfully." People from the Completion Bond Company, and Calvert, were visiting the studio more often towards the end. Williams was giving dailies of sequences that were finished or scrapped since the 1980s, hoping to give an indication of progress to Warner Bros. Williams was asked to show the investors a rough copy of the film with the remaining scenes filled in with storyboards in order to establish the film's narrative. Williams had avoided storyboards up to this point, but within two weeks he had done what the investors had asked. Williams made a workprint that combined finished footage, pencil tests, storyboards, and movements from the symphonic suite, Scheherazade, to cover the 10–15 minutes left to finish. Animators found out that they had completed more than enough footage for an 85-minute feature, but they had yet to finish certain vital sequences involving the central story.
On May 13, 1992, this rough version of the film was shown to Warner Bros., and was not well received. During the screening, the penultimate reel of the film was missing, which was not helping matters. The studio lost confidence and backed out of the project. The Completion Bond Company seized control of the film, ousting Williams from the project. Jake Eberts, who at this point was an executive producer, also abandoned the project. Additionally, according to Richard Williams himself, the production had lost a source of funding when Japanese investors pulled out due to the recession following the Japanese asset price bubble. Fans cite this decision as an example of a trend of animated films being tampered with by studio executives.
=== Production Under Fred Calvert (1992–1993) ===
Sue Shakespeare of Creative Capers Entertainment had previously offered to solve story problems with Richard Williams, suggested to bring in film director Terry Gilliam to consult, and proposed to allow Williams to finish the film under her supervision. Williams reportedly agreed to Shakespeare's proposal, but her bid was ultimately rejected by the Completion Bond Company in favor of a cheaper one by Fred Calvert. Calvert was assigned by the Completion Bond Company to finish the film as cheaply and quickly as possible. "I really didn't want to do it," Calvert said, "but if I didn't do it, it would have been given off to the lowest bidder. I took it as a way to try and preserve something and at least get the thing on the screen and let it be seen."
It took Calvert 18 more months to finish the film. The new scenes were produced on a much lower budget, with the animation being produced by freelance animators in Los Angeles and former Williams animators working with Neil Boyle at Premier Films in London. Sullivan Bluth Studios animated the first song sequence, "She Is More", and Kroyer Films the second, "Am I Feeling Love?". The ink and paintwork was subcontracted to Wang Film Productions in Taiwan and its division Thai Wang Film Productions in Thailand, as well as Varga Studio in Hungary.
Approximately 18 minutes of completed animation were cut by Calvert, due to the repetitive nature of the scenes. Calvert said "We hated to see all this beautiful animation hit the cutting room floor, but that was the only way we could make a story out of it. He [Williams] 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."
After the movie was completed, Allied Filmmakers, along with Majestic Films, reacquired the distribution rights from the Completion Bond Company.
==Changes from the Original Version==
The Miramax cut includes all changes made in the Allied Filmmakers cut. In addition, several other changes that were requested by then CEO of the company, Harvey Weinstein, were added, including:
*Several lesser known actors are replaced by more notable actors in this version. Matthew Broderick replaced Steve Lively as Tack, Jennifer Beals replaced Bobbi Page as Princess Yum-Yum (though their singing voices are still kept), and Toni Collette replaced Mona Marshall as the Nurse and the Witch
*In addition to the recasts, many previously mute characters are given voices including Phido (now voiced by Eric Bogosian), the alligators, and most notably the thief (now voiced by Jonathan Winters), who narrates over all of his scenes in the form of an inner monologue, with much of his lines also including anachronistic pop-culture references.
*The Golden City is now referred to as Baghdad.
*Most scenes featuring the Mighty One-Eye's slave women in detail have been removed, because Miramax viewed them as sex slaves, although he can still be seen sitting on them due to it being part of an important scene.
*The sequence featuring the witch has been almost entirely removed, due to the drug references it included.
*It is stated that the witch is the Mighty One-Eye's twin sister, thus explaining why she starts off as an eye when she's introduced.
*Most of the climactic battle sequence, which had already been greatly shortened in the Allied cut, is trimmed, most likely for time.
*Due to the removal of the slave women, One-Eye's death is cut, though he can be heard crying: "My machine!" as the war machine burns, whereupon he presumably burns with it.
*The ending musical number "It's So Amazing" is cut out and is instead moved to the end credits, while the number is replaced by a scene of the thief trying to steal the golden balls, only for him to fly through the tower's window, which was included in the credits of the Calvert version.
*Some pieces of music are replaced, moved to different areas, or new pieces of music composed by Jack Maeby are added into some scenes.
== Bad Qualities ==
#At the Start of the Film, Richard Williams Has Taking Jabs of His Hard Work to Finish This Movie to Release on 1968 Is Very Unique, Superior, And Fantastic Idea. Unfortunately, Due to The Creators Has Been Lazy, The Development Of the Film Has Been Troubled, Ending Up Being Development Hell for 31 Years!!! Unlike The Allied Filmmakers Version.
#*Speaking of BQ#1, Peter Bond has Originally Decided to Butcher This By Editing It, Sadly, Due to Harvey Weinstein Stole the film's Assets, We Mean... MANY, Many Assets. Bond Was Replaced By Fred Calvert, who is Forced By Weinstein to Cutting Many Scenes and Re-edited Without Williams' Decision, Which is The Horrible Choice That was Made In Miramax for These Abomination Reasons.
#After 31 (29 in the Allied Filmmakers Version) of Development, This Film Ended Up Being Nearly Completed for Williams' Work, That's so Strange!
#A Lot of Voice Actors Are Mediocre, But Awful That Didn't Match In The First Place. For Example:
#*Tack's Voice (Matthew Broderick) Sounds Like He is Boring, Lazy, Drab and Repetitive Scripts, Even He Stays Silent in the Original Version and He Talks Like Some Scripts in the Allied Filmmakers Version.
#*Yum-Yum's Voice (Jennifer Beals) Sounds Sick, and Bizarre Princess Who tired of her old life and dreams of wanting more, Even Her Original Voice Sounds Perfect in the Original Version.
#*The Nurse And the Witch's Voice (Toni Collette) Sounds Creepy, Because Her Voice Sounds Wicked and Fun in the Original Version.
#*Zigzag's Voice Sounds Like His Rhymes Like a Childish and Annoying, Because His Original Voice Was So Funky, Lucky and Evil in the Original Version.
#Not Only BQ#3, Some Characters, Who Stays Silent, Has Now Voiced By These Weird Acts. Such As:
#*Phido is now voiced by Eric Bogosian That Sounds Nasty, But Horrendous That He Didn't Speak in the Original Version.
#*The Alligators and Even the Thief Are Now Voiced By Jonathan Winters That Looks Like Boring, and Unresponsive, Much Like Tack, They Didn't Speak in The Original Version.
#Speaking of Tack and Thief's Voice, Their Monologue Are So Bad, Repetitive, Dull, And Ridiculous Even More So Than Samus Aran (Metroid: Other M) Did. Even Nostalgia Critic (Doug Walker) has Said to Tack, "This A-Hole Becomes a Boring Monologue Than SAMUS FROM METROID: OTHER M!!!"
#The Character Names, While Being Wacky, Being Weird and Awful Fit, E.g. Tack, Zigzag, and Yum Yum. Even Critic Pointed Out on Them, Saying, "these names feel more like words that infants would say for the first time. Tack! Zig-zag! Yum-Yum". And He Replaced the 4th Name with Cuss Words.
#Much Like Doogal (11 Years After the Miramax Cut), It's Filled With These Countless Pop-Culture References That are Added That Weren't In The Original Version, And Even Allied Filmmakers Version, Making this Original Version's Scripts Look, Suffered, from an incessant number of context-irrelevant and overly rapid-fire pop-culture allusions. For an Infamous Example, Thief While Stealing The Three Golden Balls, Said to one of them That, "I'm.... Going.... to.. Disneyland", Which is a Useless Reference to Disney Parks.
#*Also, This Cinema Release Poster Is Blatantly Reference to Aladdin, And Was Misleading As Well, Such as "From the Academy Award Winning Animator of Who Framed Roger Rabbit", Which It isn't Because How Atrocious Miramax are.
#Unnessecary and Stupid Choices in The Fictional World That Weren't in the Original Version As Well, For an Obvious Example, The Golden City is now referred to as Baghdad, Which is WRONG!!!.
#Many Scenes That Are Edited and Removed that they didn't want audiences to see While Miramax adding New Scenes That Weren't In the original Version As Well. For Example:
#*the Mighty One-Eye's slave women in detail has been removed, as Miramax viewed them as sex slaves, although he can still be seen sitting on them due to it being part of an important scene. Which Makes Anyone Nonsense Either.
#*The sequence featuring the witch has been almost entirely removed, Because of References to Drugs That The Original Version Added.
#*Not Only Help The Removal of The Mighty One Eye's Slave Against Woman, The Miramax Version stated that "the witch is the Mighty One-Eye's twin sister, thus explaining why she starts off as an eye when she's introduced", Which is Truly Unfortunate to See this, Because How Nonsensical Miramax are.
#*Most of the climactic battle sequence, which had already been greatly shortened in the Allied cut, is trimmed, most likely for time That Weren't in the Original Version When this Sequence Has Been Long.
#*Speaking of One Eye Slaves Against Woman, His death is cut, though he can be heard crying: "My machine!" as the war machine burns, whereupon he presumably burns with it. This Proves That How Idiotic Miramax Can Be.
#While the Animation is Wonderful and Awesome, This Suffers with many errors, like how Tack's skin goes from pale to tanned after coming out of the temple at nighttime?
#There is Some Scores From This Original Version's Composers, Are Now Replaced By Jack Maeby With The Backgrounds Doesn't Match at All! For Example, The ending musical number "It's So Amazing" is cut out and is instead moved to the end credits, while the number is replaced by a scene of the thief trying to steal the golden balls, only for him to fly through the tower's window, which was included in the credits of the Calvert version.
#*Speaking of Soundtracks, Many Songs Are Obnoxious That Are Added that Weren't in the Original Version. For Example, Yum-Yum's Singing Looks Like Jasmine from Aladdin, But She Spins Around WAY TOO MANY TIMES!!!! Resulting this to Be Ripped Off.
#And Finally, It Butchered and Ruined The Original Version of this Movie, That Harvey Weinstein Has Turned The Fantasy Film into Unfunny-Looking Comedy Film, That is Filled With Pop-Cultural References? As a Result That Weinstein Scraps Butch Hartman's Live Action Adaptation and Turns It into His American Dub?!! Thankfully, Garrett Gilchrist Adapting the Original Version to Fix It's Problems that This Dub Had 11 Years Later.
== Good Qualities ==
#Despite Being Suffered With Animation Errors, the Animation is Wonderful and Awesome, That Take Place in Arabian Themes.
#The fan restoration of this film, "The Recobbled Cut", removes all of the problems listed above and closely follows Williams' workprint. Which is a Improved Idea To Anyone.
#Despite the Voice Actors Being Mediocre, But Awful to Look at, Zigzag's Voice Sounds So Funky, Lucky and Evil, Despite Being Childish and Annoying.
#The Brigand's song "We're What Happens When You Don't Finish School" is Somewhat funny and catchy.
#The Allied Filmmakers Version Looks Stunning, But Okay at Least.
#Tack and Thief Are Stayed Silent in the Original Version Is Superior.
#Speaking of Tack, He is a very adorable and charming main character in the 90s, Despite His Voice and Monologues.
==Reception==
The Miramax version of the Thief and the Cobbler received mixed reviews from Critics and Generally Positive reviews from Audiences. However, It was a Commercial Failure, Grossed $319,723 at the Box Office Alongside With An estimated budget of $24 million. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 50% based on 8 reviews, But Lacks of Consensus.
Caryn James of The New York Times criticised the songs sung by the princess, calling the lyrics "horrible and the melodies forgettable", though he did praise Williams's animation as "among the most glorious and lively ever created". 
Animation historian Jerry Beck felt that "the added voiceovers of Jonathan Winters and Matthew Broderick were unnecessary and unfunny, and that Fred Calvert's new footage didn't meet the standards of the original Williams scenes". The Miramax version has been said to resemble a rip-off of Aladdin.
Despite Being Mixed Reviews, 8 Years Later, the Online Film Critics Society ranked the film as the 81st-greatest animated film of all time. In addition, the film won the 1995 Academy of Family Films Award.
=== Years After the Miramax Cut of the Film? ===
Alex Williams, son of the original director who also worked on the film before it was re-edited, criticized changes made by Calvert and Miramax, called the finished film "more or less unwatchable" and found it "hard to find the spirit of the film as it was originally conceived". For years, Richard Williams was devastated by the film's production and had never publicly discussed it since then. 
In 2010, he did speak about The Thief and the Cobbler in an interview about his silent animated short, Circus Drawings, a project he shelved in the 1960s before he started work on the film. 
Three years later, he later participated in Q&As for screenings of his 1992 workprint at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater on 10 December 2013 and at the BFI Southbank in London on 1 June 2014. 
Williams also said He has never seen the Calvert and Miramax versions of the film, saying "I'm not interested, but my son, who is also an animator, did tell me that if I ever want to jump off a bridge then I should take a look."
Category:1990s films
Category:Films dubbed in English
Category:Fantasy films
Category:Animated films
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Category:Box office bombs
Category:Miramax films
Category:Films that were in development hell
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