The Thief and the Cobbler (Miramax Cut) - Musical Hell Review 93

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* This episode is brought to you by Black Butler: Parody of the Phantomhives, a Black Butler abridged series-slash-parody. Thank you.

**Diva:** Greetings, mortals. Welcome to another session of the Infernal Court in Musical Hell. I'm Diva: your judge, jury, executioner, and cloistered but fiery princess. \*voiceover\* Art, as a wise composer-lyricist once observed, isn't easy. On one hand, you have the creators: the dreamers and visionaries who challenge boundaries and inspire imagination, but who can become blinded to practical matters by their own ego or hubris. On the other are the producers, providing the necessary capital and promotion that makes the artist's work possible, but whose business-centered approach stifles originality and invention. When one of these two conflicting forces gets out of hand, it seldom ends well for the art involved. And when they both do...

*Cut to a PAL DVD cover of the film we are about to see.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* ...that's when you get the long, sordid history of our next offender, "The Thief and the Cobbler". Here's the short version: in 1964, animator Richard Williams began work on what he considered his masterpiece and a tribute to the limitless power of animation based on the fables of Mullah Nasruddin. But his initial backers were caught embezzling funds, and in the fallout, he lost ownership of all his characters for the Nasruddin stories save one, a nameless thief. Williams went back to the *literal* drawing board, building a new story around the thief and a simple cobbler, who saves his city from ruin. A long struggle to find new producers followed as potential financiers were wowed by Williams' extraordinary animation, but bulked at his perfectionist practices, which could result in a single shot taking months or even years to complete. After Williams won a claim as the animation director for "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", Warner Brothers took a chance on him, but the contract came with the stipulation that if Williams failed to adhere to his schedule and budget, the movie would be taken from him and given to a completion guarantee firm to finish. This is *exactly* what happened, and "The Thief and the Cobbler" was passed to Fred Calvert, who oversaw both the movie's hasty completion and its retooling as a musical to mimic the Disney Renaissance, particularly the recent success of "Aladdin".

*Cut to an image of the infamous former film producer, Harvey Weinstein.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Miramax and Harvey Weinstein... boo, hiss, secured the American distribution and butchered the movie even further, releasing the results under the title, "Arabian Knight". And it is this version that we will be examining in court today.

## Review

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Once upon a time, in a golden city that may or may not be Baghdad, there was a beautiful palace whose tallest minaret is topped by three golden balls. We will be talking about these golden balls a lot, so take a moment to get the snickering out of your system.

*Cut to a clip from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episode 815, "Agent for H.A.R.M.", where Professor Bobo breaks the fourth wall by motioning his hands toward the viewers.*

**Narrator/Tack (Matthew Broderick):** \*off-screen\* Golden balls.

**Zigzag (Vincent Price):** \*off-screen\* Golden balls! The gold balls. THE BALLS!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Prophecy holds that if the balls are ever removed, the kingdom will be destroyed. Worth noting as a bunch of warmongering barbarians called the One-Eyes are massing for invasion not far away, but disaster *can* be averted by the simplest of souls, which brings us to our protagonist: a young cobbler named Tack.

**Tack:** \*narrating\* At the time, I was a poor orphan working as a cobbler's apprentice. Life was simple... but all that was about to change.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Right here is the single *biggest* problem with the Miramax edit: the abundant and *annoying* voiceovers.

* **Sin 1: So. Many. Voiceovers.**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Williams intended the protagonists of his story to be mute, with Tack only speaking a single line at the end and the thief not speaking at all.

*Cut to brief clips from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, as well as a silent film comedy.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* This is not only keeping with a long tradition of animated characters who don't speak, but with the silent film comedies which were among Williams' inspirations. Unwilling to let that stand, this version has Matthew Broderick as Tack narrating most of the story and gives the thief a running internal commentary that is instantly tiresome and *will not stop.*

**Thief (Jonathan Winters):** \*inner thought as he swims through a sewer\* I can't help but question the color of this water. I'm gonna stink for days.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Not to get all *(cut to an image of...)* Norma Desmond 'we didn't need voices' on this, but part of the charm of mute animated characters is how much they can communicate without speaking.

*Cut to a brief clip of Gromit from the "Wallace and Gromit" feature film, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit".*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Here, Gromit could pack full paragraphs of meaning into a single eye roll. Adding voiceover where it is not wanted or needed both insults the animators, who worked very hard to tell their story visually, and the audience who should not need to have everything spelled out for them.

*Cut to a clip from the Disney/Pixar film, "WALL.E".*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* You think WALL.E would be as beloved if he kept gabbing on through every scene? *\*dubbing over WALL.E\* "*Woo-hoo! Whee! Wendy, I can fly! I'm the luckiest bot in the world! Whoa, wonder what Freud would make of all this white stuff I'm spraying around!" The thief's attempt to pilfer Tack's meager lodgings is interrupted by the arrival of Zigzag, wizard and grand vizier and voiced by Vincent Price, all of which make him the villain by default. One of Tack's tacks slips under Zigzag's shoe, causing Tack to get arrested and dragged into the palace. On the way in, he catches a glimpse of the beautiful Princess Yum-Yum...

*Briefly cut to a poster for the 1939 film adaptation of "The Mikado".*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* ...no relation, who is bemoaning her sheltered life... as one does.

**Princess Yum-Yum (Jennifer Beals):** If I could help just one person, maybe then he'd understand there's more to me. Maybe then I'd be doing something useful.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* And being a princess in a movie they're *desperately* trying to fit into the Disney mold, she has a song all about it.

**Princess Yum-Yum:** \*sung by Bobbi Page\* Yes, the pretty face

Yes, the sunny smile

**Diva:** Okay, even with the rush job done to complete this movie, you should've been able to find a more consistent voice double than *that.*

* **Sin 2: Jarring Song Doubles**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Tack's voice double is just as bad.

**Tack:** \*sung by Steve Lively\* Don't fight your feelings, says my heart,

a heart I will obey

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* As Tack is being lugged through the castle gates, the thief catches a glimpse of the golden balls and becomes instantly fixated on stealing them, resulting in much shenanigans. Meanwhile, Tack is dragged before Yum-Yum's father, the borderline narcoleptic King Nod, but before Zigzag can persuade the king to have the lad executed, Yum-Yum is charmed by him and breaks her slipper to convince Nod of her dire need for Tack's services. This is an annoyance to Zigzag, who has the traditional evil counselor life goal of marrying the princess and taking over the kingdom, but he puts a brave face on it.

**Zigzag:** Of course... O rose of the land, your slightest whim is my command.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Zigzag's rhyming dialogue plays a bit better in the original version with non-speaking protagonists, as he becomes the one doing the most talking, and it doesn't stick out as much. Even so, I'm always down for a bit of creepy Vincent Price poetry.

*Cut to a clip from the music video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller".*

**Vincent Price:** \*voiceover\* Darkness falls across the land, the midnight hour is close at hand.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* While Yum-Yum and Tack make eyes at each other, the thief, with much grousing- seriously, this guy needs to put a pitchfork in it- makes his way through the palace drainage pipes and into Yum-Yum's suite, where he makes off with her golden backscratcher and mended slipper, causing Tack to chase him through the op art palace to get it back.

*Tack chases the thief through the palace, where we see Richard William's beautiful animation and background art on full display. Then, cut to clips of The Beatles in "Yellow Submarine" and Jareth in "Labyrinth", respectively.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* I'm surprised they don't run into the Beatles or the Goblin King going the other way, but that brings us to the movie's Saving Grace: Richard Williams' animation really is *stunning.*

* **Saving Grace: AMAZING Animation**

*More of Williams' exemplary animation/background designs in the film are shown.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* The backgrounds are remarkably detailed, the characters are fluid and visually interesting, and there's all sorts of neat little touches like the elaborate doorway to the palace, or the way Zigzag's retinue rolls a carpet under his feet as he walks. It does make it jarring when you get to the parts that were done by other studios which are vastly inferior, but enough of the original gets in to provide plenty of wow moments, and regret that it was never completed. Tack retrieves the slipper, but it's all for naught as the thief escapes and Zigzag throws Tack into the dungeon the way he wanted to in the first place. Yum-Yum is disheartened when her favorite contract labor goes missing, and the two sing of their feelings for one another in Sin number three, "Am I Feeling Love?".

* **Sin 3: "Am I Feeling Love?"**

**Both:** \*singing\* Can it really be happening to me?

Am I feeling love?

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Ill-fitting voice doubles and painfully let-in lyrics aside, the song just emphasizes that we don't see much of Tack and Yum-Yum's relationship, so they never really gel as a couple. Alone in his cell, Tack resolves to free himself for the sake of his beloved.

**Tack:** \*narrating\* Zigzag was up to something. I had to escape and warn the princess.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Wait, how does he know what Zigzag is plotting? He hasn't overheard anything.

* **Sin 4: Wait, what?**

**Diva:** Look, I understand that Fred Calvert had some holes to fill when this was dropped in his lap, but he does a *very bad* job of bridging them. \*voiceover\* Characters make decisions based on information they don't seem to have, or the plot jumps ahead without telling us how it gets there. Take the part where Zigzag decides to filch the golden balls himself to gain leverage over King Nod and sends his henchmen to nab them. We see them chasing after the balls, which the thief has removed and dropped, and nobody can grab because everyone in this kingdom has terrible hand-eye coordination, and then... suddenly they have them? Look, if we can spend time on the thief doing assorted acrobats trying to climb the tower and being chased around a polo ground, we can surely waste a few minutes on the actual story. About that, King Nod has a foreboding nightmare of his kingdom falling to the One-Eyes, and the arrival of a mortally wounded scout coupled with the disappearance of the city's MacGuffin send him into a panic. Zigzag claims to have the ability to bring the golden balls back by magic, but Nod refuses his asking price of one princess's hand in marriage, so Zigzag goes, "Fine, I'll just take my balls and leave!"

**Zigzag:** We'll see who wins at the end of the day, we'll see who ends up grieving!

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Meanwhile, Tack has filed his way out of prison, so he's on hand when Nod explains that all is not lost, as the mighty King One-Eye has a good witch for a sister, and she can tell them how to repel the invaders. Yum-Yum insists she should go because she's the smartest person in the palace, no arguments there, and chooses Tack as her guide.

**King Nod (Clive Revill):** Princess, I hardly know you. So brave... just like your dear mother was. \*chuckles\* Very well, you will go.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Really, the fact that King Nod not only refuses to bestow his daughter on the first creep who offers to do him a favor, but actually listens to her and trusts her judgement puts him pretty high up on the animated widowed dad rankings.

*Cut to a clip of the Sultan in Disney's "Aladdin".*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* You know if Jasmine's dad were in charge, Zigzag would be running the kingdom by now. And while we're on that subject, there have been claims that Disney ripped off "The Thief and the Cobbler" for "Aladdin", thanks to animators who spent some time in the Williams' studio before going to work for the Mouse. And while that is a possibility, it's just as likely that both movies are drawing on basic Orientalism cliches western media has been using for ages: *(cut to images of...)* the plump turbaned ruler, the scheming vizier, the girl in belly dancer garb, and so forth. So, everyone sets off on their respective journeys: Tack, Yum-Yum, and Yum-Yum's nanny to find the witch at the Hands of Glory, Zigzag to ally himself with the advancing One-Eyes, and the thief for more slapstick because he overheard there's a jewel-encrusted idol at the witch's place. Three days later, the good guys run into a band of brigands, who do have some decent Monty Python-esque silliness going on.

*The brigands all take cover behind a small rock as the heroes approach them.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* That is... until they start singing.

*The brigands suddenly break into a song involving not finishing school.*

* **Sin 5: The Brigands' Song**

**Diva:** ...It probably goes without saying since the title characters weren't even intended to speak, \*voiceover\* but this was not meant to be a musical, and it *really* shows here. This scene was moving along fine, and it was funny, then boom: random song. Not only that, a random song with bad lyrics about how the brigands are stupid, and don't even know how to read or write... even though we just saw them consulting a book. It doesn't improve the movie, and in fact, it throws off a scene that was doing perfectly well without it.

**Thief:** \*inner thought\* Just like "Les Mis".

*Cut to an image of a white T-shirt that reads "First of all, how dare you?"*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* No. Not even close. The brigands' leader, Roofless, explains that they were sent by the king to guard the borders of the land, unlike the original movie where they were just thieves who haven't done any actual thieving in years, which allows Yum-Yum to pull rank and draft the brigands as her royal bodyguards. Meanwhile, Zigzag and his grousing vulture, Phido- another character not meant to talk who's given an annoying running voiceover- seek an audience with King One-Eye.

**Phido (Eric Bogosian):** Is this when we eat? I need to eat. I don't see any food. I'm still hungry here. I think I just lost my appetite.

*King One-Eye is seen sitting on a makeshift throne comprised of plump, green-skinned women.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* That throne is making me uncomfortable in more ways than I can count right now. Zigzag offers his services as sorcerer, sleight of hand artist, and general evil henchman, but King One-Eye just tosses him to some hungry alligators.

**Zigzag:** \*addressing the alligators\* My friends... it grieves me to see you fed on persons like me.

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Zigzag staves off the gators with the promise of a better meal later, and...

*Cut to a scene of the thief seeming to be urinating on a palm tree. When he turns around, he is revealed to be emptying a flask of water.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover, sarcastic\* Gee, thanks, movie. So, we're back with the thief who...

*The next day, Tack (who has become noticeably tan by this point) and Princess Yum-Yum pull down one of the stone hands, opening the door to the witch's cave.*

* **Sin 6: Make up your mind!**

**Diva:** I know some of this was unavoidable. Williams' original work had a lot of uncompleted scenes and segments. They had to make do somehow, but it makes for a very choppy movie. \*voiceover\* Tack and Yum-Yum make their way to the witch, who suggests 'attack' in order to defeat the One-Eyes, leaving them perplexed. But there's no time to ruminate on that now, as Zigzag and the One-Eyes are advancing on the city, the heroes are booking it back as fast as they can, and the thief... well, the last we saw he was trying to steal the idol's ruby, but I guess he kind of gave up on that. So, everyone's standing before the city gates as King One-Eye's *amazingly* complex war machine advances.

**Brigand:** I wasn't crying.

**Brigand #2:** 'Ya were crying, 'ya big sissy!

**Princess Yum-Yum:** Tack...

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Tack realizes the witch was saying 'a tack'- two words- and launches one at the invaders, setting off a chain reaction that causes the siege engine to collapse in on itself. All while the thief, who is now trying to steal the golden balls from the One-Eyes, is making his way through its insides.

**Thief:** \*inner thought as he chases one of the golden balls\* You! You there, where do you think you're going? I'm talking to you! Do you hear me? If I find out that's just gold paint...

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Visually, this sequence is *amazing* and contains some of the best cel animation you're likely to see anywhere... but, the problem is it's dramatically unsatisfying.

* **Sin 7: Cool, and...?**

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* There's no denying that Richard Williams was done dirty by Calvert and Weinstein, but neither was he an innocent victim in all this. Like a lot of gifted creators, his personal skills left much to be desired. He held his staff to draconian schedules, would throw out days of work that didn't meet his exacting standards, and fired people on a weekly basis. But his biggest tragic flaw is that while his animation is absolutely brilliant, he never really had a firm grasp on "The Thief and the Cobbler"'s overall layout. Storyboards weren't even created for the movie until Warner Brothers was breathing down his neck. As a result, this movie has a lot of great concepts, sequences that are stunning in design and execution, but never come together as a unified whole. Without that, the entire thing feels like a technical exercise more than a movie. The war machine collapses, taking King One-Eye with it... I mean we never actually see that, but neither he nor his army are mentioned after this so sure why not, and after a brief confrontation with Tack, Zigzag falls into a hole and is turned on by all the animals he neglected to feed throughout the movie.

*Phido suddenly swoops in and covers the entire scene in darkness, the only things visible being his and Zigzag's eyes, as well as the latter's mouth.*

**Phido:** Heeeeeere's Phido!

**Zigzag:** You, too, Phido. *Man's best friend...*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* I think you *can* argue that this part got ripped off for "The Lion King".

*Cut to a scene from the aforementioned film where Scar meets his demise as the hyenas turn on him.*

**Diva:** \*voiceover\* Yum-Yum is reunited with her father, and the thief returns the golden balls, mostly because the royal guard and the entire city is watching. King Nod wishes to reward Tack for his bravery, and Yum-Yum tells him she *wouldn't* mind being bestowed as a prize for virtue just this once. So, the happy couple are married, and the thief continues his hijinks on a metafictional level.

*The film ends with the thief somehow stealing the entire film reel itself and making his exit.*

**Thief:** \*inner thought\* These flies are driving me crazy.

## The Verdict

**Diva:** Where did "The Thief and the Cobbler" go wrong? A gifted artist so consumed with his vision that he refused to compromise, even when it was in his best interest, ultimately forcing the studio's hand? A careless hack job by people who didn't understand the value of the project they inherited, instead trying to force it into a mold it was never intended for and didn't suit? A perfect storm of all of the above, really. It's a fascinating artifact of film history, and at its best offers top-tier artistry of a kind that, with the prevalence of computer animation, we're not likely to see much of in the future. It's worth checking out Garrett Gilchrist's "Recobbled Cut", which fills in Williams' work with storyboards and pencil tests, and is as close as we're likely to get to his intended product, as well as the documentary, "Persistence of Vision", detailing the film's long production history. Richard Williams himself was heartbroken when he lost control of his magnum opus; he refused to even speak of it for much of the remainder of his life, so... he's probably suffered enough. Others have not, however, so the court of Musical Hell orders the following punishments. \*voiceover\* For *never* giving the viewer a moment's peace whenever he's onscreen, the thief is condemned to always sleep next to *(cut to an image of...)* someone who snores loudly. For songs that fit *very* poorly into the rest of the film, songwriters Norman Gimbel and Robert Folk are condemned to always get *(cut to an image of...)* the middle seat in an airplane. Finally, for the absolute mess they made of the potential they were given, Fred Calvert and Harvey Weinstein are condemned to eat all their desserts with *(cut to an image of...)* mustard. So, let it be recorded. This session of the Infernal Court in Musical Hell is now adjourned.